Was you ever at Niagry Falls?
Was you ever in the penitentiary?
State how much pork, impendin’ crysis, Dutch cheese, poplar survinity, standard poetry, children’s strainers, slave code, catnip, red flannel, ancient history, pickled tomatoes, old junk, perfoomery, coal ile, liberty, hoopskirts, etc., have you got on hand?
But it didn’t work. I got into a row at the first house I stopt at, with some old maids. Disbelievin’ the answers they give in regard to their ages I endeavored to open their mouths and look at their teeth, same as they do with horses, but they floo into a violent rage and tackled me with brooms and sich. Takin’ the sences requires experience, like as any other bizness.
Browne had few if any enemies, and hosts of friends. Everyone with whom he became acquainted became his friend. He was as genial as he was humorous, and his former companions who are yet alive look back upon the time when Artemus Ward, the king of American humorists, took their proffered hand and shook it warmly in his original and friendly way.
CHARLES HEBER CLARK.
On the eastern shore of Maryland is situated a town known to the post-office authorities as Berlin. It was in Berlin in the warm month of July, 1841, that Charles Heber Clark, “Max Adeler,” first saw the light of day.
His father was a clergyman in the Episcopal church, but this appeared to have little effect on Charles, who, like all bad boys, grew up to make fun of everybody and everything. He was sent to Georgetown, District of Columbia, early in life, being shipped by express and labeled “handle with care.” He attended school for a brief period, learning but little, and jumped into the mercantile world by moving his linen to Philadelphia.