ilDDY (SUSHER PAPERS 
 
 H.FISKE 
 

 

 
 
 mm-. 
 
THE 
 
 GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS 
 
 BY 
 
 . 
 MARY H. FISKE 
 
 EDITED BY HARRISON GREY FISKE 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THE NEW YORK DRAMATIC MIRROR 
 
 145 FIFTH AVENUE 
 
 1889 
 
FISKE 
 
 Press of J.J. Little & Co., 
 Astor Place, New York. 
 
"Mary Fiske was like herself. She patterned after 
 none. She was a genius, and put her soul into everything 
 she did and wrote. She cared nothing for roads, nothing 
 for beaten paths, nothing for the footsteps of others. She 
 went across the fields, and through the woods, and by the 
 winding streams, and down the vales, or over crags, wher- 
 ever fancy led. She wrote lines that leaped with laughter, 
 and words that were wet with tears. She gave us quaint 
 thoughts and sayings filled with the 'pert and nimble spirit 
 of mirth.' Her pages were flecked with sunshine and 
 shadow, and in every word were the pulse and breath of 
 life. Within her brain was the divine fire called genius, 
 and in her heart the i touch of nature that makes the whole 
 world kin.' She wrote as a stream runs, that winds and 
 babbles through the shadowy fields, that falls in foam of 
 flight and haste, and, laughing, joins the sea." ROBERT 
 G. INGERSOLL. 
 
 M10215Q 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 THE products of Mary Fiske's fertile brain found their 
 way into the world through the medium of the press. 
 The preservation in permanent form of at least a portion 
 of her writings is no more than a deserved tribute to her 
 genius and her memory. 
 
 The sketches presented in this book have been selected 
 from the four hundred articles contributed to the col- 
 umns of the Dramatic Mirror by Mrs. Fiske during the 
 eight years that she was a member of its staff. The 
 sole difficulty encountered by the Editor in making this 
 compilation lay in the perplexities of choosing from so 
 large and rich' a store of material. The endeavor has 
 been to include, within the space available, that which 
 seemed most characteristic and representative of the 
 gifted journalist's thought and style. 
 
 As " The Giddy Gusher," Mrs. Fiske was known and 
 loved by thousands not only of the members of the the- 
 atrical profession whom she especially addressed, and to 
 whose chivalrous championship her generous pen was 
 constantly devoted, but also a multitude that sought her 
 articles with a zest born of wholesome admiration for the 
 striking' originality and amazing versatility of the writer. 
 Her strong personality unmistakably impressed itself on 
 every line she wrote, and this brought her into a familiar 
 and delightful intimacy with her readers. 
 
 As a humorist, Mary Fiske was irresistible. Her pathos 
 touched a universal chord of human sympathy. Her 
 
VI INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 eloquence, wit, and imaginative variety were inexhausti- 
 ble. She cherished an honest hatred for all forms of 
 sham. The conventional was contemptible. to her free, 
 unfettered nature. Her peculiar genius for expression 
 defied the foot-rule of literary criticism. It was sui 
 generis. She wrote in her own way, and it was a way 
 that appealed to heart and fancy. 
 
 H. G. F. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 A TRIBUTE OF SONG i 
 
 AGRICULTURAL EXPERIENCES 6 
 
 THE HOSPITAL OVER THE WAY 10 
 
 A SUICIDE 14 
 
 AN ANATOMICAL DISCOVERY 18 
 
 SUNDRY GRAVE SUBJECTS 21 
 
 BOTTLED EXTRACT OF SOUL 26 
 
 THEATRICAL FARMERS AND SAILORS 33 
 
 THE FORTUNE TELLERS. 40 
 
 UNFORGOTTEN " PAULINES " 47 
 
 SOME PUBLIC NUISANCES 52 
 
 A PRISON INCIDENT 56 
 
 YE CHEWERS OF GUM 61 
 
 THE SAD STORY OF CHARLOTTE ELIZABETH 64 
 
 MRS. PRATT'S EQUESTRIAN EXPLOIT 67 
 
 A RELIGIOUS WATERING-PLACE 69 
 
 DELIGHTS OF THE COUNTRY 71 
 
 POPULAR SUPERSTITIONS 76 
 
 SOME AWFUL MOTHERS 82 
 
 " BABY " LITERATURE 87 
 
 THE WATCHMAN'S GHOST 91 
 
 THE DRUG CRAZE 95 
 
 THE STORY TOLD BY THE CACTUS 101 
 
 OUIDA 107 
 
 LIFE IN A FLAT 112 
 
 PREVALENT PERFUMES 117 
 
Vlll CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 DOWN EAST. 122 
 
 AT THE INDUSTRIAL EXHIBITION 125 
 
 A REAL HOME FOR THE AGED 131 
 
 THE PLAN OF THE BOOMERANG 136 
 
 A STUDY OF BALD HEADS 140 
 
 THE GREEN PAPER Box 146 
 
 ASA FARWELL'S CHERRY '. 150 
 
 THE INEQUALITY OF THE SEXES 153 
 
 A RAILWAY ACQUAINTANCE 158 
 
 BLESSED ARE THE HARD OF HEART 163 
 
 THE BABY 166 
 
 ABOUT INFANTS' NURSES 169 
 
 DREAMS 175 
 
 DECORATIVE ART 181 
 
 THE SERGEANT'S STORY 184 
 
 FIRST LOVE igo 
 
 ABOUT DOGS 195 
 
 THE BEST TIME TO DIE 203 
 
 A SPECIMEN BOARDING-HOUSE 208 
 
 OUR PROFESSORS OF DRAMATIC ART 212 
 
 THE HORRORS OF MOVING 219 
 
 A RECOLLECTION OF CHILDHOOD 222 
 
 AN INGERSOLL LECTURE 224 
 
 FRAGMENTS 227 
 
 " TIGER LILY'S" RACE 234 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 A TRIBUTE OF SONG. 
 
 THERE is no place on earth where man's utter help- 
 lessness comes out so strongly, where the ceremonies in 
 human use fall so powerless before the majesty of the 
 occasion, as at a funeral. It need not be that one's heart 
 shall be interested. The obsequies of a stranger, con- 
 ducted with all the pomp and vanity of church and state, 
 with the melancholy rolling drum of the military funeral, 
 or the gorgeousness of the Masonic regalia apron all 
 are alike inadequate and unavailing. 
 
 But once in my life have I witnessed a ceremony that 
 was as grand and impressive as the silent, awful occasion 
 of it. 
 
 I will tell you of a funeral which lingers in my memory 
 as the grandest, most solemn and befitting ceremony that 
 was ever given to the dead. 
 
 It was many years ago that a poor, widowed woman, 
 leading a hard life of unending labor, was called to part 
 with the one thing dear to her her only child. Mother 
 and daughter had toiled together for fifteen years, and 
 the only bit of sunshine falling into their dark lives was 
 that shed by their loving companionship. But the girl 
 had been always sickly. Under the heart-broken mother's 
 eyes she faded and wasted away with consumption, and 
 
 i 
 
2 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 at last the day came when the wan face failed to answer 
 witfi its ''ghastly smile the anxious, tear-blinded eyes of 
 the 'mother. r : 
 
 The po6f young c'reatpre was dead. For many months 
 the pir ftad' been ''supported by the elder woman's sew- 
 ing, and it was in the character of employer I had 
 become acquainted with Mrs. Cramp and her story. By 
 an occasional visit to the awful heights of an East-side 
 tenement where they lived, by a few books and with 
 some comforting words, I had won the love of the dying 
 girl. Her grateful thoughts turned in her last hours to 
 the small number of friends she possessed, and she 
 besought her mother to notify me of the day of her 
 funeral and ask me to attend. 
 
 That summons reached me upon one of the wildest 
 days preceding Christmas. A sleet that was not rain, 
 and a rain that was not snow, came pelting from all 
 points of the compass. A wind that wailed in the chim- 
 ney and howled in the street told how truly dreadful for 
 out-door purposes was the weather of the day. I piled 
 the glowing grates ; I drew closer the curtains and shut 
 out the gloom of the December afternoon ; I turned on 
 the gas and sat down devoutly thankful that I had cut 
 all connection with the wicked weather when an instal- 
 ment of it burst in on me in the shape of Parepa Rosa. 
 She was Euphrosyne Parepa at that time, and the opera- 
 tic idol of the city. Muffed with tippets flecked with 
 snow glowing with the short encounter she had had 
 with the elements rushing up the steps from her car- 
 riage, she threw herself into an easy chair and proclaimed 
 the horrors of the outer world to be beyond description. 
 
 And even as we congratulated ourselves on the pros- 
 pect of a delightful day together, there came the sum- 
 mons for me to go to the humble funeral of the poor 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 3 
 
 sewing-woman's daughter. I turned the little tear- 
 blotted note over and groaned. 
 
 " This is terrible," said I ; " it's just the one errand 
 that could take me out to-day ; but I must go." And 
 then I told Parepa the circumstances and speculated on 
 the length of time I should be gone, and suggested 
 means of amusement in my absence. 
 
 " But I shall go with you," said the great, good-hearted 
 creature. 
 
 " Your throat, and old Bateman, and your concert to- 
 night ! " I pleaded. 
 
 " If I get another ' froggy ' note in my voice it won't 
 matter much ; I'm hoarse as a raven now," she returned. 
 
 So she re-wound her throat with the long white com- 
 forter, pulled on her worsted gloves, and off in the storm 
 we went together. We climbed flight after flight of nar- 
 row, dark stairs to the top floor, where the widow dwelt 
 in a miserable little room not more than a dozen feet 
 square. The canvas-back hearse peculiar to the twenty- 
 five-dollar funeral stood in the street below, and the 
 awful cherry-stained box with its ruffle of glazed white 
 muslin stood on uncovered trestles in the centre of the 
 room above. 
 
 There was the mother, speechless in her grief, beside 
 that box a group of hard-working, kindly-hearted neigh- 
 bors sitting about. It was useless to say the poor woman 
 was prepared for the inevitable end it was cold com- 
 fort to speak to her of the daughter's release from pain 
 and suffering. The bereft creature in her utter loneli- 
 ness was thinking of herself and the awful future of the 
 approaching moment when that box and its precious bur- 
 den would be taken away and leave her wholly alone. So, 
 therefore, with a sympathizing grasp of the poor worn, 
 bony hand, we sat silently down to "-attend the funeral." 
 
4 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 The undertaker's man, with a screw-driver in his hand, 
 jumped about in the passage to keep warm. The creaky 
 boots of the minister belonging to the twenty-five-dollar 
 funeral were heard on the stairs. There was a catarrhal 
 conversation held outside between them, as to the enor- 
 mity of the weather, and (probably) the bad taste of the 
 deceased in selecting such a time to die was discussed. 
 Then the minister came in with a pious sniff, and stood 
 revealed, a regular Stiggins as to get-up a dry, self- 
 sufficient man, icier than the day, and colder than the 
 storm. 
 
 He deposited his hat and black gloves and wet 
 umbrella on the poor little bed in the corner ; he slapped 
 his hands vigorously together ; he took himself in well- 
 merited fashion by the ears and pulled them into glow- 
 ing sensation, and after thawing out for a moment, 
 plunged into business. 
 
 He rattled merrily through some selected sentences 
 from the Bible. He gave us a prayer that sounded like 
 peas in a dried bladder, and he came to "Amen " with a 
 jerk that brought me up like a patent snaffle. He pulled 
 on his old gloves and grabbed his rusty hat, and with his 
 umbrella dribbling inky tears over the well-scrubbed 
 floor, he offered a set form of condolence to the broken- 
 hearted mother. He told her of her sin in rebelling 
 against the decrees of Providence. He assured her that 
 nothing could bring the dead back. He inveighed 
 against the folly of the world in general and this poor 
 woman in particular ; and then he made a horrid blun- 
 der, and showed he didn't know even the sex of the dead, 
 by saying : " He cannot come to you, but you must go to 
 him." 
 
 This was a settler for Parepa and myself. We looked 
 at the departing minister in blank astonishment. 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 5 
 
 The door swung wide ; we saw the screw-driver wav- 
 ing in the air as the undertaker's man held converse with 
 the clergyman. A hush fell on everybody gathered in 
 the little room. Not one word had been uttered of con- 
 solation, of solemn import, or befitting the occasion. It 
 was the emptiest, hollowest, most unsatisfactory moment 
 I ever remember. 
 
 Then Parepa rose, her cloak falling about her noble 
 figure like mourning drapery. She stood beside that 
 miserable cherrywood box. She looked a moment on the 
 pinched, wasted, ashy face upturned toward her from 
 within it. She laid her soft white hand on the discolored 
 forehead of the dead girl, and she lifted up that match- 
 less voice in the beautiful melody : 
 
 ' ' Angels ever bright and fair, 
 Take, O take her to your care." 
 
 The screw-driver paused in describing an airy circle ; 
 the wet umbrella stood pointing down the stairs ; the two 
 men with astonished faces were foremost in a crowd that 
 instantly filled the passages. The noble voice swelled 
 toward Heaven, and if ever the choirs of Paradise paused 
 to listen to Earth's music, it was when Parepa sang so 
 gloriously beside that poor dead girl. 
 
 No words can describe its effect on those gathered 
 there. The sad mourner sank on her knees, and with 
 clasped hands and streaming eyes the little band stood 
 reverently about her. 
 
 No queen ever went to her grave accompanied by a 
 grander ceremony. To this day, Parepa's glorious trib- 
 ute of song rings with solemn melody in my memory, as 
 the' only real, impressive funeral service I ever heard. 
 
AGRICULTURAL EXPERIENCES. 
 
 THERE is no sort of doubt existing in that thinking- 
 machine of mine that Heaven and Destiny intended we 
 should scratch round like so many hens and get our living 
 off and out of the earth. It's fun from first to last, from 
 sowing to harvest. Having lately become a farmer, I 
 speak by the schedule on which true happiness is run to 
 the best of my information and belief. It was quite the 
 fashion a few years ago to ridicule Horace Greeley as an 
 agriculturist, and some of the papers are at present 
 knocking out a good deal of fun from the exploits of 
 Hayes as a poulterer. 
 
 Make no mistake and don't hope to laugh at your 
 bucolic Gusher. She has been a success from the hour 
 she broke ground in March and began to plant things. 
 She didn't put out egg-plants for spring chickens, nor 
 plant horse-chestnuts with a wild idea of seeing chestnut 
 horses coming up like cabbages ; but she put in a peck 
 of tomato seeds in March and they froze or rotted in the 
 ground and never showed up in May one single seed. 
 But one day, travelling through a down-town street, she 
 saw tomato-vines a foot high ; she bought a load of 'em, 
 and gave a man a dollar to climb up to her farm as early 
 as five next morning, and in the seclusion of the shubbery 
 put them out. 
 
 The astonishment of the rest of the country knew no 
 bounds, and a coalition was at once formed between your 
 astute Gusher and this man, who is as near being a tramp 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 7 
 
 as a man who will do a day's work occasionally can be. 
 My ally informs me what seed I shall plant one morning. 
 I do it ostentatiously, and put up little pigmy posts, with 
 cards neatly lettered stuck on top of 'em. These agri- 
 cultural guide-posts inform you that here lie buried ver- 
 benas or petunias or gladiola or tuberose bulbs. My 
 wicked partner never fails me. As soon as it's light 
 enough to read he pulls up a stake ; sees that I have put 
 beside it a gladiola bulb ; he selects from his assortment 
 one that has made its way in the world, and has a green 
 flag ten inches long flying. This he plants, replaces the 
 tag beside the flourishing plant, and goes on this way with 
 all the rest. The natives gather 'round and tell about 
 backward springs and miracles in horticulture ; ask me 
 if I put anything into the ground except the old case- 
 knife and the seed they see me sow ; ask me if I have 
 always been considered to be like other folks, and if I am 
 gifted in any other way beside making things grow. 
 
 In this way I have greatly astonished my innocent 
 neighbors, and now I've begun on the rest of the inhabi- 
 tants. I find a hen's capacity for amazement is very 
 great. My ally, who now works round on the place, said 
 one day : " Some o' them hens wants to set." 
 
 I sent him off for new-laid eggs, and in twenty-four 
 hours I had several hens on as many nests, and just as 
 many eggs under 'em as I could tuck away out o' sight. 
 The tramp advised me to buy eggs by the barrel and set 
 the hen on the bung-hole. This may have been scarcasm, 
 but when an old speckled girl named Hannah came off 
 with twenty-three chickens no one knew that I had stolen 
 ten from Mrs. Phoebe and Aunty Brown, two noble old 
 hens in the barn that belong to the landlord, who is round 
 bemoaning to this day that Aunty should have only one 
 chick and Miss Phcebe four. Hannah's chickens were 
 
8 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 about fifteen minutes old when I brought a hatful from 
 the barn and let 'em loose beside her in a little coop. I 
 threw her in a handful of egg-shells to account for the 
 large family, and she never weakened. 
 
 Now, then, a Shanghai named Miranda had been sit- 
 ting on thirteen eggs for fourteen days when a little gray 
 hen of mine evinced an intention to make a nest. I had 
 made omelettes of her incipient family, and felt called on 
 to see her through. I took a cigar-box full of eggs to the 
 barn, and after a vigorous protest on the part of Miranda, 
 got her off the nest long enough to take her thirteen 
 warm eggs and substitute thirteen fresh ones. These we 
 put in the gray hen's coop and let nature take its course. 
 In less than a week my little gray mother-hen came off 
 with a dozen chickens, and I tell you a more excited bird 
 I never saw. She walked into the bar and sat on the back 
 of a chair ten minutes examining the almanac. She knows 
 she wasn't on that family as long as she ought to have 
 been, and she gathers 'em under her now and tries to sit 
 it out. But then I know several mothers whose broods 
 have grown up, and some of 'em are twenty years of age, 
 and the old girls sit on the family to this day. 
 
 But the gray hen is the wonder of the poultry. She took 
 her chickens and paraded in front of Miranda, who was 
 peacefully sitting on my dozen store-eggs, and the mother 
 instinct is strong. She looked at my little stump-tailed 
 pullet and the twelve stalwart, long-legged Shanghai 
 chickens that stalked beside her, and she routed the 
 whole party. 
 
 It's often thought that the world treated people very 
 much as they deserved, and the better a person deserved 
 the better the world treated 'em. It's precisely the same 
 way with hens. A muddy-colored little chicken got its 
 leg hurt and went lame, and the whole fleet of hens bore 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 9 
 
 down on her and pecked and maltreated her. The poor 
 thing led a horrible life till I caught her and painted her 
 head with gold paint, and made eyes like peacock's, with 
 iridescent paint all down her sides, and gilded her legs, 
 and when she was quite dry I let her loose among her 
 former persecutors. The effect was stunning. That 
 hen walked into the sun, and she was something daz- 
 zling. The unpainted hens were dazed with admiration. 
 She has received the unremitting attentions ever since 
 of the four roosters belonging to my farm. Duels are 
 daily fought on her account and my premises. What 
 will happen when the gilding soaks off I can't say ; but 
 at present she is the bossess and queen of the coop. 
 
 Yes, the affairs of a poultry-yard are very much like 
 the affairs of human beings, and the affairs of a little set- 
 tlement are conducted in the same selfish, sacrificing way 
 as the affairs of a nation. 
 
 One of the loveliest places to be found is up here, where 
 I have pitched my tent and am running the miracle farm. 
 It's just near enough to the city to allow my getting all I 
 want of it. I can see a new play and leave a theatre at 
 eleven o'clock, and in fifteen minutes from the Forty- 
 second Street depot stand on the farm, with the odors 
 of the green-growing things flooding the air around me, 
 the nice, quiet, country stars blinking over me, and the 
 great solemn arches of the High Bridge sweeping off 
 into darkness, and the pleasant little Harlem River 
 rippling beneath them. The night-cry of a bird in the 
 maple-tree and the cheerful swearing of a brakeman 
 making up a freight-train on the Hudson River road mix 
 delightfully together, and I am glad to be alive. 
 
THE HOSPITAL OVER THE WAY. 
 
 I NEVER fully realized how often the human head got 
 broken until my most intimate friend moved down oppo- 
 site the New York Hospital. Her husband is by fits the 
 most practical and sentimental man in America. You 
 take him one day, and the laying of an egg by a careless 
 hen fills his soul with anxiety about a future omelette ; 
 and you take him the next, and you might saw my poor 
 Maria's leg off before his eyes and he wouldn't flinch. 
 But in both positions he issues unpleasant opinions, and 
 as they struck their new quarters when his heart was 
 tender, Maria was frightened by the dread forebodings 
 of her Ichabod. 
 
 " Put me at the back of the house," said he. " The 
 clang of that ambulance fills me with pain." 
 
 " Why should it," said Maria, " as long as I didn't ring 
 for it ? " 
 
 " And the sight of those dreadful walls are hideous, 
 enclosing so much human misery," he continued. 
 
 " Moreover, it is built of parti-colored bricks and a 
 heap sight more cheerful than the Metropolitan Opera 
 House. The misery there is alleviated, which is more 
 than I can say for that across the street." And Maria 
 got in one on Ichabod. 
 
 Then, Maria and I just began to look at the hospital, 
 to see if He or She had the right of it. And in its study 
 we have found much to interest and more to amuse. 
 
 The early-morning politician with the broken head is 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. II 
 
 one of the funniest features of the season. A coach 
 with a few friends drives up at six. At that hour I am 
 struggling with Dana on Cleveland or Bennett on Elaine, 
 but instantly I take a greater interest in the evidence of 
 a great political issue which is being carefully decanted 
 from the coach across the way. His coat is torn, his 
 necktie is hanging, and the blood so incarnadines his 
 face that it's a question if he is a white man or a Fif- 
 teenth amendment of one. His friends boost him in 
 through the great iron gates and the coach patrols the 
 street. After a good hour of this exercise it stops, to 
 take on board the repaired article, and here the laugh 
 comes in. The doctors have plastered and patched him, 
 and put a poultice on the north side of him, and mounted 
 a sort of white night-cap on top of all the other white 
 fragments, and aloft, on a small embankment where a 
 peculiarly big lump occurred, one of the officer's friends 
 had perched the sufferer's little black derby hat. You 
 talk of funny sights ! That exhibition takes place almost 
 every morning, and if your windows were open my howl 
 of delight would reach you. 
 
 The other day an ambulance arrived with a stout Irish 
 fellow, so thoroughly broken up that they just dished 
 him out as if he was picnic chowder. The big iron 
 gates had hardly clanged behind him before a stalwart 
 Biddy with a stove-lifter braced herself against the rail- 
 ing. She had evidently brought her work home herself. 
 
