Where’s the alligator boots which sat around the festive board last new year’s day? Where’s the silk umbrella you left on the doorstep this morning?
Where’s the ton of coal and the jar of country butter you laid in about that time? Where’s the plumber who agreed to “come right up,” and thaw that water-pipe out? The sad wind sighing through the treeless leaves, solemnly puckers its mouth, and sadly answers,—
“Gone up!”
One by one they have fallen beside the curbstone of life’s dreary highway, have been swept over and almost forgotten, while you and I have been spared to put up the stoves another time, and to have the landlord raise the rent on us—drat him! It makes one feel sad, especially the rent business.
Farewell, old year! If you go west to grow up with the country, or go south to run a steamboat, we hope you’ll be honest, seek respectable company, and make your daily life a striking example for, and a terrible warning to, the man who goes around playing the string game on unsuspecting people.
Welcome, new year! Howdy? If convenient, give us some new clothes, a few thousand in cash, and a race-horse, and prove by your actions that you mean to do the right thing by a fellow. Give us some strawberry weather this month, wollop the pesky Indians into behaving themselves, and make it uncomfortable for grasshoppers and potato-bugs. Be around with some decent weather when a fellow wants to go fishing, and let ’er rain to kill when the women go out to exhibit their new bonnets. Do the fair thing by all of us, including New Jersey, and we won’t stand by and see you abused.
HENRY W. SHAW.
“Josh Billings,” the far-famed writer of Yankee proverbs, is over sixty years of age, yet hale and rather hearty. He was born in western Massachusetts, and after having a hard time of it in life, working at various times, in various places, in various states, at various occupations, he finally settled down to the peace and quiet of an author, with an occasional lecturing tour. This has been the life history of Henry W. Shaw, whose eccentric mode of spelling has made him famous. His eccentricities are not assumed and artificial, but a part of the man, and in his daily conversations he uses the same apt and peculiar similies that are characteristic of his pen productions.
In 1872, when asked by a friend to give some facts relative to his life, Josh wrote the following biography, which is very characteristic of the man: