Judge — September 29, 1883 — page 7: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

A DOUBLE BAR “THE CORN 18 WAVING, Alonzo Busbeo: His Life and Im-| pressions. BY WILLIAM GILL. cmar, vt Wuews Sheeny Sam made the arrange- ments for visiting the mansion on Washing- ton Heights, he labored under the impression that the only occupants of the house were an aged couple who resided in the basement and took charge of the premises in the ab- sence of the Bullenbear family at Newport. as for Sheeny Sam! And _ still more alas for the gentlemen who accompanied him on his midnight excursion! He was, to use a phrase of the day, ‘a off” in his calculations. Up to four o'clock that afternoon none but the two aged servitors occupied the dwelling, but a slight panic on the “Street ” had brought Josiah O. Bullen- bear, accompanied by his son Augustus, post haste from Newport, where. the family had been summering, and, at the moment we drove up to the vicinity of the mansion, Josiah and his son were on the point of re- tiring to bed, after a long and exhaustive talk, which embodied the plan of operations to be pursued in the morning against those vile creatures who were endeavorin| the stream of gold from the Bullenbear pockets into their own, Ordinarily equable in temper—when nothing occurred to put it out—Josiah was roused by a keen sense of the selfishness which sought to make him its victim, The Bullenbear selfishness was a grand and noble quality. The selfishness of the rest of mankind was a base and sordid pas- sion. How many of us, oh gentle reader, are Bullenbears? sic Leaving the wagon in the care of Sheeny, Bill, Hoodlum, Jack and myself cautiously | ANNIE.” ade our way tothe back of the house and mi stopped in front of the basement door. listened but could not hear a sound, “Up with you, young ‘un,” said Bill, and with the ce of Jack I clambered on to Bill’s broad shoulders, and following the instructions given me as we wended our w: from the wagon, tried the fastening of the | transom above the door. Jt yielded to my touch, | “In with you and open the door.” I squeezed my small frame through the open- ing and dropped lightly on the floor of the hallway. I had no sooner done so than, by the light of the gas jet which flickered above my head, I beheld: And right here this cliapter should conclude. Here I could leave my readers, racked, tortured, frenzied with anxie nent the outcome of the sentence broken short off in its career of incident, What a wide field of speculation for cur: osity to wander in for a week—seven days cudgelling of brains in order to evolve from its numerous cells a satisfactory ending to the words ** I beheld!” Beheld what? Per- We chance the family ghost on its way to the | cold-victual department of the establishment. Perhaps the faithful old servitor, who, roused from sleep by some presentiment of harm about to visit the peace of his master’s fam- ily, or the disturbing effects of a late supper of fried pork chops and green apples—was making one more round of the house to se that all the fastenings of the house were s | cure, and was to meet his death at the hands | of desperate men while in the discharge of | his duty. Perhaps the Loy-burglar beheld his poor, beaten, yet pious mother, who had | risen from her cot in Ward 3 of the New | York Hospital and walked, in her. bed drapery and bare feet, eight miles in a piti- less July sn to prevent her darling boy committing acrime. How, in a coma- tose e (the effect of a cracked skull), she could have known of her darling boy’s mis- sion that particular night, and found her way to the house, and got into the house, would, in the hands of any ordinary ten-cent novelist, have been easily explained. whole-souled—no, nor half-soled—novelist is going to let probability stand in the way of dramatic situation; he’d devilish soon lose his situation if he did Perhaps what the intruder beheld was vertisement on the | wall that the “Evening Telegram” was Befor I the world.” Or one from the | Sun,” signifying its willingness to daily print the fiat of C. A. D., “ The Republican ty must go!” Or the sworn affidavit of vhus Pullitser, that Jay Gould was not interested in the management of the ** World "—he only held a mortgage on it. Or a hand writing on the wall—a sort of modem Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharism from George Edgar Montgomery—proclaiming in | letters of fire, ** Tam the at ki-yi; when | I speak let no other dog bark; art is not art unless / say it is art. Iam the great origi- nal literary dude of the ‘Times *and don’t you forget it!” Or a‘ Herald” war map, pointing out with geographical accuracy the seat of war in Tonquin, or the seat of cholera in Egypt, or the seat of a pair of Nicol’s 81.50 pants. Or the benign features of Lydi Pinkham, the noble yet untitled wo- man who devoted her life to the glorious task of rescuing mankind from the pitfalls of disease and providing bucolic journals with enough advertising matter to insure their editors at least one square meal a week. Oh, come to the point—revenous a noux moutons, (How's that? Don’t that come in naturally, eh?) Keep not your readers on the tenter hooks of uncertainty. (By the way, while I think of it, what are ‘‘ tenter hooks?” I have read of them in poetical inkslings, and thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea to drop them into the composition of this history; but I have no more notion of what they mean than a Tammany alderman has of the fact that, according to Darwin, his far-back progenitor was a ringtailed baboon with a blue nose). I'd give a dol- | lar and a half—and that’s a lot of money for an who has to take his ulster out of pop , or lose it, and the “melancholy ing on to us with rapid strid if I could defer the explanation of what I beheld until the next installment. or, I can tell you, it is a task of no light weight to work wp toa dramatic episode, and when a fellow has accomplished it, he hates like thunder to slur it over in the middle of the chapter, when he knows that by allowing it to hang over he can make himself an object of intense interest to the thousands of scul- lery maids and Rapid ‘Transit telegraph boys, who hang upon his every word, and strangle themselves, as it were, with his utterances, It isa great thing to be gifted with the power of precipitating the essence of one’s brain into the sympathies of one’s fellow men and women; to cause the tear to flood the eye of the peanut fiend and the bosom of the lady cashier to 8 with pity or with terror, as the fluctuating fortunes of the hero and heroine call for one sentiment or the other. Well, revenous a nous—stop! I made use of that before, and of all taught ologies, tautology is the most reprehensible. Good boy! send it to ‘‘ Texas Siftings.” ‘What's that? Got cern copy?” By Jingo, I’ve managed. Hooray! By the light of the gas jet which flickered above my head, I beheld [To be continued in our next—unless the author, in the meantime, gets the jim-jams. ] comicbooks.com