It were interesting to know what kind of a swindle W. L. Moody & Co. have in soak this season for the guileless cotton grower. I have provided this office with a car-load of nickel-plated tear-jugs for the benefit of cotton men who will call later to tell me their troubles. My idea is to build a condenser, start a wholesale salt store and supply Baptist dipping-tanks with water free of wiggletails. Say! There's millions in it. Col. Mulberry Seller's eye-water enterprise were as nothing to my graft when I get it agoing.
. . .
I note that the Wrong-Reverend E. H. Harman, formerly presiding elder of the Methodist church at Brenham, but given the grand bounce for getting too gay at Galveston, where, in company with another sanctified ministerial hypocrite named Wimberly, he had "a hot time in the old town," with hacks, harlots and barrel-house booze, has been converted to the Christian (or Campbellite) faith and proposes to preach. Possibly his conversion is genuine; but it is worthy of remark that he saw nothing attractive in the Christian cult until no longer allowed to occupy a Methodist pulpit—until reduced to the necessity of either seeking a job in a new corner of the Lord's vineyard or taking a fall out of the lowly cotton patch. He ought to make an excellent running mate for the "Rev." Granville Jones, the poorty preacher who puts his picture on his evangelical guttersnipes to show the people how a holy man of God looks after confessing to having forged a letter derogatory to a poor motherless working girl's reputation. As my father is a Christian preacher I feel I have a right to protest against his being placed on a clerical parity with bilkers of hack bills and crapulous associates of two-for-a-penny prostitutes. If Harman attempts to defile the Christian pulpit with his presence, I hope to the good Lord that the decent members of that denomination will tie him across a nine-rail fence and enhance the torridity of his rear elevation with a vigorous application of pine plank.
* * * THE RETORT COURTEOUS.
F. L. Lewis writes from San Antonio to an obscure sheet called the Railway Age, that Brann is not an Englishman as the Age editor in one of his elephantine efforts to be humorous seems to have suggested, and that "all Englishmen in this country repudiate his every utterance." Thanks, awfully; that's the highest compliment ever paid an American sovereign by a British subject. When I next visit San Antonio I'll testify my gratitude by giving Lewis 50 cents instead of the usual two-bits for toting my grip from the "Sap" depot to the Menger hotel. I once said, "There are some very decent and brainy Englishmen;" but as all Englishmen in this country repudiate the soft impeachment, I hasten to acknowledge my error. As the editor of the Age is quite anxious to ascertain my nationality he probably suspects that I may be his father.
. . .
The Independent, which I infer from the date-line of a letter calling attention to its existence, is published at Pomeroy, Wash., proposes, bumbye, to "give a history of the robberies committed by Brann during the war." H——;! I can do that myself. Attired in a triangular strip of birds-eye linen and emitting savage yells, I repeatedly stormed and captured the most magnificent breast-works ever built in Kentucky and ravenously appropriated whatsoever I found therein without so much as a thankee mum. Yes sirree, I was a robber dead-right in those old days; but the Independent editor is safe: he's got nothing but a shirt-tail full o' pied type and a card of membership in the A.P.A.—Aggregation of Pusillanimous Asses. I have no use for his "plant," and God knows I would not be caught dead in a Chinese opium den with his certificate of infamy concealed in my clothes.
. . .
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch of August 20, contains a half-page puff of one John Morrissey, who seems to be a peripatetic iconoclast who has started out with a Bible in one hand, and a free lunch in the other to abolish preachers. According to Morrissey he was a Roman Catholic until he learned better, a drunkard until "the Spirit of God entered his heart" and caused his reformation, and used to write sermons for St. Louis preachers who palmed them off as their own. I don't know about that; but I know that of the interview he gave the Pee-Dee a column was cribbed without credit from the article on "Charity" in "Brann's Scrap-Book." "The Spirit of God" may have done much for Morrissey, but it hasn't cured him of the thieving habit, and I would advise people to keep a sharp eyes on their portable property until this religious reformer succeeds in breaking into the penitentiary.
. . .