Out of the Hurly-Burly; Or, Life in an Odd Corner — John Shaqi
Out of the Hurly-Burly; Or, Life in an Odd CornerClark, Charles Heber
General
Out of the Hurly-Burly; Or, Life in an Odd Corner
Clark, Charles Heber
American fiction -- 19th century; Humorous stories
Your city editor often displays a certain amount of vehemence at such
times, but his wildest frenzy is calmness, is absolute slumberous repose
itself, when compared with the frantic enthusiasm manifested by Colonel
Bangs. The latter succeeds in getting up as much fury over a candidate
for constable as a city editor does over an aspirant for the Presidency.
He will turn out column after column of double-leaded type, in which he
will demonstrate with a marvelous profusion of adjectives that if you
should roll all the prophets, saints and martyrs into one, you would
have a much smaller amount of virtue than can be found in that one
humble man who wants to be constable. He will prove to you that unless
that particular person is elected, the entire fabric of American
institutions will totter to its base and become a bewildering and
hopeless ruin, while the merciless despots who grind enslaved millions
beneath their iron heels will greet the hideous and irreclaimable chaos
with fiendish laughter, and amid the remnants of a once proud republic
they will erect bastiles in which they will forge chains to fetter the
wrists of dismayed and heart-broken patriots. He will ask you to take
your choice between electing that man constable and witnessing the
annihilation of the proud work for which the Revolutionary patriots bled
and died.
The man who runs against the candidate of the _Argus_ will be proved to
be a moral and intellectual wreck, and it will be shown that all the
vices which have corrupted the race since the fall of man are
concentrated in that one individual. The day after election, if his man
wins, Colonel Bangs will decorate his paper with a whole array of
roosters and a menagerie of 'coons, and inform a breathless world that
the nation is once more saved. If he loses, he will omit any reference
to the frightful prophecies uttered during the campaign, keep his
roosters in the closet, and mildly assert that the opposition man is not
so bad, after all, and that the right party must triumph next time for
certain. Then Colonel Bangs will keep his enthusiasm cool for a year,
and during that period will rest his overwrought brain, while he edits
his paper with a pair of predatory shears and a dishonest paste-pot.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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