 Several adherents stood at a respectful distance, when 
 a jolly-faced man on a milk-cart addressed her : 
 
 " Fwat's the matter, Mrs. Mulcahy ? " 
 
 " They're puttin' a new lid on Mike in beyant." 
 
 " Was it an accident ? " 
 
 "No, it was meself." 
 
 "That was too bad of ye, Mrs. Mulcahy." 
 
12 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 " Arrah, was it indade ? Av yees had seen the red 
 head of her, and Mike walkin' it round the Par'ak, ye'd 
 a'seen fwat he took his midicine for. It's here I'll land 
 him ivery toime I catch him at it." 
 
 Just here the gates creaked a little and a policeman, 
 who had ridden in unnoticed on the ambulance, shot out 
 and grabbed Mrs. Mulcahy stove-lifter and all. 
 
 A short, sharp struggle, and down the street with his 
 prize walked the copper. Maria and I silently rise and 
 shake hands. The hospital has its consolations. 
 
 Now, then, it's nine o'clock, and rattling up to the 
 main entrance comes a big, many-seated Park wagon, 
 and lifted carefully in are a score or more of white-faced, 
 puny little children some of 'em bandaged, some of 'em 
 in splints, some of 'em in strange apparatus for straight- 
 ening backs or lifting heads, but all joyful at the expec- 
 tation of a ride. 
 
 I wonder it doesn't strike the wealthy woman or the 
 married man oftener than it does to do something for 
 these magnificent hospitals of ours. Why, for a few dol- 
 lars you can have a whole afternoon's solid pleasure. 
 Go buy up fifty picture books, and ask permission to 
 visit the juvenile ward, and leave one on each little cot. 
 Buy a few dollars' worth of worsteds and fancy cottons 
 and crochet hooks and feather braids and go through 
 the convalescing ranks of the female patients of a hos- 
 pital and brighten by your little presents the monoto- 
 nous hours of your suffering sisters. It does seem to 
 me that we struggle and put out lots of money and 
 effort to attain the very miserable returns we call pleas- 
 ure, when the truest form of it can be procured so cheaply. 
 
 A careful observation of the habits of man, as dis- 
 played at the windows and on the balconies of the hos- 
 pital, leads me to believe that taking off a man's head is 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 13 
 
 the only way to take the flirt out of him. On the second 
 story there is a ward apparently devoted to the use of 
 young men who have been more or less removed. No 
 one of 'em seems to have the full complement of arms 
 and legs ; but they all flirt. There's a pretty housemaid 
 next door who rouses the whole hospital when she washes 
 her steps. When she appears with her bucket they all 
 appear with their crutches, and one particularly awful 
 young man, who is swathed like a mummy and has evi- 
 dently been half-way into a sausage-cutter, jumps play- 
 fully 'round and waves a red silk handkerchief at the 
 divinity with the broom. 
 
 But, then, the ruling passion is hard to eradicate. I 
 remember, when a lady friend of mine died a year ago, 
 the doctor thought it his duty to break the impending 
 change to her, and advise her to make such disposition of 
 her property and two unruly children as she could in 
 twenty-four hours, that being the limit of the game. She 
 telegraphed for a sister, she sent for me, and she did all 
 her front hair up on pins. When I reached her at nine 
 o'clock, twelve out of her twenty-four hours were gone. 
 She gave me the dreadful information and the most sol- 
 emn charge to reach the house at twelve next day and 
 " take down her crimps " before the undertaker saw her. 
 It was plain she meant to make a good impression even 
 on that most uninteresting of all men. 
 
A SUICIDE. 
 
 SOME of the greatest lessons the world has ever learned 
 have been taught it by pictures, and I heartily wish I 
 could duplicate one I saw the other day and hang it on 
 the walls of every grinding, thieving manufacturer 
 throughout the land. Every one who knows the habits 
 of the Gusher knows that though she goes to bed with 
 the owl she gets up with the lark. No sleep for her when 
 there's daylight outside, and very little for anybody else 
 in her volcanic vicinity. Well, it is nice to be up and 
 out in the early morning, and especially in the country, 
 where I am farming and browsing just at present. Aston- 
 ished cows and newly risen roosters view me with sur- 
 prise as I go prowling about over the land, and it was 
 on one of these excursions that I saw the picture I wish 
 I could have had photographed by the hundred for dis- 
 semination. 
 
 Just above McComb's Dam rotten bridge, the salt 
 water of Harlem River is full of frozen cakes of ice. 
 Along the shore it lies piled up in rough, dirty masses, 
 and in the morning sun it glinted and gleamed here and 
 there bright enough to put into cocktails, or gloomily 
 bobbed up and down in the water as dirty and battered 
 as property trunks. On some of these soiled and float- 
 ing cakes of ice two men were picking their way, as 
 Eliza crossed the river in " Uncle Tom," to an object 
 jammed in between some of the overlapping layers. 
 They bent curiously over it a moment, then lifted and 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 15 
 
 bore to the shore between them the body of a drowned 
 woman a mere shadow of a creature, with flat chest and 
 narrow shoulders and bowed back, with hair just touched 
 with gray, carefully combed and tied and braided on the 
 hollow-templed head. Her eyes were wide, staring as if 
 seeking to see what laid beyond the gate she had opened 
 for herself, and a pitiful, pleading expression rested on 
 the poor mouth, from which oozed the foam that always 
 fills the lips of the drowned. Every article on the wasted 
 body was scrupulously clean and carefully put on. 
 
 The rough but kindly men began to speculate on the 
 probability of her being some resident of the neighbor- 
 hood who had been out in the storm of the night before, 
 and slipped off the bridge returning home. But Peter 
 Conlon, the captain of the precinct, gave one look at 
 the woman, and said : " She is a suicide, and driven to it 
 by hard work and despair." 
 
 I wish that face in marble or on canvas could confront 
 every ready-made clothing manufacturer in this land. I 
 wish that silent but awful prophecy could reach everyone 
 of the wretches who fatten on starving needle-women ; 
 for just as surely as it told the tale of her misery past 
 and her hard life ended, it told of the woe to come, the 
 punishment waiting the authors of her misery, when, 
 beyond this brutal ruling, that face would be in some 
 celestial witness-box. 
 
 In a few hours the story of Minna Huer, the German 
 sewing-woman who committed suicide, was known, and I 
 shall never forget it, illustrated, as it was, with one dread- 
 ful picture. The papers gave it a brief, succinct mention. 
 They are agitating some of them the question of better 
 pay for the starving seamstress, but they failed to see the 
 magnificent text furnished them by the life and death of 
 this poor woman. 
 
1 6 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 She was a good, pure woman, alone in a strange land ; 
 a well-educated person of much refinement. She had 
 lived for five years in a narrow garret all by herself, 
 cooking her slender stock of food, polishing up her poor 
 place till it shone with cleanliness, pulling a needle 
 through a piece of cloth from five o'clock every morning 
 till midnight, and often begrudging the time she lost in 
 carrying her ill-paid work home, and breaking utterly 
 down and seeking shelter in death when her hard work 
 failed her. 
 
 When a young girl is suddenly faced by disgrace and 
 rushes into the other world ; when a woman sees the 
 light go out of heaven as some lover's arm drops from 
 round her, and ends a life that contains no longer the 
 love that sustained it, it's very sad ; but they both have 
 had their good time, and the transition from joy to sor- 
 row has wrecked 'em. Here was a joyless, sunless life, a 
 round of unending toil, and it is very pitiful to picture 
 this poor creature tidying up her attic for the last time ; 
 putting all in order, knowing that she was never to 
 return ; smoothing out the bed on which her weary limbs 
 would never rest again ; dusting the little glass in which 
 the wan face, going shortly to look into the gates of 
 death, should never again be reflected ; writing her last 
 sad letter to the brother at home, to whom she desired to 
 send her few poor things ; thanking the good woman 
 who had given her the teaspoonful of coffee with which 
 she made her last earthly meal, and directing that in 
 case her body should be cast upon the land once more 
 it should be clothed in a nightgown she left in the top 
 of the trunk, and which she had " long designed for that 
 purpose." 
 
 My God ! Why was not some good Samaritan some 
 Vanderbilt or Gould on that avenue seeking the poor 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 17 
 
 and needy, when, in the rain and growing darkness, the 
 discouraged, despairing seamstress stole up its slippery 
 length and plunged into the black, icy water ? Where 
 is the justice of Heaven that let that weary, grief-stricken 
 spirit pass men whose pockets were bulging with coin 
 made from the heart's blood of such poor creatures as 
 she, and their mean legs not give way with paralysis or 
 their grasping hands not wither with palsy ? 
 
 Oh! Robert Ingersoll, I do hope you are a little out in 
 your reckoning, and that there is another town, hard by, 
 where some of the wronged citizens of this will find a 
 hearing, and some of the tough citizens get a settling ; 
 for things are not conducted on a pleasing plan here. 
 
AN ANATOMICAL DISCOVERY. 
 
 I WONDER if any savant of the past ever meddled with 
 the theory that the reasoning faculties, the affections, the 
 ambitions and instincts of man lie in the legs of that ani- 
 mal, not in the head ? I do not desire to invade the 
 realms of science nor occupy the pants of a professor. 
 It would distress me beyond measure to see my name 
 printed with Darwin and Tyndall. If I could go off and 
 discover that this world was neither round nor flat, but 
 built on the plan of a crook-neck squash by imitative 
 Nature, I think I should refrain from mentioning it, to 
 escape notoriety of a scientific character. 
 
 But it seems as if reasons of a philanthropic kind 
 demanded that my present discovery should be divulged. 
 I hesitate before flying in the face of accepted, long- 
 standing belief. I know I shall meet, as all great 
 discoverers have met, opposition and enmity. The per- 
 son who upsets a theory that has enjoyed respect and 
 consideration for ages treads dangerous ground, and it 
 requires great courage and large-heartedness to become 
 such an iconoclast. You can therefore take the dimen- 
 sions of my courage and get a fair idea of the size of 
 my pericardium by the step I boldly take in proclaiming 
 that the legs of man, not the head, are the residence of 
 his reasoning faculties, the abode of his ambitions, the 
 boarding-house of his being. 
 
 With a woman it is different. She is anxious, she has 
 a headache ; she is miserable, she grows gray ; she is 
 flattered, her head swells. A man's head swells. That 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. IQ 
 
 proves nothing. It's the stuff he has put in his stomach 
 that enlarges his head. You tell a man a funny story. 
 What does he do ? Slaps his legs. His risibilities are 
 closely allied to his legs. You notice two men talking of 
 taking a company on the road. The man with the money 
 slowly rubs his legs between the knees and the hips ; the 
 man with the play, with every argument, stabs him gently 
 in the thick part of his leg (unless the capitalist is a dude 
 and has no thick part then he j.ust picks at the bone). 
 Why do they both do this ? Because the moneyed man 
 feels that such prudence as he has lies in his legs, and 
 the other feels that, if he can poke a full belief of his 
 racket into the legs of the hunted animal, his show will 
 stand a chance of going out. 
 
 Look at the prominence man instinctively accords his 
 legs ! A woman's dwell in comparative obscurity. A 
 man's are always on exhibition. In public places they 
 are constantly placed higher than his head. This is 
 instinct. I am stopping just now at a country hotel, to 
 which a garden is attached for restaurant and bar pur- 
 poses. A party of men drift in. I make my bets while 
 they are in motion. The man with the check legs will 
 have his two legs on a table in five minutes. Out come 
 the watches and we time him. Nine times out of ten I 
 win. Drive up the Boulevards and look at the piazzas 
 of the road houses rows of boot and shoe soles are set 
 up on the rails. The men are taking in the spectacle of 
 our presence and the speed of fast horses with that por- 
 tion of their body capable of most enjoyment their legs. 
 Look down the aisles of a theatre. Every man who has 
 an end seat has his legs waving about in the passage. 
 The little blower that is provided at the base of an 
 orchestra chair to let air in on your spinal column is 
 usually occupied by a boot-toe. The foot-rests are 
 
20 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 enough for a woman, but a man is only prevented from 
 putting his feet on top of the back of your seat by the 
 presence of the usher. 
 
 I haven't been in a theatre for a year that some man 
 didn't walk up my back like a fly or kneel like a camel 
 in the desert on the small of my back. Why can't a 
 man keep his feet on the ground as well as a woman ? 
 Because he's ambitious. His nervous centres, his pro- 
 jectile qualities, are in his blamed legs. The size of the 
 legs is not regulated by the amount of ability their 
 owner possesses in all cases. No one denies the clever- 
 ness of Evarts or the humanity of Bergh, and yet a 
 Croton bug of ordinary intelligence wouldn't trust him- 
 self on four such legs. 
 
 It has long been allowed that the size of the head does 
 not show the amount of intellect one possesses. A No. 
 23 hat is worn oftener for a season's success, the whiskey 
 drank the night before, and hydrocephalus, than for intel- 
 ligence or great perceptive faculties. This same state of 
 affairs exists in the legs, but not so frequently. We all 
 know that the attributes of the head are transmissible 
 and contagious. The son has his father's red head and 
 his mother's cross eye as an heirloom. 
 
 It was a wise provision that put women's brains in their 
 bonnets. If women's affections dwelt in their legs, we 
 should be horrified at their deportment. If a woman's 
 ambition dwelt in her legs, we should be paralyzed by 
 her having them higher than her head, and her No. 2 
 Spanish insteps stuck on mantel-pieces and balcony 
 rails. Her sense of humor does not lie in her legs, or 
 we should be shocked by the spectacle of woman slap- 
 ping them every time she heard her husband had caught 
 on to a new girl, or some little frequently recurring 
 joke like that. 
 
SUNDRY GRAVE SUBJECTS. 
 
 ONE of the wisest provisions of an all-wise Providence 
 is that for the dead there is no coming back. Foster 
 and Slade to the contrary, the disembodied spirit does 
 not revisit the scenes of earth. I should believe in 
 future punishment if I were a Spiritualist, for a return to 
 familiar scenes would be the worst sort of a hell to any 
 loving soul. 
 
 Being more than ordinarily fond of a very bright 
 woman, when my theological views were in a rather cha- 
 otic state, we used to discuss early death in a romantic 
 fashion, and make terrible vows to each other as to our 
 behavior beyond the grave. Why, we two promised 
 many years ago that she who first laid down to final rest 
 would break the bondage of the grave to know and 
 soothe the sorrow in the other's breast. 
 
 And as time rolled on, it came about my dear old 
 chum was called to meet the early death we had rather 
 courted in our romantic days. God rest her ! I really 
 believe, could she come back as she promised, the only 
 heart she had ever trusted that remembered her would 
 be that of the Giddy Gusher. In three weeks from the 
 day of her burial her husband wrote a love-letter to his 
 wife's bosom friend. We all remember the loving soul 
 in Paradise who importuned the heavenly gate-keeper 
 for just one hour on earth in which to comfort the 
 broken-hearted lover she had left kicking and pulling 
 out his hair on her grave, and, though a thousand years 
 
22 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 in Hades was the price, she paid it and jumped in on a 
 scene to which the tortures awaiting her were as noth- 
 ing, for a blond head lay on the shoulder where her bru- 
 nette locks were wont to disport, and a big fat girl occu- 
 pied the loving arms that had clung to her consumptive 
 form. Smiles sat on the lips she had last beheld pale 
 with grief. Altogether, it was the worst frost that had 
 ever nipped her, and she flew for her thousand years, 
 taking to the tortures very kindly after that return to 
 earth. 
 
 It's a queer world, taken any way, and human affec- 
 tion is not an infringement of Goodyear's patent. I got 
 several lessons to that effect quite early in life that I 
 shall never forget. There came on a visit to my native 
 town a gentleman and wife from a Western city, and the 
 man was taken sick with some sort of fever, and after 
 quite a lengthy illness, attended by the best doctor (who 
 happened to be a good-looking bachelor), the poor hus- 
 band died, and was laid out and coffined, and the 
 funeral appointed and the mourners gathered. When 
 the widow spoke of the family of the deceased and how 
 bad they would feel, having no picture of their lost 
 relative, some friends suggested a portrait by an eminent 
 artist residing among them, and he was sent for in hot 
 haste. This was before the days of Daguerre, when the 
 fleeting daguerreotype and the flattering photograph were 
 unknown, and a portrait after death was accomplished 
 from a plaster cast taken from the face of the dead. 
 
 At that time no one was married, hung or buried with- 
 out my active superintendence ; naturally, then, I accom- 
 panied the artist to the home of mourning arid carried 
 the pail of plaster of Paris. We were ushered into the 
 room where the body lay, and every one retired but our 
 two selves. The artist twisted a towel round the han- 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 23 
 
 dies of the folding doors separating us from the discon- 
 solate widow and her sorrowing friends to secure us from 
 interruption, and commenced operations. 
 
 It was a hot summer day ; the sharp, stinging cry of 
 the locusts in the trees outside and the stamp of the 
 impatient horse attached to the hearse were the only 
 sounds that broke the stillness of the sad place. A 
 towel was tucked neatly in round the dead man's nice 
 white shroud, the rigid features were rapidly brushed 
 over with sweet oil, and, to insure the reappearance of 
 every wrinkle in the matrix, a spoonful of the heavy plas- 
 ter was dashed with much violence into the hollow sur- 
 rounding the right eye, and, as it was "spatted down with 
 the back of the wooden spoon, behold ! we both saw the 
 left eyelid twitch. 
 
 The artist, in great excitement, wiped off the plaster 
 and tried another spoonful, and we got another wink. 
 To come to Hecuba for it's too long a story the man 
 was alive. I rushed for a doctor, silently and stealthily 
 introduced him into our bureau of resuscitation, and in 
 twenty minutes the body was looking about in a dazed 
 way ; and upon the artist devolved the task of breaking 
 the news of the resurrection to the widow. 
 
 There was a crowd of mourners, relations and friends. 
 The man, as men go, was an excellent husband, father 
 and citizen, and a pleasant person to know. In that 
 assembled company I saw consternation the wildest 
 surprise and astonishment, but there wasn't a syllable of 
 rejoicing and the entirely upset expression on the 
 resigned widow's face I shall never forget. As I trotted 
 home with the unused pail of plaster, the artist and I 
 exchanged views. 
 
 " She didn't seem pleased a bit," said I, referring to 
 the widow. 
 
24 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 " No wonder. She's not only lost a funeral, but a 
 wedding," answered the resurrectionist. " She has been 
 engaged to the attendant physician for forty-eight hours, 
 to my certain knowledge." 
 
 When you make your mind up to a certain thing and 
 expect it, you feel sort of disappointed if it doesn't come 
 off even if it's a funeral, or your own leg. I remember 
 when Mrs. Buskin took to her bed with mortal illness, 
 she got poor old Sock up nine nights out of seven to 
 hear her last words and see her depart in peace. Every 
 time she sank most out of sight, and every time she ral- 
 lied, and got some solid food about daylight. This 
 thing went on for weeks till Sock got sick of it. 
 
 He was great friends with an undertaker in his neigh- 
 borhood, and, in a general way, bespoke Mrs. B. 's coffin. 
 So one day, after a specially bad night, he dropped in on 
 the undertaker, and told him the old lady couldn't live 
 through the day, and the man just sent the coffin home 
 that afternoon. Sock set it up in the parlor, and dusted 
 off the plate, and bought a wreath of immortelles, and 
 laid it on the cover, and then brought in Samanthe to 
 see the outfit. Instead of being pleased, she nearly 
 raised the roof. She went on all day, but every one 
 took a sleep that night, and we heard no more of the 
 regular midnight leave-taking, and Samanthe Buskin 
 goes out with one of the fall companies to play second 
 old woman ; and Sock is paying storage for a mahogany 
 coffin with a tarnished plate setting forth how Samanthe 
 died on August n, 1869. 
 
 The story runs of another lingering case of suffering 
 up in Connecticut, when an old lady watched beside a 
 husband's deathbed for something like eighteen months. 
 There was a ray of hope one day, and a relapse the next, 
 till the patient wife was exhausted. The patient had 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 25 
 
 been very weak for several days together, when one 
 morning the neighbors went in and found the widow 
 quietly weeping. 
 
 " Poor darling ! " she sobbed, " he breathed his last 
 just as the clock struck four, and Miss Belcher's bantam 
 began crowing." 
 
 " Did he seem to suffer much ? " asked the minister's 
 wife. 
 
 " Not close to the last," was the broken answer. 
 "About three he had a bad spell of breathing, and I 
 took his wind-pipe between my thumb and forefinger 
 and pressed it kind of gently, and he went off as easy as 
 a lamb." 
 
BOTTLED EXTRACT OF SOUL. 
 
 THE Vienna police have of late been trying to suppress 
 a certain doctor who has a theory that Soul is a sort of 
 odor that exudes from a person, through the hair princi- 
 pally ; that this soul-perfume can be bottled, sold, and so 
 used that the desirable attributes of some excellent 
 character shall be carried into an unpleasant nature. 
 I'm heartily sorry the meddling police have apparently 
 cut short this beautiful business. How I should have 
 gone into the bottled-soul trick had my worthy doctor 
 ever touched New York ! 
 
 I suppose some of the wild and untamed smells I meet 
 are escaping souls, and I supposed it was gas till I read 
 of my poor doctor's discovery. Whatever were his op- 
 portunities in Vienna, here in this city there is an unri- 
 valled field for the bottled-soul business. How large a 
 demand there would be for the Extract of Sullivan, or 
 the Exhalation of Evarts ! Muscle and Erudition a 
 chance for the dudes to build up physically and men- 
 tally. 
 
 I took up a big black bottle at home, the other day, 
 and my mother said : " Put it down, dear. It's an in- 
 fusion of gall and. wormwood, and extremely nasty to get 
 on your hands." 
 
 " Is it ? " replied I. " Well, I ought to know about it, 
 having had some of the chippiest instances of gall on my 
 hands lately that I remember to have heard of." 
 
 To begin with, there's my friend Pump. Pump has a 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 27 
 
 fine house on Fifth Avenue and a country-seat in Pequon- 
 nock. Pump one day got a note from Gironemo Gall, 
 saying that, as Pump's family was in the country, he'd 
 like his bay-window for a party of five, to see the Grant 
 funeral procession pass. Poor Pump had quite enough 
 intimate friends to fill his house, but he is a man who has 
 not learned that useful lesson how to say no. There- 
 fore, he wrote Gironemo that he could have a chance at 
 the window, although he had a few friends of his own 
 who were coming. Directly this got to Gall r that 
 worthy sat down and wrote back that, having the win- 
 dow assured, he had invited seven more ; his party 
 would therefore number thirteen, and they, knowing 
 how long the procession would be in passing, would 
 bring some lunch. 
 
