me--askin', all together, who'd bin a stabbin' me? what wur the marter? and who'd hit me? I opened my eyes to tell 'em I'd fell from the third story, and broke every bone in my body, when, on lookin' up, thar wur the old Frenchman and his darter, grinnin' out of the top winder, about _ten feet_ above me! The fact wur, boys, I'd dropped out on the _hill side_ of the house, and jumped down jest _four feet_ from whar my toes reached,--I had lit on the edge of a water pail, and it flowed about me when I fell over! Arter old Fecho told them the joke, they pretty nigh busted a larfin' at me. I crawled off, arter firin' a volly at old Mounseer, of the hardest kind of cusses, and from that day to this I han't gone a courtin' in French Hollow! THE SECOND ADVENT! TOM BANGALL, THE ENGINEER, AND MILLERISM. |About the period fixed upon by Father Miller, for the general blowing up of the world, some of the engineers upon our western waters, who had been used to blowing up its inhabitants, became a little frightened at the prospect of having to encounter, in another world, the victims of steamboat disaster. Among these was Tom Bangall, the engineer of the Arkansas Thunder. Tom was a rearing, tearing, _bar_ state scrouger--could chaw up any single specimen of the human race--any quantity of tobacco, and drink steam without flinching!--A collapsed flue had blown him once somewhere in the altitude of an Alpine height, but dropped him unharmed into the Arkansas, and he used to swear that after the steam tried to jerk him apart and found it couldn't do it, why, it just dropped the subject, as the stump speakers say, by dropping him into the “drink”--he therefore incontinently set water, hot or cold, at defiance. Tom was, withal, a generous, open-hearted, whole-souled fellow, and his cheering words to the emigrants on the boiler deck, and many a kind act to a suffering passenger, proved that beneath his rough exterior he had a heart open to gentle influences. As a further proof of this, Tom had a wife, a good wife, too, and what's more he tenderly loved her; but she in vain tried to cure him of drinking and swearing. Tom swore that he would swear, that a steamboat wouldn't work without some swearing, and if a fellar didn't drink he'd bust, and, therefore, it was necessary to take a bust now and then to keep out of danger. “There is no use,” he would say, “in blowing off steam from your 'scape-pipe agin it, for it has to be _did!_” One day on Tom's return home, he found Mrs. Mary Bangall weeping bitterly, and Tom became, instantly, correspondingly distressed. “Why, Polly,” inquired he, “what's the matter, gal?--what's hurt you?--is anythin' broke loose that can't be mended?--what the thunder makes you take on so?--Come, out with the cause, or I shall git a blubberin' too.”