Judge — December 1889 — page 31: what you’re looking at

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

THE TALKING-HEAD DISILLUSIONIZED. fs Blo K'S THE MANAGER —"* Allow me, chentlemens, to call to your addentions der gread mysdery, dot shpeakin’ sphinx !” Bows BRNSFIV Ain‘d it wonderfuls 2” THE GNOME OF NUREMBERG. THE, MALL in Central park is never gayer than when the sleighs at Christmas-time are whirled over the iron-bound drive, with their freight of rosy faces peeping merrily out from furs and instinct with life— when existence itself is a delight, and the music of bells and the happy laughter of children come down the wind that has forgotten for a momen: the tortures reserved for the tenements. noon a little wooden man—in reality a gnome—tumbled over the side of the sleigh in which he lay among the robes by the side of his ten-year-old ‘master and was in an instant ground to bits by the flying runners and the hoofs of the horses that followed fast, uncons n the exuberance of their equine spirits as they sniffed the frosty air and spurned the frozen earth, that they had assisted at the finale of a tragedy begun four hundred years ago. The ten-year-old boy hardly missed his odd little doll, whose right eye bulged out so peculiarly, and which his father had bought with other toys from the deft hands of the German peasants, at an importing shop on Park place. The bulging eye lay uncrushed on the snow, where it had rolled after the catastrophe, and 1, with a grotesque pity half unconscious, picked it up and put it in my vest pocket. The ten- year-old boy slept more peacefully that night, for he had frequently complained that his ugly little wooden man sat astride of his bed-post all night and made faces at him. Nobody had be- lieved the boy; but I myself fell that night under the spell of the Eye, and not unti! I have written the story it spoke to me in my misty, troubled slumbers that night do I expect it to rest _peacefully—if even then—in the lake where I threw it only yesterday, and where I am sure it lies now, with its steadfast gaze directed at the stars, peering up through the icy gray waters as the swans sail over it and the sun- beams glint on the ripples, just as they glinted four hundred years ago on the dark-brown boles of the fir- At four o'clock on such an after- to the Ephesians ?” , dear.” BIBLICAL. ELrrepa—"' Wasn't it St. Paul, mamma, who did so much good Is that what makes Minneapolis so awfully jealous?” trees at Nuremberg, and as they will shine for many centuries to come. It was the night before Christmas at N the greatest gold mines of the world. Cortez and Pizarro had not yet found the precious metals of Peru and Mexico; the golden streams of California and the silver-ribbed mountains of Nevada were unknown to avaricious man, Down under the sides of their fir-clad mountains the famous old gold mines of Nuremberg lay, and a brooding gnome sat guarding each, the immortal custodian of its treasures. Above, the air was keen and the wild north wind howled fiercely in the hollows of the hills, stopping now and again to laugh with the gnomes over the way the peasants shuddered at his ravings. One of the gnomes Inughed so con- sumedly his right eye flew out. The jesting north wind scurried it away, and it bounded along the moss until an old, old man who was picking up fagots picked it up, put it hastily in his pocket and went on gathering fuel under the swaying snowy trees, whose dead branches crashed to the earth here and there all around him. The gnome bounded away from his mine in an agony of pain and entreated the old man to give him back his eye. But the covetous dotard would only do so on promise of a share of the gnome’s treasure, and the next day it was given out that the gray-beard had inherited a great estate. He became a lord and built a great castle, But the money wrung from a frenzied creat- ure’s extremity never prospered its peasant owners, and in three hundred and ninety-nine years they were again reduced to such penury that the wealth of their ancestors was only a tradition, and the last of the line (for peasants have lineage as well as lords) gathered sticks for his fire last Christmas eve along the surface of the mine his fore- father had despoiled, and the very existence of the mine was forgotten. But the steadfast gnome sat on the hanging wall and kept watch, The north wind, which never grows old and feeble, blew the poor fagot- mberg, where then were