“I want to be introduced to the jars in which you keep the boy scouts of the Sierras! Show me the bins full of the boy detectives of the prairie! Point out to me the barrels full of boy pirates of the Spanish main!” and with each demand she dropped the umbrella on the young man’s skull, until he skipped over the desk and sought safety in a neighboring canyon.
“I’ll teach ’em!” she panted, grasping the urchin by the ear and leading him off. “I’ll teach ’em to make it good or dance. Want to go fight Indians any more? Want to stand proudly upon the pinnacle of the mountain and scatter the plain beneath with the bleeding bodies of uncounted slain? Want to say ‘hist’ in a tone that brooks no contradiction? Propose to spring upon the taffrail and with a ringing word of command send a broadside into the richly laden galley, and then mercifully spare the beautiful maiden in the cabin, that she may become your bride? Eh! Going to do it any more?”
With each question she hammered the yelping urchin until his bones were sore and he protested his permanent abandonment of all the glories enumerated.
“Then come along,” said she, taking him by the collar. “Let me catch you around with any more ramrods and carving knives, and you’ll think the leaping, curling, resistless prairie fire had swept with a ferocious roar of triumph across the trembling plains and lodged in your pantaloons to stay!”
SOME OTHER FUNNY FELLOWS.
There are hundreds of humorists in America who are comparatively unknown—humorists who are intensely funny, but who do not know it; persons who write one or two good things and then cease to write; journalists of the staid, old school, who once in a decade or so say something really witty. During the last ten years I have endeavored to accumulate a portion of the many stray bits of fun that have appeared in the American newspapers from time to time.
As an example I quote the following from an unknown humorist: “The editor of a mining camp newspaper went to Denver to hear Emma Abbott sing, and in a review of the opera said: ‘As a singer she can just wallop the hose off anything that ever wagged a jaw on the boards. From her clear, bird-like upper-notes, she would canter away down on the base racket and then cushion back to a sort of spiritual treble, which made every man in the audience imagine every hair on his head was the golden string of a celestial harp, over which angelic fingers were sweeping in the inspiring old tune, Sallie Put the Kettle on. Here she would rest awhile, trilling like an enchanted bird, and hop in among the upper notes again with a get-up-and-git vivacity that jingled the glass pendants on the chandeliers, and elicited a whoop of pleasure from every galoot in the mob. In the last act she made a neat play, and worked in that famous kiss of hers on Castle. He had her in his arms with her head lying on his shoulder, and her eyes shooting red-hot streaks of galvanized love right into his. All at once her lips began to twitch coaxingly and get into position, and when he tumbled to her racket, he drawed her up easy like, shut his eyes, and then her ripe, luscious lips glewed themselves to his and a thrill of pleasure nabbed hold of him, and shook him till the audience could almost hear his toenails grind against his boots. Then she shut her eyes and pushed harder and dash—O, Moley Hoses!—the smack that followed started the stitching in every masculine heart in the house.”
A Montana editor writes as follows of a hated rival:—“The blear-eyed picture of melancholy and imbecility who has ravaged his exchanges to fill up The Insect during the past year, and the cheerful looking corpse who has acted lately as his man Friday, and who is a tenderfoot, equally soft at both ends, will doubtless paralyze everybody to-day with his thunderbolts of choice sarcasm and polite invective. The intelligibility of their phillippics, however, will depend largely on whether they could borrow that dictionary or not, their vocabulary being painfully abridged if left to their own resources.”