Volume 4 — EDITOR'S DRAWER.

We are at the beginning of another year; a season in which all pause, and “take note of time”—time, the vehicle that carries every thing into nothing. “We talk,” says a quaint English author, “of spending our time, as if it were so much interest of a perpetual annuity; whereas, we are all living upon our capital; and he who wastes a single day, throws away that which can never be recalled or recovered:

It is well to think of these things, standing upon the verge of a new year. But let us not trouble the reader with a prolonged homily.

Every body will remember the missionary at one of the Cannibal Islands, who asked one of the natives if he had ever known a certain predecessor of his upon the island, who had labored in the moral vineyard there? “Yes, we know him well—we ate a part of him.” Now, the “piece of a cold missionary on the sideboard for a morning lunch,” of which the witty Sydney Smith made mention, is scarcely a less objectionable dish, on the score of the material, than the chief feature of a repast, held, according to a French journal, not a thousand miles from the Ascot race-course, in England:

“At the recent races at Ascot the famous horse Tiberius broke his leg, by bounding against one of the posts of the barrier, while preparing for the race. His owner, the Lord Millbank, lost ten thousand pounds in betting upon his noble steed, besides his value, and others also lost very heavily: the law, of course, being that all bets should be paid whether the failure to win came from the less speed or from accident.

“Three days afterward, Lord Millbank gave a very sumptuous dinner. The most distinguished of the English peerage were present, and the conviviality ran exceedingly high. Toward the close, the noble host rose in his place, and proposed an oblation to the health of the departed Tiberius.

“The toast was clamorously received, but the speaker remained standing with his glass in his hand.

“‘We drink to Tiberius,’ said Milord Millbank, when the shouts had subsided; ‘to Tiberius the most beautiful, the most admirable, the most spirited courser whose hoofs ever trod upon our glorious British turf!’

“Shouts again resounded to the roof in vehement peals.

“‘You know,’ continued his lordship, ‘the achievements of this horse. His deeds belong to history. Fame has taken charge of his glory. But it belongs to me, and to you, my lords and gentlemen, to do honor to his mortal remains! I wished that this lofty courser should have a burial worthy of his great, his immortal deservings. He has had it, my lords and gentlemen, he has had it! My cook has fitly prepared him, and you have feasted upon him to-day! Yes, my lords and gentlemen, this repast which you have relished so keenly—these dishes which awakened the so frequent inquiry, ‘What animal could be so delicious?’—that animal, my lords and gentlemen, was Tiberius! It is that noble courser whose mortal remains now repose in your stomachs! May your digestions be light!’

“At these words the enthusiasm concentrated for a moment—possibly with some vague thought of an immediate resurrection—but with a sudden outburst of ‘Hurrahs!’ the sentiment took the turn of sublimity, and another glowing bumper was sent to join the departed courser in his metempsychosis.”

The English papers sometimes get off telling jokes against their neighbors across the Channel, but seldom any thing better than this. Besides, how thoroughly French it is, both in the conception and execution! Its origin could never be mistaken.

We put on record, in these holiday-times of imbibition, these warning stanzas, to guard the reader alike against cause and effect:

The vagaries of the insane are sometimes amusing to witness; and not unfrequently there is a “method in their madness” that would not be amiss in those who are on the outside of lunatic asylums. Many years ago in Philadelphia, a patient in the insane asylum of that city fancied himself to be the Redeemer of the world; and his talk and actions were always in keeping with the character, save that he exacted a rigid deference to his person and his divinely-derived power. But one day another patient arrived, whose idiosyncrasy it was, that he was the Supreme Being. A little while after his entrance into the institution, he met in one of the halls, as he was passing, the imagined representative of the Son; who, not liking his bearing, reminded him who he was: “Yes, you are the Son, but know from this time henceforth, that you have seen the Father, and must obey him!” “And strange enough,” said the keeper of the institution to the friend who gives us the particulars, “from that day forward, all power was given unto the latter; and at length the fancied Son’s ‘air-drawn’ vision melted away, and he left the establishment a perfectly sane man.”