 Pump's hair rose on his bald head. Lunch eaten by 
 thirteen in his magnificent parlors ! What to do the 
 poor man didn't know. He took counsel with a lady 
 friend, who said the " only thing to do was to send him 
 word to bring no lunch, as lunch would be provided." 
 
 According to this advice, poor Pump wrote, and or- 
 dered of Pursell an elaborate lunch for twenty-five per- 
 sons, and with fear and trembling awaited the develop- 
 ments of the funeral morning. 
 
 At nine sharp, Gall and the first instalment arrived ; a 
 little later the party numbered thirteen, and then the 
 undaunted Gall broke the news gently to his host that 
 during the morning his wife's pastor and family, from 
 Pequonnock, had come to this city, depending on him 
 (Gall) to take them to some suitable spot to view the 
 funeral. 
 
 " Of course, I could do no less than share my quarters 
 with them," finished Gall, " so I invited them here." 
 
 Pump gasped. In due time the Rev. Mr. Sam Singer, 
 
28 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 Mrs. Sam Singer, and four children under twelve, pulled 
 the weary bell of the Pump mansion. Gall threw up an 
 embankment of plush chairs and gilded tables on which 
 to perch the evangelical kids. He disported himself 
 with playful freedom, pulling out a Buhl cabinet and 
 sitting on it in the rear of his guests, who were ranged 
 in tiers in Pump's bay-window. At two, when the pro- 
 cession was under full head, lunch was announced. The 
 hungry crowd descended upon the table laid in the 
 library at the rear of the drawing-room, and nineteen 
 out of the thirty-one would get their hands and mouths 
 full, when one of the dozen left on guard would shout : 
 " Oh ! here's the Wethersfield Seedling Foot Guard ! " 
 and, pate-de-foie-gras, sandwich in hand, the Pequonnock 
 detachment would madly rush across the Turkish rugs 
 and pile into the window, shedding drops of bloated 
 goose-liver in every direction, like sparks from a Cathe- 
 rine wheel. 
 
 A slight diversion was caused by little Sam Singer 
 falling off the shelf of an etagere, where his doting par- 
 ent had put him in company with a Dresden shepherdess. 
 Sammy broke his head and the shepherdess both her legs. 
 
 My friend Pump has sent his rugs to the cleaners ; and 
 counts his outlay and inconvenience at something like a 
 couple of hundred dollars. We exchange experiences 
 and vote that the world has taken to a diet of wormwood 
 and gall. 
 
 About three months ago a young man said to me : 
 " You have the pen of a ready-writer, and I am not 
 felicitous in expressing myself. I have met a girl in 
 Elmira who is pretty high-toned, very well educated, 
 and dreadful sweet on me." 
 
 It was a combination hard to understand, and while I 
 pondered how three such conditions could exist together, 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 29 
 
 my fresh friend proposed that I should write his love- 
 letters. You know how good-natured your Gusher is. I 
 agreed, and the amatory correspondence began. That 
 young woman has written three times a week, and I have 
 done the same. The letters have glowed with fervid 
 heat till I am sure the later ones have melted the wax on 
 their backs. 
 
 Mr. Fresh seems to have become imbued with the 
 opinion that this is purely my affair, and when I hand him 
 his adorer's love-letters, I doubt if he reads them. Yester- 
 day he called and wanted to know if I couldn't let her 
 down easy gradually cool off and finally write her he 
 was drowned or hanged, or some little thing like that. I 
 hate to. In a great degree I am responsible for this very 
 unpleasant state of things. She never saw this wretched 
 sham of a lover but once, and the only atonement I can 
 think of is to find some solid chunk of a real for true 
 man, run him on deck as Mr. Fresh, agree to write all his 
 letters when necessary, and abdicate. 
 
 Oh, you talk about gall ! I could give you instances 
 by the dozen. 
 
 A captain of one of the English boats had an unruly 
 passenger in the steerage, who gave him no end of 
 trouble. Finally he got drunk, fell down the companion- 
 way, and broke his leg. The captain took up a collec- 
 tion, raising a hundred dollars, and gave him a rig of 
 clothes besides. The first thing the man did when he 
 got on shore was to begin a suit for damages against the 
 company and one against the captain for malicious slan- 
 der in saying he was as drunk as a beast from Liverpool 
 to Sandy Hook 
 
 All this has nothing to do with the transmission of the 
 qualities of souls and character discovered by the Ger- 
 man doctor. I am not blind to my own deficiencies. 
 
30 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 There are several qualities I lack. As an arithmeticker 
 I am a failure. If only the bottling doctor were here, I'd 
 take a case of Ferdinand Ward. His figuring is the style 
 to suit me. I lack the quality of " holding " sadly. I 
 should take half a case of Ed. Gilmore. He is able to 
 hold five aces if occasion requires. I haven't the slightest 
 confidence in the honor of English authors or composers, 
 and I should try and get a few bottles of Stetson to 
 repair that defect. 
 
 In the meantime New York is not so far behind Vienna. 
 I went into a drug-store up-town the other day, for some- 
 thing to take off sun-burn, as fishing in open boats had 
 rendered me a painful spectacle for first-nighters. 
 
 " What, you want," said the man, " is our famous Pith." 
 
 I had never heard of it. He assured me it would give 
 me an entirely new complexion and make a different 
 creature of me. I like change, and I bought a jar as 
 quick as a wink. 
 
 Going home, for want of better literature I unrolled a 
 prospectus from around the jar, and here it is. I can 
 understand how the doctor found customers for his 
 bottled-soul business when I find that in intelligent 
 New York such statements as the following find believers . 
 
 The Pith's peculiar effect is traceable to Polaric properties latent 
 in the substance. It purifies the skin, neutralizes offensive perspira- 
 tion, stimulates the capillaries to healthy action, smoothes wrinkles, 
 rounds the form, removes tan, pimples and "worms," moistens the 
 most torpid cuticle, and makes pliable the most rigid countenance ; 
 finally it exhilarates the mind, clears the mental faculties and allays 
 nervousness. 
 
 The last three things were the ones to take my fancy 
 a sort of cold-cream that, daubed on my face, would 
 clear my mental faculties and exaltate my mind was just 
 the cold-cream for me ; for, you must know, the manner 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 3! 
 
 of using this article that acted on the mind, cheered the 
 grummet, and pleased the penute was : 
 
 Previous to application wipe the face with a soft sponge moistened 
 in warm water. Apply the Pith with both palms and work it well 
 in for a few minutes by slow movement of the hands. 
 
 Determined to rid myself of any hitherto undiscovered 
 " rigidity of countenance," I rushed home and undid my 
 purchase. I found it looked like an ounce and smelled 
 like twenty-four ounces of ranci'd butter. I read with 
 horror that 
 
 Its fragrant aroma, which is new and different from any other 
 known perfume, is permanent, it being part of the substance itself. 
 
 Thinks I, if I smell like this for any length of time, 
 I may as well be buried at once, before friends forsake 
 and fortune proves untrue. 
 
 This thought depressed me, and I got down to consider 
 and wait for the " exhilaration of mind " promised in the 
 prospectus, when I saw a rose-colored sheet of paper that 
 had escaped from the jar unperceived. It was a simple 
 and touching tale of the discovery of the shrub. I give 
 it verbatim : 
 
 Rambling about in the mountain-passes for stray flowers, my 
 attention was arrested by a most delicious aroma arising from the 
 ground where I stood. The scene around me was wild and rugged, 
 and not a flower to be seen. A strange feeling of loneliness crept 
 over me, and my heart became agitated with feelings foreign to my 
 nature. Recovering my self-possession, I stooped to trace the 
 bewitching scent and found myself drawn as by magic to an ugly- 
 looking shrub from which I mechanically broke a twig, and lo ! to 
 my surprise, the pith of the twig emitted the exquisite fragrance 
 which so enchanted me. Elated at this pleasing discovery I hastened 
 home, but not until I had selected a few of the larger stems for speci- 
 mens, and taken a good survey of the locality so I could find the 
 place again. Making inquiries among the natives about the strange- 
 looking plant, I observed an unwillingness on their part to give me 
 
32 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 any satisfactory information ; one even went so far as to say it was 
 poisonous and I had better let it alone. This excited my curiosity 
 only the more, and by diligent search I found among the fortune- 
 tellers, who abound in the city, one who for a round sum betrayed to 
 me the secret. 
 
 This took place in the Indian end of Turkish Persia, 
 I believe. Of course, after the secret was betrayed, the 
 rancid butter was easily made, and here you have it, with 
 all its pleasant idiocy printed and tied round it with pink 
 ribbon. And lots of sensible people buy it and use it. 
 Can you doubt the success of the Viennese doctor if he 
 ever gets to New York and begins to peddle his bottled 
 Extract of Soul ? 
 
THEATRICAL FARMERS AND SAILORS. 
 
 THE actor in the character of farmer or sailor is one of 
 the most amusing persons on top of earth. The fad 
 doesn't last long, but while it does it consumes all his 
 strength and taxes all his vitality. The veriest cockney 
 in the whole profession used to be George Clarke you 
 could not get him off Broadway. All the grass he wanted 
 to see grew in Union Square. And when his managers 
 wished to send him out, he sat down and wept as he 
 packed his portmonkey for Philadelphia and Bridgeport, 
 bemoaning the fate that exiled him from his beloved city 
 haunts and conveyed him to fresh fields and pastures 
 full of cows and vocal with frogs. 
 
 Look at him now ! He comes in from a potato patch 
 he hoes by the day, with hayseed in his hair smelling of 
 his cow a horny-handed farmer. He will talk you 
 blind on the exciting subject of rutabaga turnips, and his 
 eyes dance with enthusiasm while discussing the three 
 quarts of oats he's raising in pots on the back stoop. 
 Observe the bagginess of his trousers at the knees that's 
 acquired through weeding onions ; take in the slack he 
 carries in the rear that's brought on by sitting on a 
 milking-stool. 
 
 I met him the other day with a long thing done up in 
 brown paper, and thought by the cut of it it was a Per- 
 sian yatagan, and that he was going to play some East- 
 ern part. So I expressed myself, and was laughed to 
 scorn. Catch him carrying any stupid " prop." through 
 3 
 
34 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 the street. No, indeed ; he was lugging a new scythe- 
 blade, having mowed the old one all to flinders on a 
 batch of stones where his hay is growing. Mrs. Clarke 
 cut one crop with a pair of scissors, and George got in 
 another crop with the family razor ; but he found, after 
 all, the proper thing for hay was a scythe, and so he'd 
 bought a new one, and was hurrying home to snatch that 
 little grass-plot bald-headed before the hens got in and 
 snapped it up. 
 
 Then there's Johnny Wild ; he's bought up all the 
 land outside Troy, and throws an agricultural look about 
 his clothes almost as strongly developed as that pervad- 
 ing George Clarke. Madame Ponisi's husband has a 
 nice place back in Pennsylvania, where they raise snakes, 
 and had a lovely crop last year. 
 
 Dear old Sam Wallace, he thought he would put up a 
 larger and more commodious edifice on his place, and last 
 spring he began all by himself to build. His home was 
 almost ready for plasterers and painters, when one after- 
 noon, while hanging a door, he heard a strange, creep- 
 ing sound on the stairs. Looking over the railless open- 
 ing, there he beheld a huge black snake squirming up, 
 and just as the reptile's head appeared on the landing 
 the plucky old gentleman gave it an awful knock with a 
 chisel. 
 
 Even while this visitor was in the throes of death, he 
 happened to look up and beheld hanging over one of the 
 unplastered beams of the attic another of the same fam- 
 ily. Nothing daunted, Sam seized a saw, and creeping 
 up the next flight, he walked across the open beams and 
 deliberately sawed the nasty beast in two. Then he 
 thought for some time that he had two enemies instead 
 of one the sawed off tail seemed endowed with as much 
 intelligence as the head part. It danced round and inves- 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 35 
 
 tigated its other end with a detached curiosity unpleas- 
 ant to behold. The snake crop has rather daunted 
 Madame. Sam got in his snakes early last year, but this 
 summer they are going to seed uncut, as the dear couple 
 are discouraged about raising anything else on their 
 place. 
 
 But if the theatrical farmers are funny, the theatrical 
 sailors are something convulsing. Wallack on board his 
 yacht was a spectacle to stir their pulses to flights of 
 emulation. Robson and Crane have got a yacht, Nat 
 Goodwin's got a yacht, and Jack Ryley's got a yacht. 
 He 'calls his the Madeleine, after his wife, but he should 
 re-christen her the Rock Hunter. There never was such 
 a craft for discovering rocks and splitting on them as the 
 Madeleine. A dozen times she has been high and dry 
 on them. You feel a bumping and a thumping under 
 you as if the bottom of the boat were being filed off, and 
 Jack says pleasantly, " She'll get over ; she's taking her 
 rocks beautifully to-day." 
 
 I was on this theatrical craft the other day.. Jack 
 has carefully selected his crew from men who have had 
 experience in nautical dramas. We all remember how 
 good a Captain in the " Pinafore " troupe John Nash was ; 
 he's the sailing-master. Ryley himself was a wonderful 
 Admiral in the same piece, and his maritime intelligence 
 lays over the deck. The bo' sun, first mate and loblolly 
 boy is well up in sailors' hornpipes, and has played 
 William so often that he is very seldom seasick. 
 
 Manned by such a crew, the Madeleine has created a 
 wholesome terror in the souls of less experienced yachts- 
 men. I never saw such deference shown a small vessel. 
 Quite a party boarded her the day I went the prima 
 donna of one company, the soubrette of another, a first 
 old woman weighing two hundred pounds, a light come- 
 
36 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 dian and the gallant Ryley. After adjusting his eye- 
 glass, he gave the order to weigh the anchor, and the 
 rest of us began to look 'round for the scales to make our- 
 selves useful. 
 
 Twenty different sorts of boats were lying about near, 
 and as they heard the mandate every one of 'em betrayed 
 unusual interest. The light comedian thought he would 
 distinguish himself, and he pulled cheerily on the first 
 rope handy. Up went our jib, and for the next five min- 
 utes the recording angel had both hands full in noting 
 down the profanity that filled the air on all sides. The 
 Madeleine rounded and swept every deck in the neigh- 
 borhood with her jib-boom. She backed and she filled. 
 You should have seen the anchors fly out of the water ! 
 There was no safety for anybody but in flight every one 
 flew. " That's the way to be treated," said Ryley. 
 " They give me the whole thing." The horizon was 
 dotted with escaping boats, and away we went rock-hunt- 
 ing. Nash spread out a chart of Behring Straits and 
 straddled over it in a knowing way, with a pair of divid- 
 ers. We were just off the Larchmont Club House, but 
 a true, safe sailor looks a long way ahead. 
 
 Rumors had reached me of Ryley's yachting on rocks 
 as frequently as on water, so I was not unprepared when, 
 in a good stiff breeze, I felt a sudden shock, and we came 
 up all standing. 
 
 " It's Gibraltar this time," said the first mate, as he 
 rushed below for a map of the coast of Ireland. We 
 had a little cannon tied on to our gunwales, and Ryley 
 ordered this fired. " It clears the air," he explained, 
 and he thought we should lift with the smoke ; and 
 we did, going off with a parting scrape, as if loath to 
 leave. " I think it would be a good idea to put the 
 Madeleine on a dry dock," said the Commodore, " and 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 37 
 
 grease her bottom. She seems to stick lately whenever 
 she strikes." This motion was carried unanimously. 
 We all sang " Larboard Watch " and went below for 
 seven bells. Afterward we sang " A Wet Sheet " and 
 " A Life on the Ocean Wave," and Nash did very 
 prettily a stave or two of " Merrily, Merrily Goes the 
 Bark," and between all these selections we went below 
 for seven bells. 
 
 The first old woman by this was a little ill, and we lashed 
 her to a camp-chair and planted her aft, while we went 
 below to the chart-room. Then the breeze died out and 
 we were becalmed, so we got out the quadrant and took 
 our bearings. For hours we drifted, " like painted ships 
 upon a painted ocean." Well provisioned and provided 
 with the means of having unlimited seven bells, our stal- 
 wart hearts never flinched. Of one thing we were solid 
 certain, we had no water in our holds, and the jest ran 
 on and the songs were sung, and lots of things were eaten, 
 and and then. some anxious mortal looked at a watch. 
 Great king ! It was six o'clock, and the Commodore was 
 due at the Casino at eight and the prima-donna due in 
 her dressing-room at seven. The first old woman was 
 out of an engagement, but she was sick of a nautical life, 
 and elected to go in the boat that was to take the anx- 
 ious Thespians to the distant shore, where six cornfields, 
 a potato patch and an apple orchard took them to a 
 depot. The party were nicely balanced in the dinky, and 
 the heavy woman was besought to plant her feet in the 
 exact centre of the boat, which she did, but some one's 
 hand slipped. She sat down with an expression of 
 anguish (used before for Hamlet's mother) on a rowlock, 
 and the " sickening thud " was succeeded by a vision of 
 two No. 6 boot-soles common -sense heels two yards of 
 knitted leaf-lace and some tape-strings. A yell of hor- 
 
38 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 ror greeted this spectacle, but the loblolly boy, quick as 
 a wink, clapped an oar under her shoulders, and the light 
 comedian, an expert swimmer, jumped in and buoyed her 
 up. Ropes were attached to her head and heels, and 
 we on deck began to pull. But, if she weighed two hun- 
 dred pounds when she was dry, she weighed four hun- 
 dred, water-soaked as she was. 
 
 The great head of our skipper here asserted itself. 
 " Bail her out," said he. We were all willing to go bail 
 if any one would take it for her, but no one offered 
 time was going on Ryley must leave. " Tie her up to 
 the after part of the boat ; I'll send a derrick from off 
 shore and some one to work it," said he. But just then 
 help came from a yacht in the distance and the water- 
 logged lady was taken on board with much boosting and 
 more pulling. The little boat made for shore, a mile and 
 a half away, and Captain Nash, in a nice baritone voice, 
 sang " The Sea, the Open Sea," while the first heavy 
 wrung out her skirts and threatened to founder us with 
 the water she had brought on board. 
 
 By-and-by we had the twenty-sixth fright of the day. 
 The returning boat was pulled by two able-bodied young 
 female seamen, but they got in between two Glen Island 
 boats and slopped about in such a hair-standing way that 
 we were only anxious to recover their bodies. This 
 agony was protracted for a long time, until, the Starin 
 boom subsiding, we took the perilous passengers on 
 board. Then we all sang " Blow, Ye Winds, I O," till the 
 effort met a response. u We'll go into town in good 
 shape," said the skipper, and we went below for eight 
 bells. Sure enough, she was scudding when we came 
 up. Nash examined the chart and found no danger 
 signals marked for the vicinity of the Bermuda Islands 
 (we were just off Glen Island, but what's sauce for the 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 39 
 
 goose is sauce for the gander, and we had no chart of 
 Mr. StarinJ. 
 
 It was a jolly sail for the next twenty minutes, when, 
 crash ! bang ! we were hoisted up on a beautiful steady 
 rock, and we dipped to windward and bent to starboard 
 and did all sorts of things to larboard but come off ! 
 There we stuck. The captain went below and reported 
 a hole as big as a barrel in her stern. " Take to the 
 boat," said he heroically, "leave me to my fate." We 
 were a couple of hundred yards off shore, and the cap- 
 tain swims, so we took his advice and the boat and sent a 
 man to take him off the wreck, and after unheard-of 
 trouble on land we got to New York and to Seighortner's 
 for a nice supper, at which the Admiral returned thanks 
 for the way in which we had carefully hung up the 
 Madeleine in a nice dry place for the riight. She has 
 had some planks nailed over the hole we made, and 
 to-day she is rock-hunting, as good as ever. 
 
THE FORTUNE TELLERS. 
 
 THE Gusher got hold of a young woman the other 
 day who was desirous of penetrating the veil of the 
 future, and contemplated visting one of the advertising 
 fortune-tellers of the city. The lady was in a great deal 
 of trouble. The Alphonse of her existence had been 
 mysterious and suspicious of late ; there had been a 
 terrible episode at a ball during the week before, and 
 altogether the demon of jealousy was aroused. She an- 
 nounced to me her determination to " know the worst," 
 and for this purpose visit a fortune-teller. 
 
 "Let's visit a half-dozen of 'em," said I ; "don't do 
 things by halves. We will wring from fate the whole 
 dreadful boodle of woe. I'll chip in and pay for three of 
 'em ; you do the same ; and out of six seers it will go 
 hard if we don't seer little into the nefarious proceedings 
 of Alphonse." 
 
 And we started. The papers gave the address of ten 
 different astrologers, clairvoyants and fortune-tellers. 
 We selected six and took the one nearest home for the 
 first pop. 
 
 In the basement of a decent house on the East side 
 we were ushered into the presence of an ordinary man of 
 middle age, dressed in a business suit " an every-day 
 young man " the sort of person you would expect to 
 find behind the counter of any dry-goods store. He took 
 my anxious friend into a little room without a window, 
 lighted by a student lamp ; asked her the day and hour 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 41 
 
 of her birth ; drew something on a sheet of paper that 
 looked like a gridiron, with a rampant kitchen poker and 
 a couchant kitchen tongs each side of it ; held her trem- 
 bling little hand and told her, " A dark man would work 
 her mischief ; she would be married within a year and 
 lose her first children twins but afterward raise a large 
 family ; that great danger would overtake her ; and only 
 by consulting the best star- reading astrologers in the 
 place where she happened to be, would she avoid a 
 season of woe." 
 
 This, with the gridiron, was only fifty cents, and we 
 were well pleased. On the next block we struck an 
 oyster saloon with the legend " Families supplied " in 
 the window ; but on inquiring we learned that no such 
 " large family " as our astrologer guaranteed would be 
 supplied for fifty cents. Here we took a car up Third 
 avenue to Thirty-something street to consult Madame 
 
 . We were received by a gray-haired man, who 
 
 conveyed us into the reception-room on the first floor of 
 
 a flat-house. Madame proved to be an angular, 
 
 slab-sided, sharp-eyed woman, who wrested her informa- 
 tion of the future not only from the hand of fate, but 
 your own hand. She was a palmist. Maria removed 
 her glove and submitted her claw to the inquiring gaze 
 of the Madame. 
 
 Now, then, our troubles began. The " line of life " 
 had some very devious ramifications ; the " Mount of 
 Venus" somewhere in the vicinity of the base, of the 
 thumb exhibited a tendency to become volcanic ; there 
 was a terrible discovery made of disaster by sea in the 
 neighborhood of the little finger, and a mysterious wrinkle 
 near the centre of the hand predicted with unerring 
 exactitude a red-headed husband of jealous tempera- 
 ment, and a cross-eyed boy, who would be drowned in 
 
42 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 his twelfth year. Maria weakened, and I hastened to 
 disgorge my dollar, which was Madame's fee, and we 
 went off, per Xtown bob-tail, to the lair of Professor 
 , in Sixth Avenue. 
 
