RAMBLINGS.
BY MOSE SKINNER.
MR. PUNCHINELLO: I infer that you never visited Slunkville, Vermont. Still, it is not strange, for many very estimable people have not done so, and still they are happy.
It is a very quiet hamlet. More quiet, if possible, than BOOTH'S HAMLET.
I am sojourning here for the summer. Communing with Nature, I believe they call it. I can commune here for five dollars a week and no extra charge for retiring pensively to a babbling brook, and reading MILTON or BYRON, though when my poetic soul hankers most, I prefer Bacon.
I take it fried, about an inch thick, with plenty of ham fat.
I went to hear Parson SLOWBOY last Sunday, on the Coolie question. He handled it without gloves, and, it being very warm, without stockings also. It's a very exciting question just now, almost as exciting as the question, "What'll you take?" and I must say, that, even in the heat of argument, he talked Cool-ie.
The Parson is very zealous, but rather illiterate. During a fervent exhortation he prayed that, "all the undiscovered and uninhabited isles of the sea might become converted," and on another occasion he began with,--"Oh, Lord, thou art a merciful sinner."
But he means well, and that is everything. A man knocked me down once, and stamped on my head several times. But he meant well because he thought I was another fellow. He apologised so politely that I actually felt cheap because he hadn't done it a little more.