14. Let us look into the future for the sequel
to perfect this romance, and around a cheerful hearth
we see again Geoffrey and Beatrice, who are paying
due homage to their tiny friend Leicester.
1. A sacrilegious son of Belial, who suffered
from bronchitis and diphtheria, and had taken much
morphine and quinine, having exhausted his finances,
in order to make good the deficit, resolved to ally
himself to a complaisant, lenient, docile, young woman
of the Caucasian race. Buying a calliope, a coral
necklace, an illustrated magazine, and a falcon from
Asia, he took a suite of rooms, whose acoustic properties
were excellent, and engaged a Malay as his coadjutor.
2. Being of an epicurean disposition, he threw
the culinary department of his hotel into confusion
by ordering for his dinner vermicelli soup, a bologna
sausage, anchovies, calf’s brains fried, and
half a gooseberry pie. For the resulting dyspepsia
he took acetic and tartaric acid, according to allopathy,
and when his aunt, a fair matron of six decades, called,
he was tyrannic and combative, and laughed like a
brigand until she was obliged to succumb to his contumacy.
3. Etiquette being thus annihilated, he became
amenable to tenderer passions. He sent a letter,
inviting his inamorata to a matinee, together with
an eighteen-carat gold ring. She revolted at the
idea of accompanying him, and sent a note full of
piquant raillery, which led her suitor to procure
a carbine and a sword, with some apparatus, and to
declare that he would not forge hymeneal chains upon
any one.
4. So proceeding to an isolated spot, without
comrades, he severed his jugular vein, and discharged
the carbine into his abdomen. When inquiry was
made, he was found dead, and the coroner sat on the
debris and did his exact duty, though it was no couch
of eider he occupied.
5. Had the misguided youth read Ovid less often,
and given precedence to Hemans and Ingelow, his fate
might have been different. True, he might have
hung on a greasy gallows like a highwayman, in squalor,
and been the sport of canines for aye; while now,
disarmed by death, he lies in a splendid mausoleum,
far from the wharves and haunts of men, and can’t
accent his antepenults, and afford the greatest discrepancies
extant in pronunciation.
1. Learned sages may reason, the
fluent may talk,
But they ne’er
can compute what we owe to the chalk.
From the embryo mind
of the infant of four,
To the graduate, wise
in collegiate lore;
From the old district
school-house to Harvard’s proud hall,
The chalk rules with
absolute sway over all.
2. Go, enter the school-room of primary
grade,
And see how conspicuous
the blackboard is made.
The teacher makes letters
and calls them by name,
And says to the children,
“Now all do the same;”
Mere infants you see,
scarcely able to walk,
But none are too feeble
to handle the chalk.