 This was up one flight of stairs, and was something 
 like a supernatural shop. A thick pair of green curtains 
 shut out the light. A tremendous chart of the heavens 
 hung on the wall. Astronomical apparatus stood on the 
 table, and a white-bearded, bald-headed old man in a 
 long dressing-gown of sombre purple asked us gently to 
 be seated. Again the hour and day of birth were re- 
 quested, and our reverend informant began with a pair 
 of dividers and a compass to cast a horoscope. We 
 learned that Mars was in collision with Taurus at the 
 time of our birth (which, being translated, meant that 
 our mothers were taking the bull by the horns). We 
 were further disturbed by the announcement that Capri- 
 corn, whom we had always considered as friendly to us 
 as old Capsicum, was inimical to our interests, and unless 
 a conjunction with Cancer could be brought about, the 
 next year would be disastrous. The contiguity of Ursa 
 Major to Andromeda denoted a stump of a husband with 
 a predilection for apoplexy, and four children, more or 
 less unhealthy ; and the active interference of Saturn at 
 an angle of forty-five degrees with our guiding star 
 showed but too plainly that our maiden aunt Hannah 
 would be removed by measles during the coming summer. 
 
 I supported Maria down the stairs, bearing the Nativity 
 that cast such a shadow on our prospects under my left 
 arm, and we turned our dejected footsteps toward Dr. 
 
 , an unfailing medium for probing the future for 
 
 the bullets of fate. 
 
 There was considerable cheerfulness about this gentle- 
 man's apartments. He had birds and musical instru- 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 43 
 
 ments hanging round, and a familiar-looking bit of 
 drugget, and red table-cover and dried grasses in the 
 place. The spiritual doctor turned out to be rotund and 
 jolly, and redolent of beer freshly drunk, and we sat 
 down to hike up spooks in the best possible trim. He 
 asked me if I had ever consulted spirits before, and I 
 told him I had enjoyed an intimate acquaintance with 
 Charley Foster and his large collection of choice spirits 
 that when Jim Collier kept the " Histery," corner of 
 Broadway and Thirteenth Street-, I was qualified to give 
 rectified opinions on the subject, and that my relations 
 with Shed Shook settled the matter. I knew as much 
 about spirits as a distillery, and so the seance began. 
 We wrote the names of dead friends on slips of paper. 
 
 Maria's Aunt Hepzibah came up with remarkable 
 viciousness. She said she " was watching over to direct 
 and indirect her,, bu.t want of faith kept the conditions 
 unfavorable. The coming year was to be one of power- 
 ful disaster. A faithless husband, two children with the 
 rickets, inflammatory rheumatism and a bad fall would 
 all come to her in that year." I thought this was tough, 
 for a spring, summer, hard winter, and a bad fall to drop 
 into one year broke her quite up. 
 
 The procession formed again, and we took up the line 
 
 of March for Mrs. , who was infallible, and dwelt on 
 
 Forty-first Street. This critter was cadaverous and gray, 
 and looked like Cushman made up for Merriles and, 
 indeed, an evident attempt at a supernatural get-up had 
 been made ; her bony hands had been lined with Indian- 
 ink till they were ghastly ; a hollow circle of purplish ink 
 surrounded her eyes ; her dress was of black cotton vel- 
 vet, and a mass of coarse black lace fell round her head 
 and shoulders. She sat down in front of Maria, and 
 when Maria from force of habit was about to say she was 
 
44 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 born at four o'clock, Sunday morning, in the year , 
 
 the prophetess shut her lips by saying : " I know all your 
 past as well as your future." 
 
 This made me very comfortable. I thought, " Well, 
 we've struck the right old cat at last ; but she shall keep 
 her attention on Maria." Just here Mrs. - - took 
 Maria's hand, shut her own eyes and began to have fits. 
 The spasms were wicked to see, and Maria, being 
 weakly, got scared ; but I reached for a water pitcher 
 and remarked, " This woman must be brought to by 
 immediate and copious inundation the Croton is ris- 
 ing." So was the prophetess, as the first drop struck her. 
 " Put down that pitcher," said she. " I am going into a 
 trance." And she did but with one eye half opened 
 and keeping a bright lookout for me. 
 
 After a space of silence she began murmuring indis- 
 tinctly, and suddenly gaining her power of spirit, she 
 cried : " Oh, Heaven ! what a condition this poor 
 woman is in ; the left lung is infested with tubercles ; 
 the right ventricle is much impeded ; this is a sure case 
 of heart disease ; the aorta does not act normally ; your 
 stommick is impaired ; the coats of the stommick fails in 
 some respects." Being a female stomach, I asked if the 
 coats were not in this case petticoats ; but was instantly 
 repressed. 
 
 " The pleura doesn't suit me," continued the doc- 
 tress ; " symptoms of inflammation is visible in the peri- 
 cardium." (We were getting at the trouble with Al- 
 phonse now.) "A species of congestion has took place 
 in this locality." Just here Maria's diaphragm stopped 
 her, but her scientific insight trampled over that obstacle, 
 and with a shriek of alarm she brought up at poor 
 Maria's liver. " Mercy ! mercy ! how do you get round 
 and manage to live ? here's such torpidity as I never 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 45 
 
 see." Now, then, I interfered. u We came here to get 
 information of the future, not to have a medical exami- 
 nation," I said. 
 
 " But this woman hain't got no future with things car- 
 rying on this way inside her," exclaimed my trance-par- 
 ent fraud. Maria by this time began to feel very unwell, 
 and the doctress continued her explorations. I sought 
 to break off this unpleasant thread of investigation by 
 asking questions. 
 
 " How do you know the lady's liver is torpid ! " I 
 inquired. 
 
 " I can see the torpids," said' the doctress ; " and 
 unless she takes my medicine for liver complaint she 
 won't live a year." 
 
 I grabbed Maria and made for the door. Madame 
 came out of her trance in a hurry. " You haven't paid 
 me for my examination yet," said she. 
 
 "And that ain't the worst of it," said I. We gained 
 the street without further interference. Now, then, for 
 the wonderful gifted seventh daughter, born with a gall. 
 
 It was growing late of a murky afternoon as we toiled 
 up the steps to the den of the gifted one. She, like her 
 predecessor, was given to time-compelling tricks. A 
 dark gown on which cabalistic characters were sewn of 
 white cotton adorned her rotund figure. She took a 
 greasy pack of cards, her kit of tools for picking the 
 lock of the gate of futurity, and commenced operations. 
 Maria was to lose her husband in the summer, but 
 marry again next fall ; have six children ; meet with a 
 money loss ; a dark man was coming to the house ; there 
 was to be a speedy removal, a letter to her bed from 
 across sea, and general faint-heartedness. In this glad 
 way we were making history very fast, when it occurred 
 to me I had seen fortune-tellers before. I studied her 
 
46 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 grimy old features till they came back to me, and then I 
 concluded to go into the fortune-telling business myself. 
 
 " Why, see here," said I, " let me read * the cards : You 
 engaged for second old woman with George Howard for 
 a season at the Adelphi Theatre, Troy, about twenty 
 years ago. You were to join the company at Green's 
 Opera House in Albany, and play in a version of * Ida 
 May.' You came up to the back door at the last min- 
 ute on the night of the company's first performance 
 there, and told a frightful story of present necessity that 
 got a few dollars out of the management to go get your 
 baggage off the boat. You came back in half an hour 
 so comfortably full you could just walk. You managed 
 to escape the eagle eye of the boss, and got on the 
 stage. You wandered on in a scene where you had no 
 business, sat down on a garden bank, fell off it speech- 
 less, and ended your engagement in just twenty minutes 
 after you entered on its duties. So, having disclosed 
 your past, we wish you a good afternoon," and gave our 
 two dollars, and lugged my friend out. 
 
 But Maria isn't satisfied. She says she didn't get any 
 information because I was along. Next time she's going 
 to tackle fate without me. 
 
UNFORGOTTEN "PAULINES." 
 
 SOMETHING brought " The Lady of Lyons " to the front 
 this morning, and your Gusher began to think over the 
 Paulines of her acquaintance. They have been many, 
 various, of all conditions and sizes. The youngest was 
 little Julia Wyatt ; the oldest, an ancient dame who was 
 stage-struck during the last century, and brought herself 
 out as Pauline when she was in the fifties ; the prettiest 
 was Sallie St. Clair ; the fiercest was Mrs. Waller ; the 
 fattest was Carlotta LeClercq, and the funniest was poor 
 Annie Seuter. 
 
 George Wyatt, the eccentric manager who rode the 
 circuit of the Eastern towns many years ago, had two 
 adopted daughters, at that time nine and ten years old 
 Julia and Helen. He drilled these children in Romeo and 
 Juliet, Pauline and Claude, and Camille and Armand, 
 and, with the rest of the cast full size, did those aston- 
 ished plays, " Lady of Lyons, " " Camille," and "The 
 Loves of the Capulets." It was a lively series of per- 
 formances. The Connecticutters took 'em in good part 
 saw no incongruity in the idea ; but the little Gusher 
 just howled and had lots of fun by herself. Poor John 
 Flood would be the Beauseant ; old Beader Pratt, as big 
 as John Gilbert, did Monsieur Deschapelles ; Wyatt him- 
 self, weighing two hundred and fifty, the size of John 
 Duffy, played Damas; Mrs. Wyatt, an Irishwoman with 
 a brogue like Castle Garden, did the Widow; and Julia, 
 aged nine, and small for her age, whisked around with a 
 
48 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 train the size of a kitchen apron, denouncing the villain 
 Beauseant, who stooped over her in order to hear that his 
 base proposals were properly refused. Then Helen, as 
 the Prince, two sizes larger than her sister, would enter 
 on the scene, and George Wyatt would almost go on all- 
 fours to fight the combat with his three-foot adversary. 
 
 Then there was the heavy-weight Pauline. At some 
 benefit, where slices of most everything went into the bill, 
 McCullough did Claude and Carlotta LeClercq did the 
 Lady of Lyons. One act that was all ; but it was enough. 
 The cottage act, I think it was, and Carlotta, in an ex- 
 tremely low-necked dress, filled me with apprehension. At 
 that time she was very fat whatever she is now and 
 she looked for all the world as if she were built of calves- 
 foot jelly. She shook and surged and billowed about, 
 and I thought, " Great Heavens ! if she should slop 
 over ? " And she came precious near it so often that the 
 danger was excitingly disagreeable. She threw up her arms 
 in her distress, and the pink meat gurgled around the 
 bones. Oh ! a succulent and juicy Pauline was Carlotta, 
 and John danced around her as if he was almost pleased 
 at his repulse, and wouldn't have known what to do with 
 her had she viewed him more favorably. The stairs 
 crackled as the Widow led her off to the attic room, and 
 I never saw a scareder man than John when she seemed to 
 relent with an awful creak on the fourth stair, nor greater 
 relief on the human countenance than on his when she 
 finally disappeared. 
 
 For a good, determined old pump of a Pauline, with 
 whom no Claude would play tricks, commend me to Mrs. 
 Waller. I struck her up in Troy, some few years ago, 
 doing " The Hunchback " and " The Lady of Lyons." 
 She took it out of Julia with a fierceness that boded no 
 good to Clifford when she said, "I vow I'm twenty." 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 49 
 
 The truth-loving editor of the Budget groaned. And 
 when she cried, " Clifford, why don't you speak to me ? " 
 a boy upstairs sung out, " Because he's paralyzed ! " You 
 know how one gets fascinated by the terrible, and I went 
 next night to see Pauline, and I never shall forget it. She 
 was as frigid as the North Pole. I could have gone skat- 
 ing all round her. She chilled our young blood ; but she 
 had deeper depths of horror, and behold ! the third night 
 I took in " The Duchess of Main," and here occurred an 
 accident that, before dissecting any more Paulines, I must 
 tell you. 
 
 You remember that cheerful, dramatized night-mare, 
 " The Duchess ? " In the last act, murder, arson, treach- 
 ery, and treason have done their bloody work. Mrs. 
 Malfi is in a fourth-proof mad-house clean daft she 
 weeps and wails, she shrieks with demoniac laughter, she 
 sees things she crouches, she prowls, she cavorts about 
 the stage apostrophizing air-drawn children and deceased 
 grandparents, while all the time from under the stage 
 came the fitful wails of incarcerated companions in mad- 
 ness. To accomplish the " cries outside " properly, the 
 spare members of the company sat in the green-room, 
 jolly as sand-boys ; the prompter bored a hole by his 
 desk and dropped a string down into the green-room 
 through it ; old Daddy Herbert, underneath, sat on a 
 high stool, with the tape in his hand. When a howl was 
 needed, Pop Steel, prompter, pulled his string, and the 
 company below stopped conversation and emitted heart- 
 broken cries of various natures. This was great fun, and 
 for the last act the Gusher went round behind to lend a 
 merry little howl to the band. 
 
 It happened on this particular night that after one 
 series of groans, when the action of the play demanded 
 a rest, Lane, the property man, caught a cracking big rat, 
 4 
 
50 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 and all the company, including Daddy Herbert, forsook 
 the green-room to look at it. I was poring over a 
 book of the play, when I saw the tape-string wiggling 
 like mad in a wild search for the wails of the demented. 
 Now, the Gusher has lungs of immense capacity, but she 
 longs for innovations ; so, instead of raising her dulcet 
 voice in a double-barrelled yell, she grabbed one of those 
 twisted brass instruments, called a trombone, that a mem- 
 ber of the company had left behind when he joined the 
 rat-hunt. She bent her energy to the getting out of it 
 all the wickedness that lies in a trombone. 
 
 My senses, what a row ! Prolonged toots, like an ex- 
 press coming round a curve ; young shrieks that, full- 
 grown, would have crowded ear infirmaries ; a variety of 
 notes that only a steam calliope could rival. " In love 
 and pleased with ruin," fascinated by the dread instru- 
 ment, still blew I on. What mattered if the string long 
 since had ceased to vibrate ! What mattered if Mrs. 
 Waller was at white-heat upstairs and the audience in 
 roars of laughter ! I was playing the trombone to the 
 queen's taste, and until David Waller, Harry Hotto, and 
 Maurice Pike wrested the instrument from my grasp, I 
 just warmed up " the Duchess of Malfi," and made things 
 very funny for everybody but myself ; I caught it. 
 
 I was going to tell you of a very droll performance of 
 Pauline that happened at this same Adelphi Theatre. 
 The star was a pretty little woman ; but it turned out 
 she hadn't made much of " a head," as they say in Dub- 
 lin. We went from Troy down to Albany to visit the 
 Western girls during the day, and, to fortify us against a 
 sleigh-ride back to Troy, Lucille compounded some se- 
 ductive hot stuff of whisky, eggs, milk and brandy. I 
 never knew eggs and milk to behave so in a custard, but 
 in this instance they raised the mischief. The nearer we 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 51 
 
 got to Troy the worse Pauline became ; but she pulled 
 herself together and got through fairly till the time she 
 enters and is told by her parents the Prince must leave 
 them. Here Pauline lost her bearings. She gravely 
 turned to the old folks and began Desdemona's speech : 
 
 I do perceive here a divided duty. 
 
 To you I am bound by birth and education. 
 
 My birth and education both do teach me 
 
 How to respect you ; but here's my husband, etc. 
 
 Charley Salisbury was doing the Dad ; he promptly 
 went on : 
 
 My life has fallen into the sere and yellow leaf, 
 
 And that which should accompany old age, 
 
 Love, obedience, honor, troops of friends, 
 
 I have not ; but in their place, curses, not loud, but deep, 
 
 And one fair daughter tighter that a peep. 
 
 It was lovely ! 
 
SOME PUBLIC NUISANCES. 
 
 I'VE made up my mind to go to my friend, the pho- 
 tographer, and get a second-hand screw one of those 
 cast-iron, vice-like contrivances that imprison the human 
 skull while the camera does its fatal work. I will cart 
 this to theatres with me, and impale the cocoanut in front 
 of me on its tines like a doughnut on a fork. You see I 
 am desperate, and if you meet me in the lobby lugging 
 something that looks like the original old cross-bow gun 
 Edward introduced at the battle of Cressy, don't be 
 afraid ; it's not ammunition it's my apparatus for see- 
 ing the show. 
 
 At a first night lately, I sat behind a big woman who 
 always accompanies an old musical critic to the theatres. 
 She wears on her devoted head a regular old-timer water- 
 fall ; the hair of half a dozen women is piled up the 
 back, sides and top. On this hirsute construction she 
 throws out little hair corns and wens. I suppose she 
 would term them puffs. And then she clasps on an 
 Alpine hat with the spoils of a herd of ostriches waving 
 above. This cheerful woman betrays symptoms of 
 palsy, St. Vitus' dance and epilepsy. That blessed head 
 of hers bobs and wiggles and shakes like the topknot of 
 a Chinese mandarin. 
 
 I sat the other night in blissful ignorance of the stage, 
 till it struck me I'd like to see somebody on it. I 
 scrooched and peeked under the right ear-ring of this 
 theatrical abomination. In an instant that loophole was 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 53 
 
 lost and the head ducked to the right. Here was my 
 chance. I flew for the opening at the left. Old fuss- 
 and-feathers was back as quick as I. This operation 
 was repeated twenty times a minute. So I gave up 
 further attempt to see the performance and watched the 
 waving head, now up, now down ; now right and left. 
 Oh, Jacob's Oil ! how I did wish she might have a stiff 
 neck for about half an hour. 
 
 Next to the girl with the dreadful big hat and the old 
 hen with the hair embankment, comes the ruffian who 
 rolls up his coat and sits on it. It's a sure sign he's in 
 an impecunious condition and is wearing old clothes. 
 No man ruthlessly rolls a valuable garment and drops on 
 it as if he were a pile-driver. And if the coat is a good 
 one, then he's an unbroken countryman fixed up to " go 
 to York." He has a wild idea that some one will steal 
 that new overcoat unless he has it under him, or he has 
 been used to the soft side of a wooden bench, and got 
 into the habit of tempering the tough board to the ten- 
 der pantaloons by making a sandwich of himself, his coat 
 and a section of hickory (man-like, getting the meat in 
 the wrong place). 
 
 An inspiring spectacle used to be a procession of Peter 
 Cooper (the ex-mayor) and the air-pillow. Sometimes 
 Peter went, already blown up, with the air-pillow on his 
 arm ; sometimes the ex-mayor bore it under his coat, 
 folded up. It was one of the old-fashioned kind built 
 like a life-preserver, round, with a hole in the middle. 
 They didn't go to theatres often, if ever ; but the Gusher 
 was in for all sorts of wild excitement, and therefore 
 took in Geographical Society meetings and ratifications 
 and debates. So in the bowels of the earth, over the 
 corner of Eighth street and Third avenue, she often 
 came upon the blowing up of Peter when he came with 
 
54 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 his cushion in a collapsed state. But Peter was a philan- 
 thropist, and I honestly believe, in his tripe-like old peri- 
 cardium, there was as much good-will to man as is found 
 in the human heart. If he thought he was obstructing 
 any fellow-creature's view of Chief-Justice Daly's geo- 
 graphical legs, he would blow off his cushion as quick as 
 a wink. Heaven bless him ! 
 
 Not so the hair-raising woman or the coat-roosting 
 man. They are as careless of the feelings of others as 
 they are careful of their own, but the hour of retribution 
 draws nigh. I'm going to get the head-screw, and I'm 
 equal to applying it red hot, as I did the plaster to Char- 
 lotte Cushman's back. I never told you about that, did 
 I ? Well, I must, for it's funny. 
 
 Charlotte was stopping in the same hotel with me once, 
 many years ago. She had a faithful colored maid and a 
 Scotch terrier as travelling companions. Lottie was not 
 extravagant ; so, dispensing with a carriage the first 
 night of her engagement, the dog, the maid, and the 
 tragedienne set off to find the back door of the theatre. 
 It was not more than three blocks away ; but in a blind- 
 ing blizzard of a storm, it took her some three-quarters 
 of an hour to reach it by going quite out of town and 
 coming in by a cross-lot cowpath. She took a fearful 
 cold, and after delighting the youthful Gusher with her 
 marvellous Meg Merriles, won her heart completely by 
 asking her to share her supper. It was during this sup- 
 per that the subject of a plaster was broached. The 
 cherished dog was taken wheezy, and the maid began 
 rubbing its throat with camphorated oil. Charlotte pro- 
 duced a lovely kid plaster, thickly spread with a black 
 mixture like tar. 
 
 " Now, warm that well," she said, " and put it just be- 
 tween my shoulders." 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 55 
 
 My acquaintance with Burgundy pitch in plasters was 
 limited. I held the blamed thing to a roaring grate fire, 
 while Miss Cushman let down the neck of her dress. 
 When the plaster began to melt in the fervid heat, and 
 my fingers were well scorched, I clapped it on the un- 
 fortunate actress's back, and a howl went up to heaven 
 that shook the roof. 
 
 " Take it off ! " she shrieked. It wouldn't come off, 
 and it didn't come off ; it stopped where it was and 
 sizzled, and we had doctors and all sorts of curatives for 
 burns, and I was in disgrace (as usual). This digression 
 has little to do with the subject, only to show how likely 
 I am to give folks things red-hot when my sympathy is 
 aroused. 
 
A PRISON INCIDENT. 
 
 I WAS reminded, when passing Meriden recently, of an 
 event happening many years ago, by the boarding of the 
 cars by a mean, contemptible-looking man I had thought 
 dead years ago. This man's name is Doolittle, and he 
 used to be keeper in the Wethersfield State-prison. He 
 bears on his face some awful scars. 
 
 I think the time is not far distant when the festive 
 Connecticutter will begin to believe that, if he would 
 have " his days long in the land," he must not, when 
 appointed State-prison warden, act as though the spirit 
 of Danton and Robespierre had possession of his Yankee 
 body. That small but severe State began a swindling 
 warfare on man and beast many years ago, when a peck 
 of hickory nutmegs, " biled " in a pot, with one original 
 Jacobs, did well enough for flavoring the unimpassioned 
 doughnut of that innocent period, and when shoe- 
 pegs sharpened at both ends passed for oats with the 
 unenlightened horse. 
 
 But time has changed all that. The blue laws and the 
 wooden nutmegs have passed away, and the only vestige 
 of the ignorance, the superstition, and the barbarity of 
 those early days exists in a small town six miles from the 
 capital, Hartford. 
 
