Should you wish to pervert my high moral notions in relation to railways,
please make it good for thirty days, as it may take me a week or so to
mortgage my property and get ready to go in good style. I will let you
know on what day I will be in New Orleans, so that you can come and see me
at that time. Should you have difficulty in obtaining an audience with me,
owing to the throng of crowned heads, just show this autograph letter to
the doorkeeper, and he will show you right in. Wipe your boots before
entering.
Yours truly,
Daniel Webster Briggs,
Editor of “The Squeal.”
It is my opinion that no railroad official, however disobliging, would
hesitate a moment about which way he would swing after reading an epistle
after this pattern. Few, indeed, are the men who would be impolitic enough
to incur the displeasure of such a paper as I have artfully represented
“The Squeal” to be.
Words About Washington.
The name of George Washington has always had about it a glamour that made
him appear more in the light of a god than a tall man with large feet and
a mouth made to fit an old-fashioned, full-dress pumpkin pie. I use the
word glamour, not so much because I know what glamour means, but because I
have never used it before, and I am getting a little tired of the short,
easy words I have been using so long.
George Washington's face has beamed out upon us for many years now, on
postage stamps and currency, in marble, and plaster, and bronze, in
photographs of original portraits, paintings, end stereoscopic views. We
have seen him on horseback and on foot, on the war-path and on skates,
cussing his troops for their shiftlessness, and then in the solitude of
the forest, with his snorting war-horse tied to a tree, engaged in prayer.
We have seen all these pictures of George, till we are led to believe that
he did not breathe our air or eat American groceries. But George
Washington was not perfect. I say this after a long and careful study of
his life, and I do not say it to detract the very smallest iota from the
proud history of the Father of his Country. I say it simply that the boys
of America who want to become George Washingtons will not feel so timid
about trying it.
When I say that George Washington, who now lies so calmly in the limekiln
at Mount Vernon, could reprimand and reproach his subordinates at times,
in a way to make the ground crack open and break up the ice in the
Delaware a week earlier than usual, I do not mention it in order to show
the boys of our day that profanity will make them resemble George
Washington. That was one of his weak points, and no doubt he was ashamed
of it, as he ought to have been. Some poets think that if they get drunk,
and stay drunk, they will resemble Edgar A. Poe and George D. Prentice.
There are lawyers who play poker year after year, and get regularly
skinned, because they have heard that some of the able lawyers of the past
century used to come home at night with poker chips in their pockets.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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