Later:  While the coroner was summoning a jury, Mark Antony and other friends of the late Caesar got hold of the body, and lugged it off to the Forum, and at last accounts Antony and Brutus were making speeches over it and raising such a row among the people that, as we go to press, the chief of police is satisfied there is going to be a riot, and is taking measures accordingly.

THE WIDOW’S PROTEST

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 stooffin’ 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 scriptural Panoramist—­[Written about 1866.]

“There was a fellow traveling around in that country,” said Mr. Nickerson, “with a moral-religious show—­a sort of scriptural panorama —­and he hired a wooden-headed old slab to play the piano for him.  After the first night’s performance the showman says: 

“’My friend, you seem to know pretty much all the tunes there are, and you worry along first rate.  But then, didn’t you notice that sometimes last night the piece you happened to be playing was a little rough on the proprieties, so to speak—­didn’t seem to jibe with the general gait of the picture that was passing at the time, as it were—­was a little foreign to the subject, you know—­as if you didn’t either trump or follow suit, you understand?’