 This town smells strong in the nose of high Heaven 
 for many and various offences. In the first place, 
 Wethersfield is one vast onion -bed. Every woman and 
 child in it has corns on his or her knees from kneeling at 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 57 
 
 the eternal task of weeding. Tears fill the eyes of the 
 stranger within its gates when first the affecting effluvia 
 bursts upon his nose. It is an old town, a pretty town, 
 with old, old houses and magnificent elms, and the pleas- 
 ant bit of the Connecticut River known as Wethersfield 
 Cove, hid away among green fields and waving onions. 
 But of a sudden a turn in the elm-embowered road brings 
 you face to face with a huge blue-stone mass of build- 
 ings, whose grated windows and forbidding aspect plainly 
 tell you you are fronting the Wethersfield inquisition 
 the Connecticut State-prison. 
 
 Prisons were not built for rewards of merit. It is not 
 supposed their inmates are happy or expect to be. But 
 as there is a merciful God above, to whom the best of us 
 pray for mercy, never for justice, so should the guilty 
 (and sometimes the unfortunate and not the guilty) find 
 the justice meted to them by imperfect man tempered 
 with that attribute of divinity. If ever there has been 
 inhumanity shown to poor fallen humanity, it has been 
 within those dark-blue walls. I question if ever the dun- 
 geon that echoed to the groans of the tortured Ugolino, 
 or the unhappy Leonardo da Vinci, heard more of man's 
 misery than the Connecticut State-prison. Warden after 
 warden has fallen before the maddened victims of their 
 tyranny, till it really seems as if the law of self-preserva- 
 tion would in some way control the Connecticutters' wild 
 desire to oppress and destroy. And so I am prompted 
 to tell you the story of Doolittle and the way his face 
 came to be seamed. 
 
 A good many years ago a young Irishman came to this 
 country and opened a modest little liquor and cigar-shop 
 in the city of New Haven. The building occupied by 
 Gerald Toole for this purpose was a frame dwelling- 
 house, further inhabited by several families. One night 
 
58 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 this building burned, and Toole, being insured fully, was 
 accused by his landlord of incendiarism, tried, found 
 guilty by twelve bullheads on evidence of a very weak 
 character, and sentenced by some judicial lightning-bug 
 to imprisonment for life. A mere boy of twenty, he was 
 consigned broken-hearted to the tender mercies of the 
 Wethersfield prison. He had never made a shoe in his 
 life, and for that reason probably the astute authorities 
 put the poor devil in the shoe-shop. He meekly, hum- 
 bly went to work to do his best. In a few weeks he got 
 so well up in his part of the business that the overseer 
 in charge told him he must do this particular branch of 
 work on an entire case (12 pairs) of shoes each day or 
 take a flogging. Day after day saw that poor young 
 wretch working with all his might only to accomplish 
 nine or ten pairs, to be flogged with leather thongs in the 
 hands of a huge blackamoor ; to have his raw and bloody 
 back washed down by a bucket of salt and water ; his 
 shirt put on and his maimed, mangled carcass thrust 
 into a cell, where sleep and misery refused to lie down 
 together. Day with its blessed sun followed these nights 
 of horror, till finally the man Toole was turned into a 
 fiend, who looked upon any means of escape as justifiable. 
 There came a day when, working desperately at his 
 bench all the hours allotted to him, night overtook him 
 with only the eleventh pair completed. He was as usual 
 taken to the stone- room, where the negro and the whip 
 awaited him. This time the forlorn, abused wretch had 
 made up his mind that if he must die he would sell his 
 life dearly. As the inhuman overseer, Doolittle, with his 
 assistant, began stripping the victim, the warden entered 
 the room, and, falling on his knees, poor Toole begged 
 him to interfere, pleaded with him as if for life, assured 
 him that another day, he thought, he would be able to 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 59 
 
 get through his case of boots he had done his best that 
 day. But his prayer was of no avail ; the warden told 
 them to go ahead with the flogging. 
 
 The shirt was torn from his raw back, and the lash of the 
 negro descended. In a moment, however, the scene was 
 changed. Instead of tremblingly receiving the cruel lash, 
 the victim suddenly turned upon his tormentors with a 
 small shoe-knife he had concealed in his waist-band, and, 
 making an onslaught on the entire party, cut and slashed 
 right and left among them. The fiend Doolittle and the 
 brute negro each got gash after gash, and as the warden 
 came within reach of the infuriated man, he got a rip 
 from the flying knife that loosened his unnatural bowels 
 for the rest of his natural life. Grabbing his injured crop 
 with both hands he made for his office, sat down, and in 
 less than a brace of shakes gave up his little ghost. 
 
 After the warden left the flogging party, there was a 
 reinforcement. Toole was overpowered, kicked, beaten, 
 dragged and. left in a dark cell for dead. However, the 
 warden was a gone man, and as a natural consequence 
 Toole would be wanted on a charge of murder. So to the 
 cell they went, got the half-dead creature out, and went 
 to work fixing up their case to make a presentable show 
 in the Hartford courts. This miserable man was tried, 
 convicted, and hanged, all in due time, and three years 
 thereafter there died in New Haven the owner of the 
 house poor O'Toole was sentenced for burning, and this 
 landlord on his death-bed confessed to the priest that he 
 was the real culprit. The good father would not, and 
 did not, grant him absolution until that confession was 
 made to the world and not to the church. 
 
 Law has got into such a muddle in this country, and 
 " put-up jobs " so often act instead of even-handed jus- 
 tice, that, going through our own prisons, I am not sure 
 
60 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 whether I am viewing the real worth and virtue of the 
 State put out of the way of interfering with criminals 
 by those who manage the bar and bench. Certainly the 
 annals of the Connecticut State-prison show some of the 
 keepers and wardens to be harder and wickeder than the 
 criminals under their charge. 
 
YE CHEWERS OF GUM. 
 
 LET any one advertise having discovered some emollient 
 for smoothing the human countenance some unguent 
 that, applied to the face, will compose and beautify its 
 expression, and he will find ninety-nine women out of 
 a hundred anxious to try it. And yet it does seem as 
 if every other woman was making a fright of herself 
 chewing gum. Wherever you go, in stores, in cars, in 
 church and theatre, abroad and at home, it's chew, 
 chew, chew ! 
 
 The masticating operation is not a lovely one. Byron 
 couldn't bear to see a pretty woman feed, and coun- 
 selled the professional beauty of his time to chew her 
 food in the privacy of her apartment, and tackle the table 
 with her own grocery well stocked, that she might dally 
 with a fork and trifle with a spoon, and spare admirers 
 the pain of seeing her jaws in the spasms of mastication. 
 
 Good Lord ! What would he do now in these days of 
 tutti-frutti and spruce gum ? Chew chew chew ; 
 wiggle and woggle their unceasing jaws ; turn over the 
 unending cud with restless tongue. Chew, chew, chew.! 
 On the faces, upheaving with this exciting engagement, 
 there is an accompanying expression of idiotic interest 
 in the absorbing business on hand a sort of chewing- 
 gum abstraction. 
 
 I looked at a line of women in a Broadway car lately. 
 By the door was a large, fat woman who had studied 
 the panel adorned with an advertisement of chewing- 
 
62 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 gum. There was a ponderous, surcharged air upon her 
 stolid face, as if the announcement she was reading 
 was taking effect. I glanced at the 'next woman a 
 girl with frail figure and luminous eyes, aesthetically 
 dressed, innocent and demure. She suddenly projected 
 her chin, made a circuit in space with her under jaw, 
 turned over her cud with a wallop of her tongue, and 
 started in as if dear life depended upon her getting sev- 
 enty-five incisions to the minute into that gum. 
 
 I turned in horror to the next human face. It was that 
 of a colored girl, with a " basket of wash " on her lap. 
 Her eyes were rolled up in a state of beatitude till noth- 
 ing but the whites of 'em showed. She was having an 
 attack of short, sharp, decisive chews that gave little 
 regular jerks to the top of the head. 
 
 Two young women sat next along the line. 
 
 " Ya-ump ! ya-ump ! Was Henry at your ya-ump 
 house, last night ? ya-ump, ya-ump ! " asked one. 
 
 " Ah-ung ! ah-ung ! You bet ah-ung ! Catch him 
 staying away ah-ung ! ah-ung ! " chewed the other, and 
 then they sat and looked me over and did " ya-ump " 
 and " ah-ung " in unison. 
 
 Further along a lady held the Amelie Rives number 
 of Lippincott's before her face in that intense way that 
 women accord to that issue. But outside the page there 
 was a rapidly bulging and contracting cheek, and a now- 
 you-see-it-and-now-you-don't play of eyebrow, which 
 indicated that the deadly work of gum- chewing was 
 going on in the very rockiest spot along Miss Rives's 
 lines. Passionate passages and tutti-frutti spasms were 
 taking it out of that woman's frontispiece together. 
 
 So I reverted with relief to the cataleptic countenance 
 of the fat lady by the door. Great Scott ! The imper- 
 turbable calm was all broken up ; the torpid cud was 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 63 
 
 revolving like a button on a woodshed door. The mass 
 of meat that composed her cheeks was writhing and con- 
 torting as I have seen the hapless child across its 
 mother's knee. She was out-chewing the chewers, and I 
 felt my way to the platform with my eyes shut on the 
 dread spectacle of a half-dozen women all in a row chew- 
 ing gum. 
 
 Girls, young women, and old women, for heaven's sake 
 sit down before a looking-glass' and take a look at 
 yourselves chewing gum ! The practice makes you look 
 ridiculous. It distorts your faces. It cheapens your 
 style. It endows your mug with the expression of an 
 idiot. I defy a girl, however pretty, to look well chewing 
 gum, and its work is fatal on the female face surviving 
 the first freshness of youth. It brings up the muscles of 
 the neck like whip-cords ; it stretches the flabby skin of 
 the cheeks by one movement, and shows up the wrinkles 
 by the next. 
 
 For the sake of your looks, stick your cud of gum on 
 your mirror as you pin your hat on, and spare the public 
 eye the painful exhibition of a woman in the pangs of 
 gum-chewing. 
 
THE SAD STORY OF CHARLOTTE ELIZABETH. 
 
 DID I ever tell you of Charlotte Elizabeth ? Lottie 
 Libbie was a rag doll of mammoth proportions belonging 
 to the Gusher at the tender age of five. On one hospi- 
 table afternoon a few infant friends gathered, and it was 
 proposed to give Charlotte one square meal. A hole 
 was dug in her mouth and about a pound of cotton 
 dragged up. The vacuum thus formed was filled with 
 clam fritters, fricasseed chicken, and any other eatable 
 thing we could lay our hands on. This meal was ad- 
 ministered with a spoon and rammed down with the 
 handle. 
 
 Now, Charlotte's digestive faculties were not equal to 
 her appetite. She suffered dreadfully with dyspepsia for 
 three days, and then the family began to suffer. They 
 tore up the floor for dead rats ; they sent for the Select- 
 men to look into the drainage ; they disinfected and they 
 deodorized with every means known in that unenlight- 
 ened age and benighted city. 
 
 Suddenly it began to be noticed that the awful per- 
 fume stole over their agonized senses with strange regu- 
 larity on my appearance. The Investigating Committee 
 immediately turned their forces on me. I was trium- 
 phantly acquitted. But, alas ! Charlotte was discovered. 
 The dreadful creature was taken with the kitchen tongs 
 at arm's length, and I was retired for fumigating. It is 
 distinctly remembered that my remonstrances were heard 
 at Rocky Hill, a distance of six miles, and my lament 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 65 
 
 for Charlotte Elizabeth clouded the domestic circle for 
 weeks. 
 
 It was the third Sunday after " the deep damnation of 
 her taking off " that every one but the darkey cook and 
 the early Gusher went away to chunch, and the cook 
 divulged the dreadful secret. 
 
 " They done gone bury Chart 'Lisbeth under the p'ar- 
 tree," said she. 
 
 With a wild shout and a fire-shovel I started for the 
 pear-tree, and the resurrection of my pet was effected in 
 short order. There had been heavy rains and blistering 
 suns. The coffinless body was a thousand times more 
 hideous than before burial ; but I hugged my poor dar- 
 ling to my faithful breast, and burst forth in a vow of 
 earnest and dire vengeance. 
 
 I knew the length of Parson Chauncey's sermons. 
 My wrath was not to be nursed that long. Too mad to 
 think of a bonnet or ceremony, with Charlotte under my 
 arm, I bolted into church and up the aisle to the family 
 pew in front of the chancel. The pews were high and 
 my head was low. The worshippers were conscious of 
 an undercurrent odor no way resembling Jockey Club. 
 Remarks were passed that the drain had burst. Then, 
 arriving at my family's headquarters, I rattled on the 
 buttoned door, and, to show my triumph, stuck Charlotte's 
 face Charlotte's horrible, grave-stricken face with the 
 ghastly hole through which she had taken her first, last, 
 fatal meal, yawning frightfully at my paralyzed mother 
 up over the top of the pew. 
 
 There was. in the pew a fashionable young aunt, who 
 fainted in the corner ; there was a sympathetic little 
 brother, who yelled out, "Where did yer find her? " and 
 there was a stern and dignified theological uncle, who 
 always said, " Spare the rod and spoil the child." As if 
 5 
 
66 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 to receive the benediction or sing the doxology, this 
 entire party rose. Charlotte and I headed the procession 
 out of church, arid I drop a curtain over the troublous 
 interval that ensued. 
 
 Every heart knoweth its own bitterness. I do not 
 intrude my private griefs on the public, but it was the 
 moral lesson that followed this episode, and that was read 
 to me by the Rev. Mr. Chauncey, that I think applies to 
 monstrosities besides Charlotte Elizabeth. The good 
 pastor pursued me to my home and found me a little 
 outlawed pirate, sitting on a hen-house near the " p'ar- 
 tree," breaking my heart over a feeble bonfire, on which 
 lay the smouldering rags of what was once my darling 
 and my pride. My Christian uncle had built the funeral 
 pyre, and with an umbrella warded off my rescuing attack 
 with the clothes-poles. He was then court-plastering his 
 head with family aid, and I, by common consent, was 
 banished, when dear old Mr. Chauncey took me in hand. 
 
 " My darling," he said, " in this world we must consult 
 other people's feelings. That which we like may be 
 very unpleasant to those around us. Always before 
 doing anything, think ' Will this be agreeable to others ? ' 
 There were disagreeable features connected with our lost 
 Charlotte that you failed to perceive. Her presence was 
 not altogether desirable, and never force upon an assem- 
 blage so unpleasant a creation as Charlotte just because 
 you love her yourself. You crowded her with good 
 things to no purpose, and you have made many worthy 
 people miserable by dragging her before the public." 
 
MRS. PRATT'S EQUESTRIAN EXPLOIT. 
 
 ONE summer afternoon Mrs. Doctor Pratt undertook to 
 ride the doctor's horse. She was a short woman, weigh- 
 ing about two hundred pounds, apothecary weight, and 
 the horse was one that John Nathan, the circus man, sold 
 to her husband and used to ride in the entry. 
 
 Mrs. Pratt had a chair brought out and mounted with 
 much dignity and cheerfulness. She had heard that it 
 was unfashionable to wear any skirt but the habit-skirt ; 
 but she had not heard that a pair of man's pants was 
 inevitably worn underneath. But just with her ordinary 
 summer pants on she rode away. 
 
 At the corner of the principal street just when all the 
 bank men stood on the bank steps, and all the sports 
 stood on the hotel steps, and all the women walked by to 
 be looked at a hand-organ struck up, " Oh, give me back 
 my Arab steed." 
 
 The Arab steed pricked up its ears and set up its tail. 
 It remembered the old tune, and round and round in 
 narrowing circles it went cross one sharp turn, in and 
 out. Imagination peopled the street with spangled ban- 
 ners and Mrs. Pratt became a circus for that deluded 
 horse ! 
 
 The woman lost her head that was the first thing she 
 lost the spectators were unable to lend a hand, as they 
 were holding their sides. Round and round went the 
 nag. Mrs. P. concluded to slip off. Just as Bucephalus 
 made a short turn, she took her foot out of the stirrup 
 
68 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 and jumped. But oh, horror ! her skirt remained hitched 
 on the horn of the saddle. 
 
 It was composed of treacherous alpaca, and Mrs. P. 
 was solid and penetrating. She burst through it like the 
 sun out of a cloud, and stood there in a basque waist of 
 black alpaca, with ridiculous little tails on it, a pair of 
 short, summer, white pants, trimmed with ruffles, a pair 
 of striped brown and pink stockings, and two congress 
 gaiters, without heels, No. 5 J. 
 
 Lum-te-dum lum-te-dum. Round went the horse. 
 There was no imagination about it then ; he had struck 
 a circus at last, bless him ; and so had we. 
 
 I was carried into the City Hotel and brought to during 
 the afternoon by restoratives furnished from the most 
 popular part of the building ; but from that day till 
 the other night I never saw Mrs. Pratt's costume repro- 
 duced till I saw the mermaid business of an actress at 
 the Casino. 
 
 The damsels of the stage should make a decided stand 
 against this idiotic style of dress. No matter how hand- 
 some a woman's form is, the half-and-half trick ruins it. 
 It must be wholly male or wholly female, or the prettiest 
 woman who ever stepped will be as much of a sight as 
 was Mrs. Doctor Pratt when she lost her petticoat and 
 nearly killed the subscriber. 
 
A RELIGIOUS WATERING-PLACE. 
 
 THE public prints have a great deal to say every year 
 about that autocrat of Asbury, Deacon Bradley, and it's 
 popularly supposed around New York that his edicts are 
 directed against the unconventional actress within his 
 gates. 
 
 I've been reading of his late protest about bathing-suits 
 and their continuance on the owner's back after the bath. 
 So, when I went down to that cheerful resort to put in a 
 holiday, I was greatly astonished to see the inhabitants 
 clothed and in their right mind, and the theatrical colony 
 by far the primmest and most clothed of all of 'em. 
 
 True, on the 'sands controlled by Bradley, there are 
 signs which read : " Remember, modesty in a bath is as 
 necessary as soap ! " (Let us soap so.) And again : 
 " A lady's water toilet should be made with discretion " 
 (and a lock-stitch machine). 
 
 The Gusher recollects an awful morning at the sea 
 when she picked a thread off a friend's bathing-dress, 
 and was paralyzed to see a frantic female stand before 
 her in a simple yoke of flannel and short pants. The 
 ready-ripper machine had attached the blouse to the 
 yoke, and out on the green crest of the dancing billows 
 rode the garment, while Maria shouted for an ambulance, 
 with a touching collar of blue flannel doing duty for a 
 dress, waist, and skirt. 
 
 Behold ! I had pulled the string that worked the 
 show, and made as much of a mess of it as did Little 
 
70 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 Jimmy Jumpup last May in his beautiful new suit, when 
 in a Fourth Avenue car he pulled a thread off his gaiters 
 and opened his pants on the outside seam from hem to 
 pocket. 
 
 These anecdotes will crop up in these otherwise sedate 
 papers, but they can be easily skipped by the student 
 who reads me for moral support and religious instruction 
 only, and not for amusement. 
 
 As I say, the Bradley signs indicate that trouble has 
 existed between the bathing-suits and Bradley. But I 
 saw no ladies shopping in wet flannel or promenading 
 barefoot in all Asbury. Down at Ocean Grove, where 
 the fervent Baptist lives in tents and the mild Methodist 
 fills the air with hymns, the sister in Israel goes about in 
 her bath-suit and the decorous deacon lies about all day 
 in knit drawers and a hammock. But then real Chris- 
 tian people can do things with impunity that secular 
 actresses couldn't think of without being condemned. 
 
 A camp-meeting flirtation is as much worse than a foot- 
 light mash as it's possible to imagine, and yet one doesn't 
 get talked of and the other does. Along about six in the 
 evening the air of Ocean Grove is strong of prayer and 
 Medford rum. The religious lungs are often erinflated 
 with Santa Cruz breath than the uninstructed dram- 
 drinker. 
 
 There isn't a drop of dreadful liquor sold in all that 
 sanctified spot, but there's more poor whiskey drank 
 there than there is in the Sixth Ward. They wrap up 
 demijohns in rags, and swathe junk-bottles in blankets. 
 They move from the wicked city to the pious colony 
 accompanied by such stuff as the wicked actor-man or 
 woman would use on their backs if they sprained 'em, 
 but never introduce into their stomachs for any com- 
 plaint. 
 
DELIGHTS OF THE COUNTRY. 
 
 I AM prepared to defend my statement when I say that 
 New York as a watering-place, New York as a mountain 
 retreat, and New York as a country summer resort lays 
 away over Long Branch, Newport, the Catskills, and all 
 the 'villes and 'tons and 'burgs that make up the list. 
 
 Your Gusher is a Cockney. The beauties of nature, 
 with bugs and without ice, are respectfully declined by 
 yours truly. The majesty of " ocean ! mighty monster " 
 is very nice ; but when everything you touch has a saline 
 dampness that will not dry and your shoes are full of 
 sand, a little city, dry and hot without, comes in very 
 well. 
 
 I've had a square laugh lately at some neighbors of 
 mine. They are wealthy Germans, and the tinkering 
 and improvements they keep up on their premises is past 
 belief. Their houses are in the very heart of this dear 
 old city ; but rural life they are bound to enjoy in their 
 back yards. One old man has put up a tent, and in it 
 he sleeps night after night ; the other has a little six-by- 
 nine grape arbor. Quite early in the season the worms 
 took off every particle of leaf from the skeleton vines. 
 Undeterred by this condition of things, the dinner-table 
 is set under this pastoral vine, the servants rush up and 
 down the narrow flag-walk, and the family, carefully 
 brushing off and picking out the worms, partake happily 
 of the dishes brought to them from the comfortable 
 house. A camphene lamp illuminates the scene, and 
 
72 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 they no doubt find in the inconveniences and miseries 
 attending the meal a pleasant approximation to the 
 horrors of country life. As for the other cheerful old 
 pill who sleeps in a tent, he's got a grape arbor and vine 
 minus leaves over him, and on those slats the neighbor- 
 ing cats congregate and fairly startle the night. This 
 brings out the Gusher's pack of five Scotch terriers, and 
 if that nice old Dutchman doesn't think he's in the 
 Adirondacks treed by bears, then he isn't a good hand at 
 dreams. 
 
 Notwithstanding these rural felicities brought right to 
 our door by energetic Germans, Monsieur got a kink in 
 his noddle the other day that his gentle Gusher needed 
 air and country life ; that she drooped, and was pining. 
 Therefore an early start was made on one of those hot 
 days fora heavenly retreat on the line of a Jersey railroad. 
 " We'll try it for a week, anyway," said he. " Every- 
 body is going to the country ; it's the proper thing to do, 
 and I think it will be very delightful." 
 
