.... Henry Wolfe, of Kentucky, aged one hundred and eight years, who
had never been sick in his life, lay down one fine day and sawed his
neck asunder with a razor. Henry did not believe in self-slaughter; he
despised it. It was Henry’s opinion that as God had placed us here we
should stay until it was His pleasure to remove us. That is also our
opinion, and the opinion of all other good Christians who would like to
die but are afraid to do it. It will be observed that Henry could not
claim originality of opinion.
But there is a point beyond which hope deferred maketh the heart sick,
and Henry had passed that point. He waited patiently till he was naked
of scalp and deaf of ear. He endured without repining the bent back,
the sightless eyes, and the creaking joints incident to over-maturity.
But when he saw a man perish of senility, who in infancy had called him
“Old Hank,” Mr. Wolfe thought patience had ceased to be commendable,
and he abandoned his post of duty without being regularly relieved.
It is to be hoped he will be hotly punished for it.
.... One day an obscure and unimportant person pitched himself among
the rolling porpoises, from a ferry-boat, and an officious busy-body,
not at once clearly apprehending that the matter was none of his
immediate business, hied him down to the engineer and commanded that
official to “back her, hard!” As it is customary upon the high seas for
such orders to emanate from the officer in command, that particular
boat kept forging ahead, and the unimportant old person carried out his
original design—that is, he went to the bottom like an iron wedge.
Rises the press in its wrath and prates about a Grand Jury! Shrieks an
intelligent public, in chorus, at the heartless engineer!
Meantime the pretty fish are running away with choice bits of God’s
image at the bottom of the bay; the cunning crab makes merry with a
dead man’s eye, the nipping shrimp sweetens himself for the table upon
the clean juices of a succulent corpse. Below all is peace and fat
feasting; above rolls the sounding ocean of eternal Bosh!
.... There is war! The woman suffrage folk go up against one another,
because that a portion of them cleave to the error that the Bible is a
collection of fables. These will probably divest themselves of this
belief about the time that Mr. Satan stands over them with a
toasting-fork, points significantly to a glowing gridiron, and says to
each suffrager:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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