Some twelve or fifteen years ago there was in the lunatic asylum at Worcester, Massachusetts, a kind of crazy David Crockett, who fancied that he could do any thing that could be done, and a little more. One day a good many visitors were walking slowly through the halls, examining them, and occasionally saying a word or two to the patients. After a very courteous reception of a gentleman, who mentioned that he had come from South Carolina, the crazy man interrupted him abruptly with:

“Have you felt any of my earthquakes down there lately?”

One of the visitors replied: “No, we’ve had nothing of the kind, where I live.”

“I thought so! I knew it!” returned the patient, frowning. “I have an enemy. Ice! Ice! Why, I ordered one of my very best earthquakes for your part of the country! It was to have ripped up the earth, and sent the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico. Look here!” he continued, pointing to a crack in the plastering, “that’s one of my earthquakes! What do you think of that? I’ve got more orders for earthquakes than I can attend to in a year. I’ve got four coming off, up north this afternoon—two in Vermont!”

That was a good story that was told of an occurrence which took place in a stage-coach one morning many years ago in the western part of this State. A young, conceited fellow, who had been monopolizing almost all the conversation of the company, consisting of some sixteen passengers, had been narrating the wonderful exploits he had performed, the prodigies of valor of which he had been the hero, and the wonderful escapes of which he had been the subject. At least he related one adventure in which he was the principal actor, which was so perfectly astounding, that a low whistle of incredulity was a simultaneous demonstration on the part of the passengers. An old gentleman, with a solemn visage, and an ivory-headed cane, sitting in the back corner of the stage, here observed:

“That last adventure of yours, my young friend, is a very extraordinary one—very extraordinary. One could hardly believe it without having seen it. I didn’t see it; but I can relate a circumstance which happened in my family, and in which I was for a time deeply interested, which is almost as remarkable, and I believe quite as true. Will you hear it?”

“Certainly,” said our braggadocio; “I should be very glad to hear it.”

“Give it to us! give it to us!” echoed the whole company, getting an inkling, from the solemn phiz of the old gentleman, that something rich was in the wind.

“Well, sir,” continued the narrator, “the circumstance to which I alluded is this: My father had three children. He had an only brother, who had also three children. My grandfather had left to my father and my uncle a large estate, in the executorship of which a quarrel broke out, which grew more and more bitter, until at length the aid of the law was invoked, and many years of violent litigation ensued, during all which time the costs of the proceedings were gradually eating up the estate. My father and uncle saw this, and though bitter enemies, they had too much sense to bite each his own nose off. They were chivalrous and brave men, almost as much, probably, as yourself, sir (addressing the daring young gentleman aforesaid), and they determined to ‘fight it out among themselves,’ as the saying is, and thus keep the money in the family. Well, sir, my father made this proposition to my uncle; to wit: that the three sons of each, in the order of their age, should settle the disputed question on the field of honor; the majority of the survivors to decide the affirmative. It was readily acceded to. My eldest brother went out, on the appointed day, and at the first fire he fell dead upon the turf. My next eldest brother took his station at once, and at the second fire, shot my next eldest cousin through the lungs, and he never drew a whole breath afterward.”

Here the old gentleman’s emotion was so great that he paused a moment, as if to collect himself. Presently he proceeded:

“It now became my turn to take the stand; and upon me rested the hopes of my family. I can truly say, that it was not so much fear that made my hand tremble and my pistol to waver: it was the deep sense of responsibility that rested upon me. We took our places—a simultaneous discharge was a moment after heard—and, and——”

Here the narrator put his handkerchief to his face, and seemed to shake with irrepressible agitation.

“Well, sir,” exclaimed our young Munchausen who had listened to the narrative with almost breathless attention, “well, sir—well?—what was the result? How did it end?”

“I was shot dead the first fire!” replied the old gentleman; “the property passed into the hands of my uncle and his family; and my surviving brother has been poor as a rat ever since!”

An uproarious laugh, that fairly shook the coach, told “Braggadocio” that he had been slightly “taken in and done for” after a manner entirely his own.