 The cars were insufferably hot and dusty. Crossing 
 some low, flat, marshy places, the first mosquitoes we 
 had seen this year rushed hungrily upon us. We were 
 landed at an exceedingly ornamental and gaudily painted 
 depot, and conveyed by a topless wagon, under a broil- 
 ing sun, three miles through sand that reached the hubs, 
 to the sylvan retreat that should take the droops out of 
 my dauntless spirits. 
 
 The best bed-room in the house was mine. I could 
 easily write my name on the ceiling, and I'm no Mary 
 Anderson or Helen Barry. It was four breadths of straw 
 carpet wide, two trunks and a wash-stand long. There 
 were twenty-four little spectacle-glasses framed together 
 and called a window, and there was a four-post bedstead 
 with a feather bed in one corner, and a German plate 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 73 
 
 mirror that represented me as a Chinese woman with eyes 
 on the bias and a nose split up like a Connecticut clothes- 
 pin, and riding straddle of an enormous rent ir one cheek, 
 that turned out, on investigation, to be my mouth. These 
 suicidal articles of furniture prepared me to find my two 
 quarts of water in the ewer so hard that the soap curdled 
 and floated on its surface. My one little wooden rocker 
 had been fitted to something so narrow and contracted 
 that a week's practice on a picket fence was necessary to 
 use it with safety. 
 
 But, then, Monsieur said, " I wasn't expected to live in 
 my room," and I retorted, " I wouldn't be expected to 
 live if I did." And we went down-stairs, where we were 
 informed that we were late for dinner, but they'd do the 
 best they could. It was just a quarter to one, and on 
 hearing that announcement, the brave-hearted man fell 
 down two stairs and shook the house to its foundation. 
 We took hold of hands, determined to stand by each 
 other through the perils of the meal with which we were 
 threatened ; and truly unity of purpose and determina- 
 tion were needed when we entered the dining-room. 
 Measly 'skeeter bars filled the windows and doors ; a 
 damp, soggy piece of blue 'skeeter bar was stretched 
 over the table ; the nose of the water-pitcher lifted it off 
 the cut-up green tomatoes, but it rested gracefully in the 
 nice, warm butter. We were brought two plates of awful 
 bean soup, a section of something that looked and smelled 
 like a bit of fried drum-head, but proved to be tripe, an 
 oleaginous slice of boiled salt pork, some string beans, 
 unpeeled potatoes, slate-colored coffee and a piece of pie. 
 
 These articles were disputed for inch by inch by the 
 flies. The thermometer on a brass-handled sideboard 
 stated authoritatively that the mercury stood at 98 ; the 
 water was warm ; some bottled lager was sour (the beer 
 
74 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 man and the ice man had not arrived for that day). 
 Leaving your correspondent, who has a lively turn for 
 Natural History, to investigate the manners and customs 
 of a plate of china that was sent to look after the pie, 
 Monsieur went forth to investigate the surroundings of 
 this delightful summer retreat. An hour went by. I 
 sought my den above ; the chair was impracticable. I 
 sank upon the yielding surface of the bed. What is it 
 Tennyson says ? " Had I lain for a century dead, earth 
 in my earthy bed," I couldn't have caught on to a more 
 sepulchral, mouldy, musty smell than exuded from every 
 pore of that dreadful couch. It was getting ready to 
 rain outside the flies just poured in. A variety of 
 hot noises, the scratching of katydid hind-legs, the buzz- 
 ing of a multitude of bumble-bees haunting a squash 
 blossom that had ambitiously reached the little window, 
 the far-off sharpening of a scythe and the clink of an 
 anvil at a blacksmith's down the road, worked my nerv- 
 ous system up to the jumping-off place, when the door 
 opened and admitted Monsieur. I knew him in a 
 moment, despite the changes time and trouble had 
 worked. I recognized him at once, and claim great 
 credit for my quick perception. 
 
 The gallant youth had sallied forth in Saratoga blue 
 flannel. He returned a gentle Jersey gray. The dust 
 of the road had enveloped his once noble person ; but 
 the sun and the heat and the dust had taken all the noble 
 out of him. A livid light danced in his off eye under a 
 place where a bull mosquito had bitten him. A baleful 
 gleam of malice darkened his nigh optic under a dreadful 
 wasp-sting. A bee had tended to his tender nose and a 
 hornet had staked out a claim on his intellectual brow. 
 We neither of us spoke to souls whose covers are worn 
 thin by much suffering a glance is sufficient. I rose, and 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 75 
 
 with one accord, animated by a single thought, we two 
 seized the handle of the commonwealth gripsack. We 
 two lit out, and through the dust and heat of three long 
 country miles never flagged or drew foot till the delicious 
 red and greenery of the variegated station struck our 
 delighted optics. 
 
 We slept in New York that night, and, with the help 
 of Heaven and light of experience, we will pass every 
 other summer night in the safe and comfortable precincts 
 of a city home. 
 
 And yet out in that doleful, uncomfortable Jersey cot- 
 tage two millionaires and their families are passing the 
 summer. A reverend doctor is giving the place an air of 
 piety, and an actor and theatrical author are lending a 
 flavor of iniquitous and riotous living to the neighbor- 
 hood. A demijohn damning evidence of guilt with 
 the actor's name on the tag, stood on the platform of the 
 station as we came away. 
 
 I wish 'em joy of it. They may have every feather of 
 my bed ; they may have my rocker and the corrugated 
 looking-glass. Give me my dear, sweet, city home, with 
 ice enough to make a little North Pole of my own, and 
 the joys of a summer in New York. 
 
POPULAR SUPERSTITIONS. 
 
 I WANT to call the special attention of savants to a com- 
 bination of circumstances that ought to mean something. 
 If played as a three-numbered gig without a saddle, I 
 should say it would pay. On the morning of Friday last 
 the Gusher was doing the suburbs, and dropped in to 
 see George Waters, who keeps the " Woodbine " up at 
 Highbridge. He was showing her some alterations he 
 intended to make in his establishment, and she was giv- 
 ing him some architectural advice, when whang through 
 the ceiling came a leg with a blue overall on it and a 
 good-sized cowhide boot on the end of it. The room 
 was plastered and kalsomined overhead, but the other 
 side had no flooring ; and a carpenter walking from 
 sleeper to sleeper missed his footing, stepped between the 
 beams, and plunged through the length of his leg into 
 the room below. 
 
 Billy Birch would say, play the leg, boot and all ; but 
 so much happened afterward that really one would have 
 to let the boot go. Dropping in to see a busy house- 
 keeping friend, she was found up to her eyes "doing 
 up " curtains. They were stretched on immense frames, 
 four layers thick, and she was bemoaning their tardy 
 drying. " Set 'em up on end before the fire instead of 
 keeping 'em in a horizontal position," said the Gusher. 
 No sooner said than done. They were carefully raised 
 on their beam ends, and ticklishly rested against the 
 chandelier. Then a nice seance of scandal was begun. 
 Madame knows it all, on both sides the Atlantic. 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 77 
 
 " He's going to marry her, is he ? " said she. " I'd 
 like to know how he can do it. We'll set this last poor 
 creature aside. But there's Lottie, Topsy's sister ; he mar- 
 ried her, and she has two children ; all London knows 
 that ; and Lottie knew all about him. Why, bless you, 
 he was the lad in the Maccabe business ; you remember 
 her, Canterbury Hall Villiers' sister, a pretty little thing 
 with four children, and Maccabe adored 'em all. He 
 had this young man doing his accompaniments for him ; 
 but one day after dinner he woke from a nap, and seek- 
 ing his wife, found the pianist had rather forgotten his 
 position and got above his business. In fact, he was 
 making love to his employer's wife, and then there was a 
 time ; he, however, forgave her, and " 
 
 Just here the big curtain stretcher came down, noise- 
 lessly but swiftly. The Gusher and her friend were sit- 
 ting side by side when the wet, starched lace swept like 
 a cloud upon them. There was a moment's interrup- 
 tion, and then those noble women burst through like 
 a couple of stars, and sat calmly amid the wreck of 
 Nottingham, waiting for further developments. Billy 
 would have played both of us for all we were worth 
 in the capital saddle ; but this was a great day for 
 catastrophes. It devolved on the evening to lay out the 
 day. 
 
 The Gusher had got infatuated with the minstrels. 
 She inveigled her young man into a pilgrimage up to the 
 Cosmopolitan. There she was, Friday, pointing out with 
 much enthusiasm the good things in the performance, 
 when crash ! bang ! ! behind her, one of the iron pillars 
 supporting the gallery dropped through the floor, just as 
 the carpenter's leg did through the Woodbine ceiling. 
 Expecting the gallery to swoop down on her like the 
 Nottingham lace curtains, and not expecting to go 
 
78 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 through it as easily, she beat a hasty retreat ; but where 
 is the policy-shop that will rig a gig out of those events 
 to pay for the amount of mental anxiety and physical 
 damage that dropped into Friday along with the legs and 
 iron pillars ? 
 
 But speaking of theatrical belief in Jonahs, and theat- 
 rical superstitions, what a multitude of signs and omens 
 the theatrical profession entertain ! The mystic number 
 13 has a horror for any actor ; the iniquity of Friday is 
 fully believed in ; an umbrella opened under a roof is 
 sure disaster ; to sing a bar of " Macbeth " music is to 
 invite the bolts of fate. 
 
 The only able-bodied superstition the Gusher enter- 
 tains is connected with ink and its diabolical significance. 
 (How many persons will hold up their hands in pious 
 acquiescence, thinking I mean the depredations com- 
 mitted under this giddy trade-mark! No. The guile- 
 less lead-pencil is answerable for these enormities.) I 
 refer to the upsetting of ink. My first experience with 
 it was many years ago, when, with a dress wet from 
 recently spilled ink, I was called out of school to receive 
 the news of a favorite uncle's death, and every death in 
 my family since has been preceded by some accident of a 
 like nature. 
 
 Then, again, will I ever forget the grotesque nature of 
 another dread experience ? It was at a hotel in Troy that 
 the landlord, with a pallid face, hurriedly entered my 
 room and begged me to go with his wife to the apart- 
 ments of Mrs. , to whom it was necessary to break 
 
 the awful news that her little girl had fallen over the 
 banisters and been killed. The heart-rending duty could 
 not be evaded, and with trembling limbs we betook our- 
 selves to the stricken mother's room. She met us cor- 
 dially and exclaimed, laughingly : 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 79 
 
 " I've met with such a frightful accident ! Upset a 
 whole bottle of ink." 
 
 I don't know how we went to work to enlighten her as 
 to the frightful accident that really had occurred ; but 
 
 the first thing I knew, the unhappy Mrs. was in a 
 
 dead faint, and the excited landlady had seized a bot- 
 tle of cologne, emptied it on a towel, and was bathing 
 the sufferer's head and hands, which would have been 
 
 all very well if Mrs. had not been using the towel 
 
 already to sop up the ink. 
 
 It is not so many years ago that Robert Heller was 
 leaving the Fifth Avenue Hotel one Saturday afternoon 
 for Philadelphia. As he entered his carriage he encoun- 
 tered the Gusher. 
 
 " What luck ! " he cried. " You shall go with us ; I'll 
 take no denial. I'll go write a note to Monsieur ; tell 
 him I've kidnapped you, and he'll come on the midnight 
 train. We'll have a gorgeous Sunday at Strawberry 
 Hill." 
 
 Suiting the action to the word, Robert turned and ran 
 back to his parlor on the first floor of the hotel, while I 
 remained at the carriage with Haidee. Another minute, 
 and in the best possible spirits, he appeared and laugh- 
 ingly exhibited his handsome white hand, the palm of 
 which was covered with a huge ink-spot. 
 
 "I've upset the ink-bottle all over the table in my 
 hurry," he explained, and I felt a chill creep over me 
 as I viewed the fatal ink. I would not go to Phila- 
 delphia then, but promised to get there Sunday, and a 
 dozen people can testify to my going up to the Fifth 
 Avenue Theatre and being scolded for my idiotic super- 
 stition about spilt ink. Sunday, I did not get to Phila- 
 delphia ; Monday, Robert's audience was dismissed in 
 consequence of his sudden illness ; and Tuesday night at 
 
8o THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 twelve o'clock I got a telegram, saying, " Heller died at 
 nine o'clock." 
 
 Therefore do I nail down the ink-stands and tie in 
 their stoppers, and confess I hold in religious dread the 
 awful power of ink when spilled. 
 
 There's a popular superstition that Joaquin Miller is a 
 poet. I put up my claim to train in the same band. 
 Listen to Joaquin's last and the Gusher's first, which I 
 find copied : 
 
 WAITING FOR HIM. 
 
 BY MILLER. 
 
 Over the mountains and down by the sea, 
 A dear old mother sits waiting for me ; 
 Waiting for me, waiting for me, 
 A dear old mother sits waiting for me. 
 
 Oh, waiting long, and oh, waiting late, 
 Is a sweet-faced girl at the garden gate ; 
 Over the mountains and down by the sea, 
 A sweet-faced girl is waiting for me. 
 
 LAYING FOR HER. 
 
 BY THE GUSHER. 
 
 Over the fence and under the tree, 
 The speckled hen is laying for me ; 
 Laying for me, laying for me, 
 That patient old hen is laying for me. 
 
 On another lay, in a different way, 
 
 An indignant hen is laying for me ; 
 
 With a tongue that's long, an arm that's strong, 
 
 That wicked old hen is laying for me. 
 
 Then again, that dense and opaque genius, Robert 
 Browning, gets at it in his most obscure way. Hear 
 him in 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 8l 
 
 JOCOSERIA PROLOGUE. 
 
 Wanting is what ? 
 
 Summer redundant, 
 
 Blueness abundant. 
 
 Where is the spot ? 
 
 Beamy the world, yet a blank all the same, 
 
 Framework which waits for a picture to frame : 
 
 What of the leafage, what of the flower ? 
 
 Roses embowering with nought they embower ! 
 
 Come, then, complete incompletion, O Comer, 
 
 Pant through the blueness, perfect the summer ! 
 
 Breathe but one breath 
 
 Rose-beauty above, 
 
 And all that was death 
 
 Grows life, grows love, 
 
 Grows love ! 
 
 And then listen to your Gusher, who quotes from a 
 jocose poem she has got under way : 
 
 WANTING NOW WHAT ? 
 
 An atom of sense 
 
 Striking out, trying to hit the intense ! 
 
 Seeking to write something, simply immense, 
 
 That is the dodge. 
 
 Fooling the world, yet a fool all the same 
 
 Eternally trying the same old game. 
 
 What of the Juniper what of the gin ? 
 
 Does it thicken the speech ? The story's too thin. 
 
 Toxicate intoxication. O Bummer, 
 
 Pants worn all last winter must last through summer. 
 
 Breathe but one breath 
 
 Alcoholic and death 
 
 Overtakes the rash fly 
 
 That is lingering nigh. 
 
 Thus he grows and grows, and every one knows 
 
 When oats, peas, beans and barley grows. 
 
 Now, for unadulterated idiocy, who's on deck with the 
 boys any quicker than your Giddy Gusher ? 
 6 
 
SOME AWFUL MOTHERS. 
 
 NOT very long ago I heard some cold-water colporteur 
 say that the saddest spectacle on earth was a " drunken 
 father." Perhaps there was a time when I might have 
 indorsed that statement ; but I have seen so much lately 
 of the " immoral mother," that the old man blind drunk 
 is an innocent and enjoyable exhibition. The daughter 
 is always an actress. Thank God ! the mother does not 
 often belong to the profession. But at this time there 
 are dozens of actresses whose wicked old mothers connive 
 at the infamy of their daughters. They are not the poor 
 black alpaca frumps of the green-room, who descant 
 with gin-and-watery eyes and speech on the talents and 
 beauty of that dear girl. This is a new crop dressed 
 within an inch of their lives ; connoisseurs in petit 
 soupers ; epicures who delight in champagne luncheons 
 provided by wealthy admirers of their daughters. 
 
 They must be getting very plentiful, these awful old 
 women. I encountered three of them lately in one day. 
 It was on board an ocean steamer that I stumbled on 
 Convenient Mamma No. i. Here she had been all the 
 week witnessing her daughter's improprieties unblush- 
 ingly assisting the girl to lose the shred of a reputation 
 she claimed. There she was, fully cognizant of the 
 scandal already in the air knowing perfectly well that 
 this trip abroad, under the circumstances, was the most 
 damaging thing her child could undertake. But she 
 smirkingly lent her ancient countenance to the whole 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 83 
 
 affair, and smiled on the girl's Lothario, like a Cheshire 
 cat. And this was a baked-bean, brown-bread Boston 
 matron, from whom a daughter should expect untiring 
 vigilance and watchfulness, lest the. New York wolf 
 should prowl round the Massachusetts larnb. She had 
 hung round the wings of a theatre while her profitable 
 progeny sat in the star's dressing-room. She had seen 
 the girl go in with the gentleman, when arrayed in the 
 costume of his part, and emerge with the gentleman when 
 he was ready to go home, and when the company were 
 discussing the barefaced proceedings. She, the old hen ! 
 saw no impropriety. She never counselled the silly girl 
 to avoid further remark by some pretence of decency, 
 and she sailed away content, knowing that she had 
 helped on to ruin the tender feet entrusted to her 
 guidance. 
 
 It was a disgusting spectacle, and I had hardly got it 
 out of my mind's eye when a similar one presented itself. 
 In a stage-box of a popular theatre, attired in such 
 gorgeousness of apparel as human wit and wealth can 
 devise, and bad taste heap on one little figure, sat 
 mamma-chaperoned actress No. 2. This mother was a 
 peony of flourishing immorality. The gold trappings on 
 her refulgent form looked like a spangle-dealer's show 
 window. Several insipid youths danced in to hang 
 round the young woman, and the old one made them 
 very welcome, until of a sudden the burly individual 
 who at present is the permanent basis of all the regalia 
 darkened the box-door. Then mamma's administrative 
 ability came in. She took the adolescent sprigs into 
 her choicest confidence. To each one she imparted the 
 
 information that Mr. wanted to see the dear child 
 
 on a matter of business, and she adroitly slipped them 
 out on an inclined plane of maternal anxiety and hospi- 
 
84 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 tality. Then she shrugged her shoulders and audibly 
 rejoiced at deliverance from those insufferable cads 
 when a month before one of the insufferable cads was 
 the mainstay of her establishment, and her " dearest, 
 dearest boy." 
 
 Wandering home under the April stars, I met a promi- 
 nent manager, gazing dolefully at a remarkably hearty 
 moon, hanging over the house-tops with a well-developed 
 smile on its rotund visage. 
 
 " I believe the confounded thing is laughing at me," 
 he said. 
 
 " It's not unlikely," I replied. " It's not so full but it 
 has taken in the latest news concerning your petted 
 prima donna." 
 
 And the manager groaned and inwardly vowed that 
 the solar system should never be afforded amusement 
 again through his foolishness. 
 
 " Serves me right," he acknowledged. " I put the girl 
 in a position to injure me. But for me she would have 
 been humbly trotting home with her little hard-earned 
 salary. I aided her to rise from the lowest grade to 
 popularity and celebrity." 
 
 And then I interfered and said " notoriety " was a 
 better word. " Celebrity " she would never attain ; for 
 the road the young woman had selected to travel led 
 direct to loss of popularity, ability, and an early grave. 
 
 " Don't blame yourself for her muddled career," said I ; 
 " where's that old reprobate, her mother ? " 
 
 For every sin in the lives of the three girls I have men- 
 tioned, I honestly believe those three old women will 
 roast in the hottest corner of Hades. Where was that 
 mother when that No. 3 girl was a wife and mother ? 
 Did she counsel her daughter, out of her own experience, 
 to find pleasure and pride in her home and baby ? No ; 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 85 
 
 she led the wayward young thing to look at the peace of 
 a decent life as a wretched fate ; to believe that cham- 
 pagne and chicken salad with Tom, Dick and Harry, and 
 orgies with young idiots in neighboring cities, and splen- 
 did dresses and showy jewelry, were the only desirable 
 things in life. She saw her child fling away every ele- 
 ment of earthly happiness, and take to every phase of 
 reckless extravagance and fast living, without a syllable 
 of protest. She publicly avowed her belief in the non- 
 sense of a husband and a child for a woman who would 
 live happily. When her daughter skipped off in a half- 
 dazed condition with some crazy male companion, the 
 old woman undertook to cover their tracks with those 
 who had a right to expect their business contracts should 
 be respected. Oh ! there will come a day of reckoning 
 for these old recreant Tabbies when, ruined in health, 
 faded in beauty, poor and forgotten, the one-time favor- 
 ite will spend her last days quarrelling with and cursing 
 at the wretched hag of a mother who aided and abetted 
 the follies that blasted the daughter's life. 
 
 No matter how much a girl rebels at control, she 
 respects the loving guidance she may complain of. I 
 remember an instance that showed me that, however 
 young a girl was, she has a sense of right and feels a 
 contempt for any laxity of proper authority in her man- 
 agement. This incident occurred many years ago, and 
 the girl was not more than fourteen. The mother was a 
 good, weak, God-fearing woman, who had a wholesome 
 awe of influential and prominent persons. In the country 
 town where these people lived, one of the most noted men 
 was a clergyman huge in stature and very unclerical in 
 his tastes. He contracted a habit of spending hours on 
 the doorstep of this old lady, chatting all sorts of non- 
 sense with the daughter. And this girl knew as well as 
 
86 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 possible that the whole programme was utterly wrong. 
 The Bible-banger was married ; had children near her 
 own age, and his conversation of an evening was about 
 as secular as he could make it. 
 
 However, the affair drifted on ; the parson kept com- 
 ing, and the old lady kept out of the way. One night, 
 however, she unexpectedly bounced upon the pair at the 
 garden gate. The minister's arm was around the fright- 
 ened girl's waist, and she was struggling to escape a warm 
 embrace, when ma, en route from class-meeting, burst 
 out of the bushes. The child felt her heart leap with 
 delight, since now the Rev. Mr. Mushead was going to 
 catch it. 
 
 Not a catch ! The bumps of veneration and reverence 
 on that pious old head wouldn't allow her to interfere 
 with a pastor's sport. She made a deep courtesy, and, with 
 an idiotic quotation from Scripture about there being 
 " giants in those days," went into the house, while the 
 girl, disgusted, filled with contempt for such maternal 
 laxity, flung herself against the little gate and wept. Then 
 when the Rev. Dr. Mushead asked her the cause of this 
 sudden grief, the child fired up and told him what an 
 old scoundrel she thought he was, and what a blasted 
 fool she knew her mother was. 
 
