Culture's garland

The Mummy’s Conundrum.

Reading edition

A floating item tells us that Omaha is the cheapest place in the country to die in. But why die in Omaha, when one can live as cheap in St. Louis, and at the same time serve all the purposes of being dead in other localities? It is related by one of our most reliable citizens, who has travelled much abroad, that he once visited the catacombs of Rome. Deep in the bowels of the earth, surrounded by the mouldy skeletons of other centuries, and oppressed by the weird gloom of the labyrinth of the dead, the traveller abandoned himself to solemn reflections.

“This, then,” said he, half aloud, “this is the city of the dim, mysterious past—the vast charnel-house in which the glory, the flower, the cream, the ambition, of other generations crumble to dust! Grim mocker of mortality—genius of oblivion! this granary of human clay is thy cherished and supreme abode!”

To this apostrophe, a musty mummy of the time of Nero the violinist, raising himself rheumatically from his couch in a mouldy niche, replied, “Stranger, I reckon you’ve never been in St. Louis, Mo.”

A simple black-and-white line drawing of a wooden gallows structure. It consists of a horizontal crossbeam supported by two vertical side posts with diagonal corner braces. A rope hangs from the center of the crossbeam, terminating in a noose, with the rest of the rope trailing down toward the right post.

THE END.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

Fixed typos; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.

The author appeared to dislike the use of apostrophes to indicate possession in poetry and did not alter them.