This anecdote will not be lost upon bored listeners to those who shoot with the long bow, or in other words, stretch a fact until they have made it as long as they want it. We have somewhere heard of a man at a dinner-party who was determined not to be outdone in this but too common species of archery. Some one present had been engaged in attracting the attention of the company to an account of a pike that he had caught the day before that weighed nineteen pounds! “Pooh!” exclaimed a gentleman sitting near him, “that is nothing to the one I caught last week, which weighed twenty-six pounds.” “Confound it!” whispered the first fisherman to his neighbor, “I wish I could catch my pike again; I’d add ten pounds to him directly!”

There is something more than mere good measures in the following lines. There is a satire upon Love and Mammon, when the deep affections of the heart reach a greater depth in the pocket:

It is not a little amusing, or it would be if it were not rather a serious matter oftentimes, to hear a surgeon who loves his profession talk with another of the “splendid fungus” which he had recently removed, or the “beautiful case of amputation of both arms at the shoulder,” which he had just witnessed. A fair travesty of this is afforded in the letter purporting to come from an apothecary in the country to a friend in London, wherein, among other things, he wrote: “My patients are rather select than numerous, but I think the red lamp and brass plate may attract a few. I had a glorious case of dislocation of the shoulder last week, and nearly pulled the fellow in half with the assistance of two or three bricklayers who were building next door. The other doctor tried first, and couldn’t reduce it, because he had no bricklayers at hand. This has got my name up, rather. They are terrible Goths down here though. You can scarcely conceive the extent of their ignorance. Not one in twenty can read or write; and so all my dispensing-labels which I tie on the bottles are quite thrown away. A small female toddled into the surgery the other day, and horrified me by drawling out:

“‘If you please, sir, mother’s took the lotion, and rubbed her leg with the mixture!’

“This might have been serious, for the lotion contained a trifle of poison; but Jack and I started off directly; and as it happened very luckily to be washing-day, we drenched the stupefied woman with soap-suds and pearl-ash, until every thing was thrown off from the stomach, including, I suspect, a quantity of the lining membrane. This taught me the lesson, that a medical man should always have his instruments in order; for if Jack had not borrowed my stomach-pump to squirt at the cats with, a good deal of bother might have been avoided. But he is a clever fellow at heart, and would do any thing for me. He quite lived on the ice during the frost, tripping every body up he came near; and whether he injured them seriously or not, I know the will was good, and was therefore much obliged to him!”

It would be a curious thing, if they could be traced out, to ascertain the origin of half the quaint old sayings and maxims that have come down to the present time from unknown generations. Who, for example, was “Dick,” who had the odd-looking “hat-band,” and who has so long been the synonym or representative of oddly-acting people? Who knows any thing authentic of the leanness of “Job’s turkey,” who has so many followers in the ranks of humanity? Scores of other sayings there are, concerning which the same, or similar questions might be asked. Who ever knew, until comparatively late years, what was the origin of the cautionary saying, “Mind your P’s and Q’s?” A modern antiquarian, however, has put the world right in relation to that saying: In ale-houses, in the olden time, when chalk “scores” were marked upon the wall, or behind the door of the tap-room, it was customary to put the initials “P” and “Q” at the head of every man’s account, to show the number of “pints” and “quarts” for which he was in arrears; and we may presume many a friendly rustic to have tapped his neighbor on the shoulder, when he was indulging too freely in his potations, and to have exclaimed, as he pointed to the chalk-score, “Mind your P’s and Q’s, man! mind your P’s and Q’s!” The same writer, from whom we glean this information, mentions an amusing anecdote in connection with it, which had its origin in London, at the time a “Learned Pig” was attracting the attention of half the town. A theatrical wag, who attended the porcine performances, maliciously set before the four-legged actor some peas—a temptation which the animal could not resist, and which immediately occasioned him to lose the “cue” given him by the showman. The pig-exhibitor remonstrated with the author of the mischief, on the unfairness of what he had done; to which he replied: “I only wanted to ascertain whether the pig knew his ‘peas’ from his ‘cues!’”