 " Why, if I ever have a daughter," said the young lady, 
 " and any religious pump with a wife and family comes 
 fooling round that girl, I'll come out of the house and 
 brain him with a water-pot." And suiting the action to 
 the word, she seized the convenient article and dealt her 
 reverend companion a clip on the nose that adorned the 
 pulpit with court-plaster for three succeeding Sundays. 
 
 Oh, these mothers ! What a deal they are answerable 
 for! 
 
BABY " LITERATURE. 
 
 EVERY little while a batch of letters in some divorce, 
 murder, or breach-of-promise case 'turns up and fills the 
 public with astonishment at their fellow-creatures' idiocy. 
 I suppose a hundred women in this city have written 
 notes this week and signed 'em " Baby." That form of 
 stupidity has a special fascination. In the name of 
 common sense, let the McClean letters from Stapleton 
 injure the Baby business. Our young friend Barwick 
 stood more drivel of this kind than seems credible. He 
 treasured up the Baby literature with an object, no 
 doubt, for the gentleman is thrifty and has an eye to 
 business. The young woman has money, if she has not 
 brains. This remarkable suit for breach-of-promise, 
 brought by a man, is not so ridiculous after he gets in 
 the correspondence. Some compensation is due a fellow 
 who gets such letters planted along his path in life, and 
 were I on the jury I'd give the sufferer half the " Baby's " 
 fortune. 
 
 A stop ought to be put to this thing some way, and 
 heavy damages may do it. You take a big fat old lady, 
 a relic of the black alpaca period you take a muscular, 
 tripe-like female with a wart on her nose find a whop- 
 ping greasy damsel with freckles, strabismus and bandy- 
 legs, and bet your moroccos, if you can entice either one 
 of 'em into writing you a love-letter, it will be signed 
 " Baby " to a dead certainty. 
 
 I have a funny case in mind that illustrates the state- 
 
88 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 ment. Some years ago in my employ I had the ugliest, 
 most appalling specimen of the genus woman one ever 
 beheld. Loweesa was Dutch, toothless, humpbacked, 
 marked with the smallpox, very cross-eyed and about 
 fifty years of age. Her first acquaintance with English 
 was made with a family of six boys who swore like 
 pirates ; consequently Loweesa swore cheerfully, uncon- 
 sciously, and originally. Her profanity used to remind 
 me in its construction of the innocent old man who went 
 to the tavern for the first time and returned home 
 anxious to use the pretty words he'd picked up. Look- 
 ing round for something to swear at, he saw the door 
 open and broke out with : " Lord all Hell, wife, shut the 
 door by a damn sight ! " 
 
 Loweesa used to start off like a clucking hen with a 
 " cuss-cuss-cuss ke damn." So she came in one day, after 
 I had known her about six months and began : " Cuss- 
 cuss-cuss ke damn, Missis, vas du gedanken ? Ich habe 
 ein shutz, und das fool vas goming mit Sunday night." 
 Then it came out that the lover was a Yankee, and had 
 written Loweesa a love-letter that demanded an answer. 
 Loweesa's triumph over profane English hadn't been 
 great enough to whip reading and writing, so she kindly 
 intrusted the conduct of her correspondence to me, and 
 the dictation went on as follows : 
 
 " Dell him he vas a nice feller and I geeps gompany 
 py him ; und dell him I hopes to see him Sunday, und to 
 gum early py de house, und pring his razor 
 
 "His what?" 
 
 "Der Gott im Himmel ja dem corns has me like 
 crazy, und Schmidt bin ein doctor ; ein doctor for ein 
 pferd." 
 
 So the letter to the horse doctor progressed. She sent 
 her love several times. She assured him of her intention 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 89 
 
 to geep his gompany, and when we arrived at the matter 
 of signature I was about to put down " Louisa." 
 
 " Nein, nein ! " exclaimed the enamoured horror ; " das 
 is nicht forstanza ! Ich bin sein Baby." And I had 
 strength given me to look that old pirate in the face and 
 write her down " Baby." 
 
 I should not leave the subject without telling you some- 
 thing of this remarkable courtship, which resulted in a 
 happy marriage and a pair of twins. 
 
 Schmidt came every Saturday night, all winter, when 
 the ensuing conversation always occurred, without any 
 variation : 
 
 " Goot evening, Schmidt." 
 
 " Good evening, Loweesa." Silence for a time. 
 
 " Vat villst du haben, Schmidt, lager or schnapps ? " 
 
 " Well, Loweesa, I'll take a glass of beer with you, I 
 guess." 
 
 " Hast du dim razor gebracht ? " 
 
 " Yes, Loweesa ; how is them corns of yours ? " 
 
 ," was Loweesa's fluent and truthful reply, 
 
 after which the surgical operation took place, and perfect 
 silence, broken only by the lifting of a pitcher and the 
 clinking of glasses, reigned in the kitchen till nine, when 
 Loweesa would say, " Veil, Schmidt, das vas dime you 
 pin going. Good nicht." 
 
 And Schmidt would take another very squeaky kiss, 
 another drink, and depart. In the spring I had the 
 pleasure of fixing up one of the most dreadful bridal 
 spectacles I ever beheld, and the following year Loweesa 
 made her appearance in company with Schmidt, who had 
 taken a day off for exhibition purposes. They both 
 carried bundles, and Loweesa exploded in the old fash- 
 ion : 
 
90 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 " Cuss-cuss-cuss ke damn ! Missis, vas du gedanken ? 
 Schmidt und I have zwei twins." 
 
 Sure enough, when they were unrolled there were two 
 of the ugliest babies in the world. 
 
 "And what have you named the darlings?" I asked. 
 
 " Diese bin eine girl, das vas Mary, und dieser bin 
 ein knabe, und he vas Yram." 
 
 " That's a strange name, isn't it ? " 
 
 " It's the same name turned around," explained 
 Schmidt. " My wife wanted 'em both named for you." 
 
 To this minute I don't consider I'm accountable for 
 any wicked ways I may have. Any woman with two 
 such goblins named after her as Mary and Yram Schmidt 
 are to-day, should not be judged harshly. 
 
THE WATCHMAN'S GHOST. 
 
 " THAT'S a beautiful Bible passage," said old Mrs. 
 Crofut to me " that about * sleep that knits up the 
 ravelled sleeve of care.' It just heels and toes me when 
 I'm clean frayed out." 
 
 " And oh," said the Gusher, to her friend, the manager, 
 " do put air pillows and head-rests into a few seats while 
 you are making alterations in your theatre. Give me a 
 rest and a place to sleep nicely in a theatre and I'm 
 happy. I've been at it since the palmy days of the 
 Bowery." 
 
 I'm old Freligh's ghost. 
 
 During Hamblin's administration one of the theatre 
 watchmen got a notion of sleeping in one of the third 
 tier boxes. He run in a little cot bed, and there he was, 
 snug and comfortable ; but one night he got too much 
 Hester Street whiskey on board, and instead of lying 
 down in his cot bed he just tumbled out over the rail and 
 came whizzing down to the foot-lights. They found him 
 impaled and quite dead the next morning on one of 
 the ornamental spikes that finished the stage off on each 
 side. After this, with astonishing regularity, for many 
 years, the watchman's ghost was seen. 
 
 Dear old George Fox, of pleasant memory, was doing 
 his first edition of pantomime, and I went to see it with a 
 party of friends for the fiftieth time. During the even- 
 ing they withdrew, and I went to the back of the box for 
 a quiet sleep. Every one on the stage supposed I had 
 
92 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 gone with the rest. The curtain fell ; the lights were 
 put out ; the audience dispersed ; the company dressed 
 and went home, and still the Gusher slept.^ About three 
 o'clock I awoke, and where on earth or off it I was, was 
 beyond my ability to tell. 
 
 I prowled about my narrow quarters and felt of the 
 windowless walls that enclosed me in their sides. A 
 damp, mouldy smell pervaded the place, a stifling feeling 
 oppressed my lungs. " Now," said I, " can I have chipped 
 in at the game of life, and been planted without knowing 
 it ? " All at once I struck the window ; the lace curtains 
 and the velvet rail reassured me. I peered into the dark- 
 ness. Of a sudden *a glimmer of light from the front 
 shone on the midnight blackness of the place. I let out 
 a beautiful cry of distress ; the third and fourth tiers 
 took it up ; the flies sent it to the paint frame ; the pit 
 caught it on the bounce, and a dozen nooks and crannies 
 of the old theatre chorused my effort. 
 
 It was the style in those days to wear white fur cloaks. 
 I was a perfect pioneer to style. Arrayed in a white fur 
 cloak, I stood in the proscenium-box and watched the 
 effect of my howls. The baize centre doors swung back, 
 and, holding aloft a bull's-eye lantern, there stood Fre- 
 ligh. He threw a line of light hastily up and down, and 
 then, as it fell on my admirable proportions, he just cast 
 his lantern down, uttered a brief cuss-word, and fled. 
 
 Then I was mad and lifted my voice in good earnest. 
 Such a pow-wow as I made, sounded like Proctor in 
 "the Jibbenanoisay," and Jim Webb as Macduff rolled 
 into an elocutionary whole. Dear old Joe Dowling was 
 a police captain then, or a newly-made justice I forget 
 which. Anyway, he was on the street when Freligh 
 piled out asserting that the watchman's ghost was pulling 
 up the benches inside. George Worden, Joe Dowling, 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 93 
 
 and Dan Kerrigan came to the rescue. They got a gas- 
 lighter, two candles and a kerosene lamp. Timidly the 
 big doors swung back, and the brave party, headed by 
 Freligh, advanced two or three steps inside. The gas- 
 lighter I took for a rifle, and cried out to them not to 
 shoot, so that we scared each other pretty equally. At 
 all events, I was escorted home, and received my thirty- 
 second lecture on sleeping in theatres. 
 
 But it's a great blessing, and next to the corner in a 
 fat red maroon cushioned pew in church, an orchestra 
 seat in a theatre is the place for dreaming. Why 'twas 
 in an orchestra chair that I went on a grand tour as 
 manageress of a syndicate as was a syndicate. I did 
 " Antony and Cleopatra " with Susan B. in the title r61e ; 
 I did " My Wife's Baby " with John Raymond ; I put 
 on " Glin Gath " with George Alfred Townsend ; I did 
 " Painless Dentistry " with Dr. Colton as leading man. I 
 went for the new pieces and produced " The Ace of Clubs," 
 with Captain Williams, and " The Ace of Spades," with 
 Mike Murray ; " Rank and Riches," with Lord Mande- 
 ville and Jay Gould, and a splendid pantomime (original) 
 entitled " Down in the Mouth ; or, The Adventure of 
 Jonah in the Whale's Society." 
 
 Ah ! then I had a clown Talmage and what a 
 daisy clown he made ! In my delight at his success I 
 got thoroughly waked up and then I went on thinking 
 of Talmage after my dream was over, and a report I had 
 read of his sermon last week, in which he entreated his 
 Christian hearers not to treat God flippantly. Now, 
 that was a cheerful request from the Boss Flipper. I 
 would like to call Tally's attention to the flippancy of 
 the only two sermons I ever heard him preach. He 
 opened the first occasion by assuring us that God was in 
 our midst that Christ was on hand. " He is here," 
 
94 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 screamed Talmage ; " He is entering now." He pranced 
 down the platform with extended arms ; he met an air- 
 drawn Saviour, shook his invisible hand, escorted him to 
 a big arm-chair, and saying " Sit down, Christ," waved 
 his big claw at the empty piece of furniture, and triumph- 
 antly exclaimed : " There sits Christ ! " Now, if you 
 can flip us anything more flippant than that, let's hear it. 
 On the second occasion, my dream-clown executed a 
 sword-dance about his stage, showing how people dodged 
 the Word of God. " Why," said he, " some persons hear- 
 ing the voice of the Redeemer, beat it off. They treat 
 the Saviour like a dog. They say, ' Get out, Christ ! ' " 
 And Talmage stamped and kicked as if a snarling cur 
 was barking at his heels. I tell you when things are 
 straightened out and the world strikes its proper groove, 
 my dream will be fulfilled and my syndicate will boast 
 the greatest clown on earth Talmage of the Taber- 
 nacle, the champion flipper of flippancy. 
 
THE DRUG CRAZE. 
 
 PERHAPS some people think the proper place to see 
 exhibitions of faith and spectacles of belief is within the 
 portals of the sanctuary. Not at alt. If you would 
 look upon truthful believers, go to a drug-shop. There's 
 hardly a worshipper in our churches but has doubts on 
 some article of faith ; but, oh ! the credulous confidence 
 of the 'pothecary patrons. It's astonishing. 
 
 The Gusher went into the drug business early. She 
 discovered the yearning of the human heart to take pills 
 and powders at the unripe age of six. She opened a 
 drug-store under the front stoop of the family residence, 
 and sold powders made of flour, sugar and ground cinna- 
 mon for one pin apiece. The infant ills that succumbed 
 to this course of medicine having given way to another 
 form of disease, requiring, in the early druggist's opinion, 
 heroic treatment, your Gusher compounded some diabol- 
 ical powders of starch, indigo and washing-soda. Eight- 
 een children partook of twenty-five of these laundry 
 powders, and every doctor in town was busy that night, 
 when, more or less sick, the Gusher's patients waked the 
 echoes with their disturbed little insides. Twenty-five 
 pins and a hundred curses, a mass-meeting of infuriated 
 parents and a proposition to lynch me, was the result of 
 that day's drug business, but it did not shake my belief 
 in the hankering of the human heart to take things. 
 
 A man on Broadway has met a great want by putting 
 up little medicine-chests that are filled with numbered 
 
g6 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 bottles of pills. Accompanying this box is a book 
 wherein you read : " For general lassitude indisposition 
 to do anything desire for perfect repose, take No. 14 at 
 10 A.M., and follow up with Nos. 19 and 46 between 
 2 P. M. and 6 P. M., returning to No. 14 at bedtime," etc., 
 etc. 
 
 " For reluctance to rise and tendency to lie down 
 during the day, take No. 51 in moderate doses until 
 exhausted, and continue with Nos. 30 and 65. (Bottles 
 can be replenished singly at any of our agencies)," etc., 
 etc. 
 
 This is a noble work of art, but it isn't as attractive as 
 going to the drug-store and laying in large bottles and 
 small doses of all sorts of medicaments. 
 
 Having lost a small dog down a coal-hole in front of a 
 drug-store, I went in to get an adhesive plaster that 
 would not only draw out the dog but enable me to stick 
 to it after its recovery. And while the proprietor sug- 
 gested another course of treatment, and went down in 
 the cellar to bring the dog, after his prescription, I sat 
 on a stool and watched the customers. 
 
 Great Caesar's ghost ! what a gang. I noticed that no 
 matter how small, young, and green the youth who 
 waited on 'em, they called 'em all " Doctor," and the 
 airs of those medicated runts were insufferable. I made 
 it very pleasant for one particularly obnoxious little 
 wretch by saying : 
 
 " Hand me one of those almanacs, bubby. I may as 
 well improve my mind." Now, if I had bought a seid- 
 litz powder of that lad after that speech, he would have 
 said, " Let's have an end of that terror," and chucked in 
 an ounce of arsenic. 
 
 I made believe not to see the malignity with which he 
 gave me a Liver Pad almanac and Cherry Pectoral cir- 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 97 
 
 cular. A large lady, with an entire upper and under set 
 of store teeth, smiled with unflinching confidence in 'em, 
 and simpered as she examined some tooth-powder : 
 
 " Do you recommend this, Doctor, as being perfectly 
 harmless ? I imagine Sozodont is injuring mine ; they 
 feel sensitive to the touch after using it." 
 
 I could not restrain myself, and blurted out : 
 
 " Then be careful how you handle 'em when you take 
 'em out." 
 
 Only that the Directory was tied up I would have 
 been brained on the spot. The enraged woman ordered 
 a box of Brandreth's pills, two capcine plasters, a pint 
 of hamamelis, a bottle of citrate of magnesia, one 
 dozen rhubarb compound fracture pills, three ounces of 
 senna, and ninety-six drops of croton oil, and dashed 
 out. I don't believe she is so mad this morning. I 
 hope her anger has left her, and that she has forgiven 
 me. 
 
 The woman that took that woman's place wanted some 
 anodyne liniment, an electric belt, a liver-pad, Kendall's 
 Spavin Cure, and Dixon's Condition Powders and Orien- 
 tal Cream. She in turn gave room to a woman who 
 wanted Wilbur's Cod Liver Oil, Aunt Sally's Corn Cure, 
 Pond's Extract, Jacob's Oil, Warburgh's Tincture, four 
 bottles Kumyss, half a pound of ten-grain quinine pills, 
 a pint of colchicum, the same quantity of iodide of potas- 
 sium and an electric hair-brush. She went home to have 
 a good time, and I aimlessly read the pretty words on 
 the jars " Bi-carnal Bromide," " Col. Clynth.," " Assa- 
 foetida," " Cammomile," " Slippery Elm," " Flax-seed " 
 is there anything more comfortable than a flax-seed 
 poultice ? I think a flax-seed poultice and a hop pillow 
 would make a beautiful bed. 
 
 You remember Louisa Eldridge's adventure with a 
 
98 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 mustard poultice, don't you ? It's a good many years 
 ago, when Louisa was young and charming, Captain 
 Eldridge and she were stopping at a country hotel, when 
 in the middle of the night the Captain was taken with 
 cramps, and Louisa slipped on a dressing-gown and 
 went down to the porter, who took her to the kitchen, 
 where she manufactured a rousing mustard poultice. 
 She ran rapidly up stairs that the blamed thing should 
 not cool. She flew along the passage till she saw the 
 dim light over the transom. She flitted into the room, 
 she rushed up to the bed, she pulled down the spreads, 
 she yanked up a night-gown and she clapped a red-hot 
 mustard plaster on the pit of a stomach, saying, " That 
 will relieve you, my dear ! " And a great big strange 
 man sat up and cursed her like a pilot off Sandy Hook. 
 Poor Louisa ! She had cramps herself before she gained 
 her own room, and fainted on the hearth-rug, while the 
 man with the mustard poultice went raging round to find 
 his unknown assailant. 
 
 I don't know how many funny things I should have 
 been reminded of in that drug-shop if the proprietor had 
 not come up the trap with the lost dog. But I would 
 like to ask my simple sex what on earth they use such a 
 lot of trumpery medicine for ! How on earth can they 
 believe in so many quack nostrums ? Once in a while 
 you find a man given to trying all sorts of drugs, but it's 
 the women who support the apothecaries. No wonder 
 they are the weaker sex. I'm amazed they have any 
 strength at all. 
 
 I knew one gentleman, as bald as a pound of butter, 
 who is always trying everything. A lady friend fell out 
 of a hammock this summer and sustained injuries that 
 rendered a very complicated prescription necessary. 
 This gentleman was going into the city, and the lady 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 99 
 
 asked him to kindly leave the prescription at Caswell's 
 and have it sent out by messenger. 
 
 " Certainly," said the old Curiosity Shop as he took it ; 
 " what's this for ? " 
 
 " To promote the growth of the hair," said the lady. 
 " I think sea bathing is making my hair come out." The 
 gentleman took the recipe and trotted off. Three weeks 
 after he said : " By the way, Mrs. , how is that pre- 
 scription doing for you ? Do you. find it of any benefit ? 
 For you see I took the liberty of having it put up for 
 myself, and I have been rubbing it into my head faith- 
 fully for twenty days and I can't discern a hair as yet." 
 
 Oh, Moses ! How did that woman control herself to 
 answer ? I should have exploded like an overcharged 
 rocket. 
 
 And while I am on the subject of hair-growing, let me 
 give my dear sisters a word of warning particularly 
 those belonging to the dramatic profession. Don't use 
 vaseline on your face vaseline is made from petroleum. 
 Petroleum makes the hair grow without a doubt. I 
 notice a downy growth on ladies' faces just now that 
 I never did before. I meet a score of women a day 
 that have moustaches beards that would give a barber 
 actual work. I believe vaseline is responsible for the 
 trouble. Theatrical people buy pound cans of this sub- 
 stance and dash it on at night to remove " make-up ;" 
 the result, nine times out of ten, is a pair of Dundreary 
 whiskers and a military moustache. 
 
 You know the story they tell to advertise vaseline 
 pomade, that it was discovered by a workman on a rail- 
 way who was entirely bald. This man used to trim the 
 lamps in which petroleum was burned, and wipe his 
 fingers like the tidy creature man always is on his 
 hairless conk. Of a sudden he discerned hair, actual 
 
100 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 feathers, sprouting in the spots where his greasy fingers 
 had been. Presently he had tufts of foliage on his head, 
 and thus were the hair-growing properties of petroleum 
 discovered and incorporated in vaseline which beats 
 old Dr. Graham's Unguent for forcing the beard in six 
 weeks. 
 
THE STORY TOLD BY THE CACTUS. 
 
 THERE are two subjects on this earth that are as inevi- 
 table and unavoidable as Time, .and they can be dis- 
 missed from every one's mind as easily as Johnny's sum 
 is washed off his slate. 
 
 If a man should know for certain that some time dur- 
 ing his life he was going to get his leg smashed, and it 
 would have to be taken off, that inevitable operation 
 would embitter every waking hour and fill his nights with 
 mares. 
 
 He knows that, near or far, there is surely advancing, 
 with ceaseless steps, the hour when his special box will 
 be carted to him, and his special hole in the earth will be 
 dug, and into the two he will be put for his last final 
 abiding place. He forgets that all the time. He never 
 gives that more than a moment's thought. 
 
 A mother suffers the agonies of death almost in bring- 
 ing a child into the world. Prayers are said in the 
 churches for her recovery, and amid thanksgiving and 
 praise she gets through a very tough experience. One 
 year from that time the very same inevitable trial awaits 
 her a few months off. She's as cheerful as a cricket and 
 dismisses the unpleasant subject from her mind. Where- 
 as, if the woman has had a cancer removed and there is 
 another one come, and a second operation is imminent, 
 she never knows one instant's peace, though the beastly 
 thing occasions little or no pain, as is sometimes the case. 
 
 The human mind can always forget about birth and 
 
io'2 r ,; :TH.e Gir^rfv GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 death. If the fate of everybody was to be ultimate 
 injury of a painful but not fatal character, we should be 
 a nation of weepers and wallers unable to. disabuse our 
 troubled minds of that horrible destiny for one single 
 moment. And yet the dread hand that we are shocked 
 to see laid on those around us, is raised and waiting 
 above our own heads ready to strike the inevitable blow, 
 and we hardly ever give it a thought. 
 
