COMIC MAN among the audience. "Why should M'VICKER think a man a scoundrel, who deserts his wife and tries to marry another? Don't he come from Chicago?"
2D COMIC MAN.—"Don't SHERIDAN," (who plays the PLAUSIBLE VILLAIN,) "look as if he wished he were 'twenty miles away' when PETER denounces him?"
And the bystanders smile weakly, as though they had heard a good joke on SHERIDAN, and retire slowly toward their homes, evidently exhausted by the oppressive virtue of the intolerable Yankee boor, whom M'VICKER plays so well that the respectable portion of the audience is almost inclined to overlook the wretchedness of the part in admiration of the skill of the actor.
MATADOR.
Cue-rious Rumor.
That the Sound steamers are to be furnished with billiard tables for the amusement of passengers between New York and Boston. This report, however, is flatly contradicted, and we have neither charity nor chalk for the man who would make a statement so groundless.
GEORGE FRANCIS, THE UBIQUITOUS.
Amidst all the chances and changes of this chequered, and, in some respects, lugubrious life, Mr. PUNCHINELLO has the perennial consolation of one friendship, which promises to be immortal, and over which time and space hold no sway. Need we say that we are alluding to the tender emotions which crowd our bosom whenever we hear of Mr. GEORGE FRANCIS TRAIN! And lest our love for him should grow colder, this considerate gentleman allows us to hear from him almost daily. To be sure he is like some great antediluvian grasshopper, and seems capable of spanning this almost boundless continent at a leap. He is in Maine in the morning—he is making a speech in Minnesota when the evening shades prevail; but wherever he is, the roll of his eloquence reaches us, and however busy he may be, he is never too busy to write letters to tho newspapers. The great man comes very near to solving the problem heretofore considered insoluble, of being in two places at once. Two, did we say? Absurd! Three, four, five, half a dozen! What a man! Jumping here! Leaping there! Skipping North! Vaulting South! Skimming (like a CAMILLA in pantaloons) over the plains of the West! Then, as if by magic, whirling himself to the East! A man, did we say? Bah! GEORGE FRANCIS is clearly one of the immortals.
Clearly! JUPITER used to be rather lavish of electricity, but he did but a small retail business in it, compared with our dear GEORGE FRANCIS, the demi-god, who, when he is not talking with sublime garrulity, is telegraphing without regard to expense. Evidently it has dawned upon the mind (if he has any,) of this extraordinary being, that the world, in none of its quarters, can get along without him, and that the newspaper which does not mention his name must be stale, flat, and unprofitable. Wherefore he takes order that every newspaper shall print the wonderful name as often as possible. Whether he be laughed at, sneered at, sworn at, the virtue of the mere mention remains the same.
The last we heard from GEORGE FRANCIS, he was, (to use his own choice language,) "away up here on the Chippewa," beseeching the lumber men, with all the charm of his inimitable eloquence, to vote him into the Presidential chair. "I am waking up these boys for 1872," writes the valuable phenomenon. Unto "millers, rafters, choppers, and jammers," this Fountain of Oratory has gushed forth his "four hundred and twenty-first consecutive Presidential lecture." Imagine a possible scene upon a raft! GEORGE FRANCIS, mounted upon a whiskey-barrel, is making all the air resonant with rhetoric. The "rafters" are swearing! The "choppers" are cursing! The "jammers" are most reprehensibly blaspheming! The enormous mass floats onward, and "TRAIN!" the floods, "TRAIN!" the forests, "TRAIN!" the overarching skies resound! No miserable hall, no narrow street, no "pent-up Utica" contracts the power of this miraculous elocutionist—his auditorium seems to be a hemisphere—his audience all mankind! ORPHEUS singing moved rocks and trees. Great GEORGE spouting subdues all the inhabitants of the wilderness. Timid deer trip to the shore to listen; ferocious bears, catching the echo, shed tears of penitence; all creatures of the roaring kind acknowledge themselves surpassed and silenced; the whispering pines whisper all the more softly, as if ashamed of their own verbal weakness. All speeches, even the speeches of a TRAIN, must come to an end; and having ended, the floating DEMOSTHENES sits down to write to the newspapers, that he has just been delivered of his four-hundred-and- twenty-second, and is as well as could be expected.