Sympathy, we find described on a slip in our “Drawer” to be “A sensibility of which its objects are oftentimes insensible.” It may be considered wrong to discourage a feeling of which there is no great superabundance is this selfish and hard-hearted world; but even of the little that exists, a portion is frequently thrown away; a fact sufficiently illustrated by two amusing instances, cited by the writer in question:

“A city damsel, whose ideas had been Arcadianized by the perusal of pastorals, having once made an excursion to a distance of twenty miles from London, wandered into the fields, in the hope of discovering a bonâ-fide live ‘shepherd.’ To her great delight, she at length encountered one, under a green hedge, with his dog by his side, his ‘crook’ in his hand, and his sheep round about him, just as if he were sitting to be modeled in China for a chimney-ornament. To be sure, he did not exhibit the blue jacket, jessamine vest, pink inexpressibles, and peach-colored stockings of those faithful portraitures. This was mortifying: still more so was it, that he was neither particularly young nor cleanly; but most of all, that he wanted the indispensable accompaniment of a pastoral reed, in order that he might beguile his solitude with the charms of music. Touched with pity at this privation, and lapsing unconsciously into poetical language, the damsel exclaimed:

“‘Ah, gentle shepherd! tell me, where’s your pipe?’

“‘I left it at home, miss,’ replied the clown, scratching his head, ‘cause I haint got no ‘baccy!’”

The “sentiment” was satisfied at once in this case, as it was in the other, which is thus presented:

“A benevolent committee-man of the Society for superseding the necessity of climbing chimney-sweep boys, seeing a sooty urchin weeping bitterly at the corner of a street, asked him the cause of his distress; to which the boy replied:

“‘Master has been using me shamefully: he has been letting Jim Hudson go up the chimney at Number Nine, when it was my turn. He said it was too high and too dangerous for me; but I’ll go up a chimney with Jim Hudson any day in the year; that’s what I will; and he knows it, and master knows it too!’”

Sympathy was rather thrown away in this case, that’s quite certain.

Winter is upon us; the biting winds rattle our window-shutters and howl down our chimneys. “Poor naked wretches” tremble in the fierce cold; and homeless, houseless women and children huddle in the alleys and hiding-places of the city. God help the poor! Now is the time to remember them. Let the rich recall “poor old Lear,” when deprived of his kingdom, and reduced to want, the cold rains beat pitilessly upon his white head, he was forced to exclaim, remembering what he might have done when he had the power, “We have ta’en too little care of this!” Let no disappointment, such as is most forcibly expressed in these lines, add an additional drop to the cup of bitterness which is commended to the lips of the poor of our city:

A story has been for many years current, that an eccentric gentleman, of some scientific aspirations, residing on Long Island, not a thousand miles from New York, once induced a thick-set and very green Hibernian to ascend a very remarkably high and spreading tree, near his residence, accompanied by a curious nondescript flying-machine, by the aid of which he was to soar off, and float very softly down upon the bosom of mother Earth! All being ready, the aeronaut started from a platform which had been built in the topmost branches. He “slode” over the branches, and then “toppled down headlong” to the ground, covered with the wrecks of his scientific master’s flying-machine, and making another wreck of himself. He “heard something drop,” and it was a foolish Irishman! When taken up, it was found that he had broken both his arms, a leg, dislocated a shoulder, and otherwise seriously injured himself. Being long ill, at his employer’s cost and charges, the “flying-machine,” so signally destroyed, was considered a “permanent investment.” This incident, which is really true, reminds us of the story of “The Flying Cobbler,” an old Irish story, of which we find a record preserved in “The Drawer:”

“When Felix showed himself on the top battlement of the tower from which he was to jump, opening and shutting a great pair of black wings that were fastened to his shoulders, every face in the great crowd was turned up to gaze at him. I thought myself that the tower never looked such a murdering height from the ground as when I looked at the poor devil standing on the tip-top stone, as unconcerned as an old cormorant on a rock, flapping his wings for a flight. At length, by his motions we saw that he was preparing to be off in earnest. The men held their breath hard, and the women began to tremble and cry; and then, all of a sudden, he made a jump off the battlement, and sailed away ‘most illigant.’ A wild shout of delight arose from the people, but before it had ceased the glory of poor Felix was ‘done up.’ After two or three flutters, his wings fell flat to his sides, his heels went up, and down he came tumbling like a wild-goose with a shot through his gizzard, plump to the ground! Every body thought that it was all over with him; but when we ran to pick him up, we found him lying on his back, not dead, but groaning most pitifully. We took him up as tenderly as we could, and carried him home, and laid him on his bed. When the doctor came he found that both his legs were smashed. Not a word nor a groan escaped him. After he came to his senses, he lay with his eyes open near an hour; and then, when the doctor was setting one of the broken bones, he tried to raise himself up in the bed, and with the fire dancing in his eyes, he said:

