American wit and humor; Caricatures and cartoons -- United States; United States -- History -- Humor
He was proud and arrogant to a degree. He forbade legislation, and
stopped his paper. New York was at this time annexed to the New England
Colony, and began keeping the Sabbath so vigorously that the angels had
great difficulty in getting at it.
[Illustration: DUKE OF YORK.]
Nicholson, who was the lieutenant tool of iniquity for Andros, fled with
him when democracy got too hot for them. Captain Leisler, supported by
Steve Brodie and everything south of the Harlem, but bitterly opposed by
the aristocracy, who were distinguished by their ability to use new
goods in making their children's clothes, whereas the democracy had to
make vests for the boys from the cast-off trousers of their fathers,
governed the province until Governor Sloughter arrived.
Sloughter was another imported Smearkase in official life, and arrested
Leisler at the request of an aristocrat who drove a pair of bang-tail
horses up and down Nassau Street on pleasant afternoons and was
afterwards collector of the port. Having arrested Leisler for treason,
the governor was a little timid about executing him, for he had never
really killed a man in his life, and he hated the sight of blood; so
Leisler's enemies got the governor to take dinner with them, and mixed
his rum, so that when he got ready to speak, his remarks were somewhat
heterogeneous, and before he went home he had signed a warrant for
Leisler's immediate execution.
[Illustration: GOVERNOR SLOUGHTER'S PAINFUL AWAKENING.]
When he awoke in the morning at his beautiful home on Whitehall Street,
the sun was gayly glinting the choppy waves of Buttermilk Channel, and
by his watch, which had run down, he saw that it was one o'clock, but
whether it was one o'clock A.M. or P.M. he did not know, nor whether it
was next Saturday or Tuesday before last. Oh, how he must have felt!
His room was dark, the gas having gone out to get better air. He
attempted to rise, but a chill, a throb, a groan, and back he lay
hastily on the bed just as it was on the point of escaping him. Suddenly
a thought came to him. It was not a great thought, but it was such a
thought as comes to those who have been thoughtless. He called for a
blackamoor slave from abroad who did chores for him, and ordered a
bottle of cooking brandy, then some club soda he had brought from London
with him. Next he drank a celery-glass of it, and after that he felt
better. He then drank another.
"Keep out of the way of this bed, Julius," he said. "It is coming around
that way again. Step to one side, Julius, please, and let the bed walk
around and stretch its legs. I never saw a bed spread itself so," he
continued, seeming to enjoy his own Lancashire humor. "All night I
seemed to feel a great pain creeping over me, Julius," he said,
hesitatingly, again filling his celery-glass, "but I see now that it was
a counterpane."
Eighty years after that, Sloughter was a corpse.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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