Life — March 27, 1884 — page 6: what you’re looking at

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

174 VOLUNTEERS WANTED. ES, volunteers aré wanted! Volunteers for a jovial little excursion to a climate somewhat cooler than our own, and where there are no mosqui- tos; where frozen limbs, scurvy, starvation, and con- sumption can be had for the asking—and often without it. Men are preferred who can rise superior to our own effeminate modes of life, and appreciate the luxuries of an Arctic career. “Hope deferred maketh the heart sick,” O gentle | explorer ! and when your nose and both feet are frozen and you finally give up all hope of ever tasting food again your heart will be sicker than sickness itself. But the papers will be full of you, and other excur- sions will be fitted out for your relief. If you never return there are many (about sixty million} who will say “Why weep? It was his own choosing.” In certain obscure towns and remote villages, how- ever, there are tender-hearted old people who will swallow the oft repeated statement that you went there in the cause of science. But they are rapidly dying out. Far be it from us to make light of human suffering. We only regret that such an expensive and painful form of suicide should be officially recognized and encouraged by the Government. Wn. H. —— is to have a bust in the new Eden Musée in Twenty-third street. It seems a strange place to have a bust; but W. H. V. knows best. May be he, having tried it at home, thinks he will now try it somewhere else. Who pays the score? A HicH old time—The sun. THE RADIATOR. A Stupy IN THE MODERN STYLE OF COLLOQUIAL FICTION. CENE, the chamber of Mr. and Mrs, Ellston in an apart- ment hotel. Time, three A.M. The silence of the night is unbroken save by the regular breathing of the sleepers, until suddenly from the steam-radiator bursts a sound like the dis- charge of a battery of forty-pound guns. Mrs. E. (springing up in bed): “Oh! eh? what is that ?” Her husband moves uneasily in his sleep, but does not reply. The noise of the sledge-hammer score of the Anvil Chorus rings out from the radiator. Mrs. E: ‘‘ George ! George! Something is going to happen! Do wake up, or we shall be murdered in our sleep!”’ Mr. E. (With mingled ferocity and amusement): “ There is small danger of anybody’s being murdered in his sleep, my dear, where you are. It’s only that confounded radiator ; it’s always making some sort of an infernal tumult. It can’t do any harm.” Mrs. E: ‘ But it will wake baby.” Mr. E: ‘Well, if it does, the nurse can get him to sleep again, I suppose.” From the room adjoining is heard a clattering din, as if all the kettles and pans in the house were being thrown violently across the floor. ‘ -LIFE: Mrs. E: ‘There! The nursery radiator has begun. I must go and get baby.” Mr. E: ‘‘Let baby alone. If the youngster will sleep, for heaven's sake let him. The steam-pipes make noise enough for this time’of night, one would think, without your taking the trouble to wake baby.” Mrs, E. (With volumes of reproach in her tone): ‘‘ Your own little baby! You never loved him as his mother does.” The disturbances now assume the likeness to a thoroughly inebriated drum corps practising upon sheet-iron air-tight stoves, Mr. E: “Of all unendurable rackets—” A sudden and sharp boom interrupts him. Mrs. Ellston screams, while her husband indulges in language which although somewhat inexcusably forcible, is yet to be regarded as not un- natural under the circumstances, Mrs. E: ‘‘ Oh, George, don’t swear. It always seems so much worse to swear in danger; like tempting Providence, and I know there ’s going to be an explosion!” Mr. E. (severely): “Don’t talk nonsense! The engineer has gone to sleep and left the drafts open, that’s all. Don’tbeso | absurd.” | There is another fusillade from the radiator, reinforced by the reverberations from the nursery, where a regiment of artillery seem to have begun target practice. | Mrs. E: ‘I will go and get my baby! I know—Oh, George, | just hear it crash! Do get up and put the screen in front of it; that may turn off the pieces so they won’t come this way.” Mr. E. (scornfully): ‘‘ Pieces of what? Noise?” Mrs. E: ‘* How can you make fun! If the engineer has gone to sleep, he’s sure to blow up the whole hotel. I’m going to get up and dress myself and take baby over to mother’s !” Mr. E, (With calm but cutting irony): ‘At three o’clock in the morning? Shall you walk or call a carriage ?” Mrs. E. (Beginning to sob in a dry and perfunctory fashion): **Oh, you are too cruel! You are perfectly heartless. I wonder you don’t take that dear little innocent baby and hold him be- tween you and the radiator for a shield.” Mr. E.: ‘‘ That might be a good scheme, my dear, only the little beggar would probably howl so that I haven't really the moral courage to wake him.” The indignant reply of Mrs. Ellston is lost in the confused sound of the brays of a drove of brazen donkeys which appear to be disporting themselves in the radiator. The noise of mighty rushing waters, the clanking of chains, the din of a political con- vention, the characteristic disturbances of a hundred factories and machine shops, with the deafening whirr of all the elevated railways in the universe follow in turn. Mrs. E. mother’s : I will go and get my baby, and I will go to and, what is more, we will never, never come back!” Mr. E.: “Oh, just as you please about going, my dear ; only you know that if you desert my bed and board, the law gives the boy to me.” Mrs. E.: ‘‘I don’t believe it’s any such thing ; and if it is, it is because men made the law. Women would n’t take a baby away from its mother.” Mr. E.: ‘‘Have what theories you choose, my dear, onl){ please let me get a few crumbs of sleep now the radiator has had the mercy to subside.” Mrs. E. : ‘‘ You are a brute, and I won't ever speak to you again!” comicbooks.com