ARTEMUS WARD.

AND OUT OF PURGATORY.

ARTEMUS WARD’S LECTURES TO POOR, PERISHING HUMANITY.

LECTER I.

You’ll remember, relatives and nabors, how I crost the Atlantic Ocean and never agin set foot on my native soil.  I naterally thought my opportunities there, in the British Mooseum and with those Egyptian Carcusses dun up in rags, and remaining for the space of six days and six nights with a skeleton grinning at me and pointing its long skinless fingers in my face and looking in an awful licentious manner, showing its pivoted legs—­I say I naterally thought such an unheard-of experience would have prepared me for “the awful change” that follered.  But it didn’t.

One nite, cummin’ hum from the Mooseum, where I had been instructin’ and elevatin’ several thousand pussons, male and female, I innocently swallered a fog—­swallered it hull.  I’d bin swallerin on ’em ever since I’d bin in England, but that night I took in a bigger one than ever, and it made me sick.

I sent for the physicians that received the patronage of the noble lords and dooks and they made me sicker; and finally for the physicain “to her most gracious majisty the Queen of Great Britain,”—­but their aristocratic attention to me was of no use.  As I lie tossing on what is known as “the bed of pain,” I seed a big light coming through the dark towards me.  Behind that light appeared a grim skeleton, just like the pictur of Death in the Alminack, walkin’ on tiptoe toward me; and quicker than a wink he put out his long bony hand and touched me—­firstly, in the pit of the stomach, so I couldn’t holler; nextly, he pressed his finger tips on my eye-balls, and they sunk right back into their sockets.

I tried to shake him off, and to yell, but I couldn’t!  Then I knew I was “dun fur.”  Next came what a printer’s devil would call a ——­ blank.

I was skeered out of my seven senses, and when I cum to and tried to recolect myself, I was like the old woman in the song who fell asleep, and

“By came a pedlar and his name was Stout
  And he cut her petticoats all round about;
He cut her petticoats up to her knees,
  Which made the old woman begin for to freeze.”

I was in the same predicament, for I was now only in my bare bones, and knew I was a rolecking old skeleton.

Wall, it gin me an awful shock to find myself like a skull and cross-bones on a tombstone, sittin’ on my own coffin!

Presently I was grappled by a big worm with a hundred legs.  He then sent for his feller worms, and they licked me from skull to toe-jint.  After I had stood the lickin’ as long as I could (they tickled so), I concluded to run away, so I started on a full gallop, and arter I had run awhile, where should I fetch up but in the vicinity of Vic’s Palace.  I know’d by pussonal experience suthin’ of the feelin’ manner with which