Puck — July 11, 1877 — page 10: what you’re looking at

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

A PENITENT PROPOSAL. ca Ie ICKLE heart, fickle love, where dost thou stray, gf, Is there no voice that can bid thée obey, * Constantly, truly—no charm that can stay ‘Thy passionate, unrestrained flight? Ah, sweetest sweet of sweets, Sad from its own defeats, See how thy heart it meets I do not prize thee, sweet, one-half so well, For joys that in thy breast passionless dwell, As for that gift of thine, charm to repel ‘Thoughts of the loves I have lost, By thy pure nature stayed, All idle love is laid By its own wiles betrayed, Banished by thy sweet aid, Teaching love's cost. ‘Truer heart, dearer heart, purer than all, In thine own inmost soul my love install, Let but one gracious word graciously fall, On my life, love-beguiled, lone, Say that though fickle, free— Love can be chained by thee, E’en though in sportive glee Passion have made his plea Elsewhere; oh, say thou'lt be— Darling, mine own? Sypxgy Rosesven. THE FATE OF THE LAST MAN. X% ¥ %CCORDING to scientific speculations a | A< horrible death awaits the last man. “<The “last man” alluded to is nota shoemaker, though a horrible death may be in | store for some of them, too. The “last” man who proinises to have your hoots finished on Saturday night without fail, and you call for them only to learn that he hasn’t put a “last” in them, surely deserves a horrible death. The last man to whom the scientists refer is the last of the human family to inherit this earth; and, if they don’t reason erroneously, either one of the following deaths will overtake him 1. The waters will gradually cover the earth, and the last man will be starved or drowned. ‘The last man should charter a vessel and lay in a stock of provisions to last him at least | seventy years. By so doing he may live long | enough te die a natural death, and thu: escape | the fate scientists have prepared for him. 2. By the accumulation of ice at the North Pole, and melting away at the South Pole, the earth’s gravity will suddenly change, aad the last man will be drowned by a rush of waters. By this time Puck will be issued daily, and will publish an extra edition, giving a full and reliable account of the catastrophe, furnished by the last man himself, up to the hour of going to press, accompanied with illustrations taken on the spot. Now is the time to subscribe. 3. The earth will collide with a comet, and the last man, if not suffecated, will be blown up. Prof. Parkhurst will furnish Puck with a full | description and diagnosis of the celestial visitor a few days in advance of the collision, and all who may be so fortunate as to be readers of this paper will have ample time to seck a place of safety, and thus escape the impending danger. Single copies ten cents. 4. The planets are losing their velocity, and the earth, obeying the law of gravitation, will get closer and closer | and quality. When love from love retreats, | Filled with delight. | | lock and study up aerostation. to the sun. Hence the last man will be sunstruck. Forewarned is forearmed, and if the last man will take our advice he will wear a cabbage-leaf in his hat and sign the Murphy pledge, both of which are said to be excellent preventives of coup de soleil. §. The amount of water on the earth is slowly dimi- nishing. and at the same time the air is losing in quantity inally the earth will be an arid waste, and the last man will be suffocated. In view of this drying-up of the waters, servant girls, particularly those in Philadelphia, should be warned right away against their wanton waste of the aqueous fluid in washing pavements and splashing the pantaloons of store-clerks. If this sidewalk-drenching nui- sance was abolished, much water and profanity would be saved, and the last man would escape that death, anyhow. 6. Other suns have disappeared, and ours must, sooner later, blaze up and fizzle out, too and the last man will be burned to death, It is difficult to provide against such a catas- trophe—though the last man might emigrate ; to the Arctic regions, where for half the year there is no sun to blaze up and disappear. 