For ten years after M. Quad joined forces with the Detroit Free Press he wrote steadily for that journal, and rarely allowed an issue of the paper to be made without a humorous article from his pen. Since 1880, however, little or no humor has appeared, Mr. Lewis changing suddenly from a gay, rollicking style to descriptive sketches, thoughtful and pathetic. In 1881 he made a lengthy visit to the South and tramped over the old battlefields of the Rebellion. In the columns of the Free Press he described, in a series of weekly letters, the battles and the battlefields of the engagements with which he had been connected during the war. These letters were written under the title of Sixteen Years After, and signed by M. Quad. They have been copied extensively by the American and foreign press.
One of the raciest things that has ever appeared from the pen of Charles B. Lewis, is the following:
NEW YEAR’S ADDRESS.
Once more the whirligig of time has yanked an old year out, and a new one in.
Glad on’t.
If there is anything lonesome and monotonous, it is last year. The old year had a few charms, but the new one promises to give them half a mile the start, and then go under the string first.
And yet one feels a trifle sad to part with the old year, when he comes to think it over. As memory’s bob-tail car pulls us down the long lane of the past, one looks out of the window at the well-remembered objects of former days, and his heart saddens.
Where’s the fat girl who rested her head on your bosom when the old year was new? Gone—yes, gone—slid out to take charge of the snake-cage in a traveling museum of natural wonders, and your wounded heart sorrowfully but vainly calls,—
“Come back, fat girl—come back?”