enforce a truth–escapes notice in the superior glare of something in the
body of the burlesque itself. And very often this “moral” is tagged on
at the bottom, and the reader, not knowing that it is the key of the
whole thing and the only important paragraph in the article, tranquilly
turns up his nose at it and leaves it unread. One can deliver a satire
with telling force through the insidious medium of a travesty, if he is
careful not to overwhelm the satire with the extraneous interest of the
travesty, and so bury it from the reader’s sight and leave him a joked
and defrauded victim, when the honest intent was to add to either his
knowledge or his wisdom. I have had a deal of experience in burlesques
and their unfortunate aptness to deceive the public, and this is why I
tried hard to make that agricultural one so broad and so perfectly
palpable that even a one-eyed potato could see it; and yet, as I speak
the solemn truth, it fooled one of the ablest agricultural editors in
America!
DAN MURPHY
One of the saddest things that ever came under my notice (said the
banker’s clerk) was there in Corning, during the war. Dan Murphy
enlisted as a private, and fought very bravely. The boys all liked him,
and when a wound by and by weakened him down till carrying a musket was
too heavy work for him, they clubbed together and fixed him up as a
sutler. He made money then, and sent it always to his wife to bank for
him. She was a washer and ironer, and knew enough by hard experience to
keep money when she got it. She didn’t waste a penny. On the contrary,
she began to get miserly as her bank account grew. She grieved to part
with a cent, poor creature, for twice in her hard-working life she had
known what it was to be hungry, cold, friendless, sick, and without a
dollar in the world, and she had a haunting dread of suffering so again.
Well, at last Dan died; and the boys, in testimony of their esteem and
respect for him, telegraphed to Mrs. Murphy to know if she would like to
have him embalmed and sent home, when you know the usual custom was to
dump a poor devil like him into a shallow hole, and then inform his
friends what had become of him. Mrs. Murphy jumped to the conclusion
that it would only cost two or three dollars to embalm her dead husband,
and so she telegraphed “Yes.” It was at the “wake” that the bill for
embalming arrived and was presented to the widow. She uttered a wild,
sad wail, that pierced every heart, and said: “Sivinty-foive dollars for
stoofhn’ Dan, blister their sowls! Did thim divils suppose I was goin’
to stairt a Museim, that I’d be dalin’ in such expinsive curiassities!”
The banker’s clerk said there was not a dry eye in the house.
THE “TOURNAMENT” IN A. D. 1870
Lately there appeared an item to this effect, and the same went the
customary universal round of the press:
A telegraph station has just been established upon the traditional
site of the Garden of Eden.
As a companion to that, nothing fits so aptly and so perfectly as this:
Brooklyn has revived the knightly tournament of the Middle Ages.
It is hard to tell which is the most startling, the idea of that highest
achievement of human genius and intelligence, the telegraph, prating away
about the practical concerns of the world’s daily life in the heart and
home of ancient indolence, ignorance, and savagery, or the idea of that
happiest expression of the brag, vanity, and mock-heroics of our
ancestors, the “tournament,” coming out of its grave to flaunt its tinsel
trumpery and perform its “chivalrous” absurdities in the high noon of the
nineteenth century, and under the patronage of a great, broad-awake city
and an advanced civilisation.
A “tournament” in Lynchburg is a thing easily within the comprehension of
the average mind; but no commonly gifted person can conceive of such a
spectacle in Brooklyn without straining his powers. Brooklyn is part and