7. The sun’s fire will gradually burn out, and the last man will be frozen to death, Luckily, coal was never much cheaper than at present, and now is a good time for the last man to lay in a sufficient stock to tide him over all the years of his natural life. With a cellar | full of ‘coal, and a blazing fire in the parlor- grate, the last man is not likely to freeze to death, sun or no sun. 8, A gradual cooling’of the earth will produce enor: mous fissures; the earth's surface will become extremely unstable, until the remnant of humanity will take refuge in caves, in one of which subterranean retreats the last man will be crushed to death. ‘he last man should paste this 8th theory in his hat, and, when the earth begins to cool, | stick to his gloomy range, and let caves alone. gth and last. The earth will at last separate into small fragments, leaving the people without any foothold, and the last man will have a fatal fall through space. It is a mighty mean scientist who won't give the last man a foothold; and that ill-starred in- dividual would do well to take time by the fore- A man in a balloon wouldn’t wanta foothold on terra firma, and sailing through space is not so unhealthy as falling through space. Of all the theories produced by these several scientists, however, we are strongly inclined to favor the first. The last man will starve to death, When he discovers that all the news- paper editors in the country are dead, he will purchase a double-cylinder press, go west and start an eight-page morning paper. After this, his starvation is only a question of time—and a very short time at that. Hundreds of editors to-day, all over the country, are starving to death, and they are not the Last Man, either. Editors may write powerful leaders on finance, commencing, “Pay up! Pay up! We want | money;” but their readers seem to regard that sort of literature with contempt; and probably a subscriber who is five years in arrears, will send the editor a note worded as follows: “ Pleas Don't stop my Paper. ‘Times is awful hard; but as soon as I Sell one of my Seven Dogs for 20 dollars, I'll square up.” Seriously, though, it is going to be very un- healthy for the Last Man, and if we were that individual, we should be tempted to commit suicide, and let the honor fall on other shoul- ders. But suppose the last man should be a woman! By what process of reasoning do the scientists reach the conclusion that the last person on this carth will be a man? According to the last census, woman is largely in the majority in this and other countries, and the probabilities are that the Last Man will be a woman. And jicture to yourself the awful situation of that lonely woman! No neighbors to run down! No dry-goods stores to visit! No young woman living across the way on whose account she is induced to sit up until midnight to ascertain what hour her young man leaves! No induce- ment to buy the handsomest and costliest bon- net in town, to create a demon of jealousy in the breasts of those Brown girls! No— But the picture is too terrible; let us draw a veil right here. B. Dapp. LITTLE TOMMY’S TALKS. VI. I pon't like S’toga. I found out vat the springs are. They ain’t fings to \\ jump on and turn som- ersteps on a mattrass. They’re water. Rotten water. When eggs taste the way springs do, my mama tells the cook to send a scold to the grocery-man. She says the hens—hens are the way eggs are made—the hens have been setting on ’em. I guess somebody must have been setting on the springs at S’toga. They taste bad. The springs are kept in a little house wiv a roof and no sides. A boy fishes for ’em wiv a big stick wiv glasses on it. "The first day I came up here I drank some spring, and pretty soon I fought there wasn’t going to be any more little Tommy left. There'are over fings besides springs at S’toga. There's a big boo'ful house where my big brover Jim used to go every night. He doesn’t go there any more now. One night when he wasn’t looking I went in along wiv him. Nobody saw me till I got inside. Then they put me out. But my big brover Jim came along too—he came right out wiv me. And he wasn’t nasty a bit. nice. z He took me wound to hear the music, and he took me to the place where ice-cream grows; and he gave me lots of ice-cream; and he let me ’moke a little bit of his cigar. I didn’t want to ’moke much. My big brover Jim’s cigars aren't like my papa’s pipe. ‘They're little, and all squeezed up in paper like the fings my sister Sylvia puts her hair in at night. ‘Then my big brover Jim gave me lemonade that night, and candy, and all sorts of fings, and took me to hear the music. ‘And when he went home he said I was a good little boy, and not to tell mama anything about how I went to the big boo’ful house, or she might ‘pank me. Anyway my big brover Jim said I mustn’t say anyfing about the big green tables wiv cards and fings that rolled round on them in the big house, or else she'd 'pank me awful. 'N' I didn’t mean to, eiver. But I was sick that night. going to hear the music. I had awful dreams and nightmares, and fings, and I guessed I talked a lot about the boo’ ful house. But my mama didn’t ‘pank me. Guess she fought I was too sick to be 'panked. P'raps she ‘panked my big brover Jim for me. "Cause now he’s awful cross, and he won’t go to the big boo'ful house any more, and he doesn’t take me wound and give me fings. I fink it’s real mean of my big brover Jim. He was ever so I suppose it was