“‘Doctor, dear, how long will it be before I’m cured again?’

“‘Really,’ says the doctor, ‘I can’t possibly take upon me to say, precisely. ’Tis a bad case, and I don’t apprehend that you can be perfectly recovered under three months.’

“‘Three months! Oh the devil! what am I to do? Three months!—when I had just found it out!’

“‘Found what out, jewel?’ said his mother, who was sitting by his bedside.

“‘The cause of my failing to-day, mother. The wings were right, but I forgot one thing.’

“‘And what was that, Felix?’”

“‘The tail, mother! If I’d not forgot me tail, I could have flew to Ameriky and back again!’”

Now that what is called, or miscalled the “Code of Honor,” is falling into desuetude in regions of the country where it was once considered binding, the following laughable burlesque upon the manner in which modern duels are sometimes brought about, and conducted, will doubtless, as the newspapers say, be “read with interest:”

“William Singsmall, Esquire, thought proper to say something very severe about somebody abroad, when the expression was taken up by Mr. Flea, a friend of the insulted party, who happened to be within reach of William Singsmall, Esquire. Mr. Flea waited on Mr. Singsmall, who refused to retract. Ulterior measures were hinted at, and the following series of hostile notes and messages ensued:

I.

“Sir: Understanding you have imputed cowardice to my friend William Singsmall, Esquire, I call on you either to retract, or refer me to a friend. As the matter presses, I beg, on the part of William Singsmall, Esquire, that you will answer this when I return from Paris, where I am going for three weeks.

“Yours obediently, Peter Skullthick.” “To James Flea, Esquire.”

II.

“Sir: I received your note, and went immediately into the country; but on my return to town you shall hear from me with the least possible delay.

“Yours obediently, James Flea.”

III.

“Sir: I have got your note, and will see about it.

“Yours obediently, Peter Skullthick.”

IV.

“Sir: I have waited every day at the club, from ten in the morning until twelve at night, for the last month, hoping to hear from you.

“Yours obediently, James Flea.”

V.

“Sir: My object in writing to you was not on my own account, but on behalf of William Singsmall, Esquire, to whom you have most offensively imputed cowardice, and alleged that you threatened to cane him, while he was hidden in the larder of the club-house.”

“You will see that as a man of honor he must take some notice of this. I am going out of town for a few weeks, and as soon as convenient after my return shall be glad to hear from you.”

“Yours obediently, Peter Skullthick.”

VI.

“Sir: I did go to the club-house with a cane under my coat, for the purpose of pitching into Singsmall. I had the solemn assurance of the porter that Singsmall had entered the club and had not left it; but on searching the house he was not to be found. I can only presume that your friend was under the sink or in the larder, and I therefore can not consider him entitled to any thing better than the severe drubbing I mean to inflict upon him whenever I shall be so fortunate as meet him.”

“Yours obediently, James Flea.”

VII.

”Sir: I expected you would have referred me to a friend, and shall wait at the club until I hear from you again—unless I am called away by other engagements.”

“Yours obediently, Peter Skullthick.”

After this correspondence, Flea sent a friend to Skullthick, who declared he had no quarrel with any one, but only wished his friend Singsmall to have the opportunity of being shot through the body by Flea, whose friend insisted that he (Flea) should fight no one but him (Skullthick). Skullthick, on the contrary, had no quarrel with Flea; but although a married man, was ready to fight Flea’s friend, who threw himself into the hands of somebody else, who would have nothing to do with any of them. And there the matter ended!