 " It's that which may be in another life that frightens 
 me," says the Colonel, who is popularly supposed to be 
 afraid of nothing. 
 
 " It's the awful uncertainty about the actual ending of 
 this one that troubles me," I reply. 
 
 Beecher and I know all about hell. We don't believe 
 there's an ounce left over from this life to fix up another. 
 Notwithstanding all the dreadful reports of heaven made 
 by different denominations of religious teachers, I ain't 
 afraid of going there, because, possessing a very con- 
 formable spirit, I can make myself comfortable and con- 
 tent almost anywhere ; but it would be a very reassuring 
 discovery if some one would find out that in our graves 
 we stop knowing. I've got an awful idea that as long as 
 the vital spark furnishes life to the hair on our heads and 
 the nails on our fingers and toes, that dreadful intelligence, 
 that consciousness we possessed when walking round, is 
 only bound in icy fetters, and may be making agonizing, 
 intangible protest against the inroads of decay. 
 
 Somehow I feel as if there was something in me that 
 was never going to blow out. I tried a fainting fit the 
 other day ; those around me said I was wholly uncon- 
 scious for quite a time. I wouldn't want to print the 
 experience of my thinking machine during the period 
 when I was apparently as senseless as an oyster. I can 
 never get it out of my head that vegetables are not sen- 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 103 
 
 tient beings. I mash a potato as gently as possible that 
 I may not hurt its feelings, and the tenderness with which 
 I shell peas would teach a total stranger that I held 'cm 
 in different esteem than the common run of mortals do. 
 
 I had an experience in England once that has more or 
 less affected my relations with the vegetable kingdom. 
 Kew Gardens, just out of London, were very attractive to 
 me. They are wonderfully stocked with the rarest and 
 strangest plants the earth ever produced. I've spent days 
 in 'em. I've sat beside the fly-catching plant, and fooled 
 it with a straw from a whisk-broom to my heart's content ; 
 but it found me out, that smart old plant. I'd touch it 
 slyly far down in the heart of its gloomy blossom. Snap 
 it would shut up, and begin feeling round with its stamens 
 and pistil for the supposed fly no flies. I'd go off and 
 come back unexpectedly when it had set the trap again. 
 This time I'd drop a thread with a seed attached into the 
 unsuspecting blossom ; up it would shut again. But the 
 third time it was ready for me. No more playing crows 
 at home with me. It actually winked as I tried the old 
 straw, as much as to say, " I'm no agricultural ass." And 
 he wasn't. 
 
 The cactus house was particularly interesting to me. 
 Gardeners here who think they know what cactus means 
 because they have a prickly old green spine with a few 
 gable ends growing on 'em, should see the cacti of Kew. 
 Great Caesar's ghost ! What a show they plant on the 
 earth ; solid legs like a real man, which go up and sup- 
 port a huge bulbous body, that in turn throws off very fair 
 arms and a head not to be despised. There they were, 
 hundreds of them standing in huge pots together. Some 
 looked as if they were fighting, and others might have 
 been engaged, so lovingly did they lean toward each 
 other. They were six and eight and ten feet high. 
 
104 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 I was on very good terms with the tribe, and one after- 
 noon I sat down in the greenhouse on a tub and lazily 
 contemplated 'em. There is a warm, oppressive silence 
 in a hothouse that always makes me sleepy. I leaned 
 against the pleasant legs of an old he cactus and went 
 off to sleep. The long twilight of an English evening 
 passed away ; a nice fat British moon rose over the 
 premises, and I awoke. Where on earth I was I couldn't 
 tell ; but gradually my senses trooped back. I remem- 
 bered the afternoon and that which I had done in it, and 
 I started to leave the conservatory. 
 
 Not much ; the big glass door was securely locked. I 
 had got to sleep with the cactuses, and I went back and 
 told them so. Will you believe it if I tell you that one of 
 them laughed? I don't suppose you will ; but it did. I 
 went back to the place where I originally fell asleep, and 
 to that particular sympathetic plant 1 related the situa- 
 tion. Again I leaned against his comfortable old legs and 
 again I went to sleep. It might have been an hour later 
 when something touched me on the head, and I looked, 
 and behold, my gentleman cactus had dropped into a 
 sitting position, had placed one of his lately raised arms 
 upon my forehead, and was bending his nubbly green 
 head solicitously over me. 
 
 " Are you comfortable ? " he said, in a choked and 
 strange tone. 
 
 " Perfectly," I replied ; " but astonished at this altera- 
 tion in your attitude and personality. " 
 
 " It is given me at the full of every moon to resume 
 for one hour some of the attributes I possessed when in 
 the flesh some thousand years ago." 
 
 ' Good heaven ! " I cried. " Were you ever a 
 real-for-true man, such as you resemble vaguely in 
 shape ? " 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 105 
 
 " I was," replied the cactus. " I belonged to the Bronze 
 Age, was a bronze bandit king of wondrous fame, but 
 devoured by bad passions and evil intentions. My war- 
 fare with man was carried on by the use of spears and 
 lances, and every awful spike you see upon my body 
 represents some injury I did a fellow-creature. Just as 
 many of these prickly spikes as you see sticking out of 
 my body, just as many are sticking into me. I was killed 
 in battle at last and buried by -my fellows. I hadn't 
 been a week underground before I felt a pulpy, pushing 
 sensation in my head. With constant persistency I 
 poked through my cerements and the helmet in which I 
 was planted, and struck at last the sunshine and the 
 showers. You can never imagine the uneasiness of grow- 
 ing until you are resolved into a vegetable the obstruc- 
 tions met by your roots, and the uncertainty attending 
 the portion of your person projected into the air. 
 
 " Every evil characteristic I had as a man burst forth 
 upon my bulbous body as an excrescence. Every cruel 
 blow I ever struck bristled as an ever-pricking spine upon 
 my sides and limbs. I had one hope of escape. The 
 forests about me were drinking in the heat of the sun, 
 preparatory to a long sleep in the ground, during which 
 they would become coal, be discovered by man, and on 
 account of the heat they had drunk, which was slumber- 
 ing in their bosoms, it would be carted once more upon 
 earth, and get, by the process of burning, again into the 
 atmosphere and enjoy out-door life in some winged 
 form. 
 
 " Alas ! Along came one day some cursed collector of 
 botanical specimens. My peculiar shape attracted atten- 
 tion. I was dug up and transplanted a dozen times. I 
 believe for every great wrong I did my fellow-creatures 
 when a man I have to be pulled up as a cactus. It's only 
 
1O6 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 yesterday I heard the head gardener say : ' That old 
 fellow is getting too big for his tub.' 
 
 " Now, if you could get an American capitalist to buy 
 me, I could expect, when he burst up and his conserva- 
 tory was sold, I might be knocked about, destroyed as a 
 cactus, and get back in some less dreadful and comfort- 
 less shape. Here at Kew, under the governmental pro- 
 tection, I am likely to last for centuries." 
 
 I promised that poor plant I would see Vanderbilt or 
 Gould about him, and try and get him an ephemeral posi- 
 tion in America. 
 
 I must have dozed off during some of his repin ings, for 
 at six I was roused by hearing men talking outside. I 
 suppose you will say it was all a dream that I slept 
 straight through. Much you know about it ! When I 
 looked about the cactus had resumed his position. I 
 found a pair of overalls and an old straw hat belonging 
 to the gardener. With the aid of a rake I put the hat on 
 my poor cactus friend's head. I ripped open the overalls 
 behind and pinned them together about my unhappy 
 friend's legs. And to this day the men working in the 
 cactus-house at Kew will tell you how the American 
 woman was locked up there all night and amused herself 
 dressing up the plants in old clothes. 
 
 No wonder, then, that your Gusher is troubled about 
 the effects of planting, and is giving a good deal of her 
 attention to the new idea of cremation with a view of 
 stopping her eventual growth underground. 
 
OUIDA. 
 
 THE woman who writes a note or a novel that rubs the 
 bloom off this old plum, the earth, is a worse thief than 
 the gonoff who prigs one's supper. I say woman, for I 
 can't call to mind a male writer belonging to the icono- 
 clastic school of Louise de la Ramee, the novelist 
 Ouida. 
 
 I laid down " Othmar," with a devout hope that Maria 
 wouldn't be unfortunate enough to read it. Maria is 
 morbid and sentimental, and gets her facts from fiction 
 and her views of life from romances. 
 
 " A blamed unhealthy, unwholesome volume," said I. 
 " It's no wonder that certain circulating libraries of good 
 moral character won't allow Ouida a place on their 
 shelves." 
 
 Sure enough I got a letter from Maria next week. She 
 spoke sadly of an approaching birthday. " There is 
 little to live for after thirty," wailed she in inky spasms. 
 
 " She's struck ' Othmar ' for a certainty," thought I, as 
 I went on. 
 
 " Time is so unmerciful in its treatment of women," 
 sobbed my friend. " Its beastly hand strips us of every- 
 thing. It gives us nothing." Oh, doesn't it ? Perhaps, 
 Maria, you have not had the rheumatism. Yes, my 
 friend Maria has just read " Othmar." She has risen 
 from the reading imbued with a sense of discomfort of 
 impending disaster of unreal and unnatural misery. 
 
 Do you want to know the sensation created in me by 
 
108 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 the reading of that book ? It was one of pity for the 
 woman bilious enough to write it. I can understand just 
 how Ouida writes these disappointed, embittered books, 
 for I was on deck once when she was garnering material 
 for a three-volume outpour of gall and bitterness. 
 
 It was a good many years ago, when Ouida was begin- 
 ning to make a noise. She was in London, but unrecog- 
 nized by the literary fraternity. In fact, I doubt if she 
 would make a ripple if she were there to-day. Ouida is 
 much more popular in the United States than in England, 
 pour cause. 
 
 Well, as I say, it was a good many years ago, and Miss 
 Ramee, who had been materially helped in fortune by 
 Harry Stone, a banker in Paris (who at one time was one 
 of the howling swells in New York), was in London, and 
 head over heels in love with a good-looking, thick-headed 
 young man, about fifteen years her junior. 
 
 I had a friend who had furnished a pretty house on 
 South Audley Street with all the majolica pots Howell 
 & James had in stock. 
 
 What a regular old cockney shop it was, to be sure ! 
 And when I found her one day in the dumps, I assured 
 her it was Dresden shepherdesses, majolica cacti, cloi- 
 sonne, blue enamel and mediaeval designs in pottery, 
 acting directly on her cerebral diatessaron, and indirectly 
 on her diaphragm filter. 
 
 We went to Devonshire to study shepherdesses that 
 were not attached to porcelain, and bulls that were not 
 in a china-shop. But before we went we rented the 
 house all but two rooms for transient occupancy, to a 
 tall, raw-boned woman with a perfectly shocking shock 
 of yellowish hair. 
 
 The woman had one of those featureless faces that in 
 young or old are never the faces a man tries often to kiss. 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 109 
 
 She was a daisy to look at, and very shortly we found she 
 was a very field flower in worldly wisdom. 
 
 She lived at the Langham Hotel, I believe ; but she 
 installed the thick-limbed, thick-headed, thick-skinned 
 young man in South Audley Street. Rented with the 
 house were two capable servants with the usual comple- 
 ment of eyes and the usual limberness of tongue. 
 
 Every time we forsook the hills of Devon and visited 
 the china shop we heard a ton oi.scan. mag. 
 
 " That woman his ha hass," said the cook. " She's a 
 fetchin' o' chops through the street hin 'er hown 'ands. 
 She comes to the kitching hand stirs hup possets for 
 that there lob-lolly boy. She's an 'oly 'orror with 'er 
 coddlin's." 
 
 And indeed it was ridiculous to see the worship laid at 
 a very sizable pair of British boots by this devoted and 
 ugly woman. The hulking young man sniffed with evi- 
 dent weariness at the incense continually burned before 
 him. He laid around and smoked and read Bell's Life, 
 and along about the middle of the day the madam 
 arrived with whitebait in a tin can and strawberries in 
 pottles. 
 
 The maid-of-all-work said the matured siren let down 
 her hair, sat on a hassock, and read him sheets of written 
 paper all about himself. This went on for two months, 
 when one day she packed her hero's old pants carefully 
 in a multitude of boxes and went off to Italy, taking him 
 with her. 
 
 The lad had taken a fancy to something in the china- 
 shop, and his inamorata learned from the maid that it 
 had been purchased at Howell & James'. Your Gusher 
 was in that establishment when the yellow-headed dame 
 came in. Remembering each other's faces, we began to 
 talk of the South Audley pots, and speedily duplicated 
 
IIO THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 a majolica jar that seemed necessary to Ichabod's hap- 
 piness. 
 
 " So you know Ouida ? " said the manager, as she left 
 the department. 
 
 " Ouida ! " blurted I. " Which ? where ? when Ouida ? " 
 
 "Why, that's the novelist, Louise de la Ramee," ex- 
 plained the man. " She's going to Italy, and has bought 
 lots of things of us to take with her." 
 
 Great House of Parliament ! I was knocked. I scuttled 
 home as fast as I could and went through the lately de- 
 serted rooms looking for souvenirs of the departed novel- 
 ist one of the hairpins flung out when she let down her 
 back hair one of the sheets of written paper she read to 
 her young man for I had read " Under Two Flags " 
 and was an enthusiast. 
 
 Naturally, then, I never let fall an opportunity of learn- 
 ing about Ouida. A year later it was known that a young 
 man, on whom she spent loads of money and lavished lots 
 of love, had used her very badly, and I found that the 
 adolescent calf occupying the pedestal in South Audley 
 Street was the party. Ouida shut herself up with a pack 
 of dogs, and wrote a burning, blazing novel, in which the 
 bare bones of treachery, hypocrisy and deceit were picked 
 with cannibalistic relish. 
 
 I forget the name of that work, but you felt as if you'd 
 been lunching in the morgue after you'd read it. 
 
 Here comes this " Othmar " with its doctrine of a 
 thirty-year-old hell to be endured by all women. 
 
 Her blessed heroines are of two sorts maddening 
 beauties who fade at thirty and find the world at an end 
 after having had a few glorious years of it, and sweet, 
 lily-like creatures very brainless who, exposed to the 
 fascination of some impossible man, die of love for him, 
 while he romps round with the Blowsabella. 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. Ill 
 
 There's not the slightest doubt in the minds of those 
 who have tried it, that a man's arms are the greatest 
 things in the line of necklaces yet discovered ; that no 
 solitaire known to Tiffany ever gave such satisfaction to 
 the female ear as the lips of a sinful man whispering a 
 fond and beautiful lie into it. I don't say that he doesn't 
 believe it at the time ; but it turns out a lie all the same. 
 
 But for any chump of a woman to think that when her 
 neck has lost its roundness and ' she has lost the arm- 
 necklace, that when her ear has lost the pinkness that 
 won the winning tale of love, the game is up, and there's 
 nothing left to live for that's simple idiocy. 
 
 The love of man is a very good thing, but it is not 
 all. When it tumbles out of the nest it doesn't smash all 
 the other eggs. 
 
 Ouida says Time " takes everything from a woman and 
 gives her nothing." 
 
 It's a blamed no such thing. Time should give her a 
 clearer head, a. stouter heart, a braver spirit. It should 
 make life worth the living by giving it constantly increas- 
 ing knowledge, and by depleting the stock of selfishness 
 with which we all go into business. 
 
 It's only to the brainless that Time is a terror. I ask 
 nothing to conquer the evils of age with but something 
 to do, and the ability to do it. 
 
 It's a pleasure to watch the world and see how it uses 
 us all. It's a very nice world, not at all made up of 
 Granvilles and Berties and Othmars and Idalias and 
 Napraxines ; not at all like Ouida's novels, but a most 
 interesting, delightful place. I know of none better. 
 
LIFE IN A FLAT. 
 
 THAT which is everybody's business is nobody's busi- 
 ness. Certainly no one attends to it. I would be very 
 glad to hear this morning that a mob of justly indignant 
 citizens had taken the paper-shell builders in hand and 
 were making examples of them at the lamp-posts. In 
 riding up and down the Elevated Railroad I have had 
 an opportunity of seeing a great deal of the building 
 going on uptown, and it's a safe prediction to make, that 
 the Buddensiek accident in a still more dreadful form 
 will occur over and over again. 
 
 There is no power would induce me to live in the 
 places where several of my friends hang out in joyous 
 unconcern. In some of my late wanderings I have tar- 
 ried for the night in aesthetic flats and new hotels. There's 
 a house up Broadway, much patronized by theatrical 
 folks, and with a well-known lady in the profession I 
 have passed a good deal of time there lately. They are 
 hard at work this week papering over the cracks in the 
 walls on the third and fourth stories ; but I have studied 
 them and I know what an unsafe barracks it is. The 
 building is very young ; in fact, it is teething ; but it is 
 cracked from garret to cellar ; cracked and re-cracked ; 
 clocks on mantels won't go without wedges of cham- 
 pagne corks tucked under to make 'em level on the 
 cracked slabs. Half the doors won't shut ; all the cor- 
 ners of the window-mouldings and door-frames have 
 nice little bits of ornamental whirligigs set in them, and 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 113 
 
 they are falling out in every instance. I wouldn't live 
 in that hotel if they gave me the entire receipts of the 
 house. It's a trap. 
 
 Two of my newly married female friends have Queen 
 Anne style of flats. The decorations are delightful. 
 They have a little elevator two-fat-women wide and 
 one-tall-man high. A little 4-by-Q-inch boy, weighed 
 to the earth with a peck of brass buttons, slowly lifts me, 
 when I call on Melancthon and Maria, to the fifth floor. 
 The blamed thing has stuck with me lately between the 
 third and fourth landing. I've discovered the reason. 
 The little shaft has shrunk and the little box has swelled. 
 Bubby carries a bottle of Jacob's Oil, ostensibly for his 
 back, that he says is strained by buttons ; but when we 
 strike the third floor I begin to smell it particularly 
 strong, so I know he uses it on the elevator. I read the 
 other day some one's affidavit of the efficacy of this prep- 
 aration, and the wording satisfied me the patient is a friend 
 of Maria's or Melinda's. " I have been pulled through 
 a very tight place by its use," wrote the man. He's been 
 up in that Hyperion flat-house elevator, sure. 
 
 When I am dumped by Buttons at the fifth floor, lt I 
 perceive before me," like Desdemona, " a divided duty." 
 There's a landing the breadth of a farmer's boot, and 
 two little doors not able to honestly stand side by side, 
 but stuck in like the letter V ; the right is Maria's and the 
 left is Melinda's. I go to see Maria usually, because it 
 comes natural for me to do the right thing ; but it 
 amounts to the same. I sit in her parlor and I hear Me- 
 linda in her kitchen telling the cook that the cold mutton 
 will be good enough for dinner with a can of peas. Wild 
 horses could not drag me in there after that. Between 
 the parlor and the bedroom there's a little plaster tube 
 which runs from the basement to the scuttle. It's for 
 
114 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 air so the builder says. So it is to air all the dirty 
 linen of the twelve families who live under the roof. I 
 slept with my right ear about a foot away from it one 
 night, and I was heartily sorry for every one of 'em. 
 
 Flat No. i is occupied by a widow with one son, and 
 he is a loafer. Far into the night that ruffian nagged 
 and threatened his poor mother about a couple of hundred 
 dollars she had received during the day. Flat No. 2 
 has a jealous wife in it ; Flat No. 3, an invalid crank. 
 The third floor contributed one of those nervous house- 
 keepers who can have convulsions if the laundress blues 
 her wash in the wrong tub, and a pair of poker-playing 
 gentlemen. The fourth floor takes a cornet-playing young 
 man as a boarder, and the other family have a daughter 
 who is keeping company with the most demonstrative 
 youth that ever sparked a girl. 
 
 This is the sort of thing the tube conducted into my 
 ears for three mortal hours : 
 
 " What d'yer want 'er thet money berfore nex' week ? 
 Lem-me use 't, will yer ? lem-me turn it over ? Yer 
 freeze onter yer stamps wuss 'en ever yer did. It's all 
 very well for you to tell me you wasn't out of the office 
 to-day. I've got things fixed so's I know. How comes 
 four pin-holes in your shirt bosom instead of two ? I 
 pinned down your Albert scarf this morning, just here. 
 Now look ; there's two more holes, an inch and a half 
 away. Oh, you forgot ? You did run around to Lafay- 
 ette Place and have a Turkish bath. Indeed, you're sure 
 it wasn't some other place ? When I am gone you will 
 realize what I have suffered. That medicine don't seem 
 to be doing me no good. I think it's a cancer. All 
 great people have cancers Charlotte Cushman, Charles 
 Sumner, Fanny Fern, Ulysses Grant and me. You know 
 that beef-dripping from yesterday, and every scrap of 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 115 
 
 that turkey-fat, was sold by that wretched woman for 
 soap-fat this morning. It's enough to put one in their 
 grave. I have endured as much as a martyr with that 
 awful, unprincipled thing. The clothes-wringer is broken, 
 and half the clothes-pins are left on the roof. I raise 
 you ten. What's that ? Three queens. Confound the 
 luck ! Make this a jack-pot. Give me two. Pass me 
 a match. Well, here goes. I look toward you. Hold 
 on. I come in on that. ' Toot-ee.-toot. Toot-ee-toot.' 
 (First bar of Mabel waltz.) 
 
 " My sweetest own, I really must [clinging kiss]. 
 Got to be at the office at nine. How I will think of you 
 all day. And in an hour from now sweet dreams will 
 give you to my waiting arms. Just here I will fancy 
 your little head put your little head there for a moment. 
 Oh, you darling ! I'll kiss you for that." (Sque-e-sch 
 another one of the old-fashioned kind.) 
 
 " If you were to talk all night I could not let you have 
 that money. That's the second yellow hair in a fortnight 
 I've found on your overcoat. In my weak condition 
 that girl shan't stay in the house another 'Tain't what 
 you hold, it's what you draw. I'll take four this time. 
 Toot, toot-ee-toot ! Now, darling, I must go just one 
 real sweet one." (Fearfully elongated kiss.) 
 
 Now what do you think of that over and over again 
 for hours ? 
 
 The closet they dine in is the other side the tube, and 
 a perfect concert of noises accompanies each meal. The 
 fires in those traps always occur in the elevator shaft and 
 start right up it ; the stairs are all huddled close to the 
 elevator. If ever there's a flame starts down stairs 
 that loving couple will be fried in their own fat, that 
 poker party will draw their last card, the invalid will 
 find her dream of a coffin realized at last, and the latest 
 
Il6 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 yellow hair will be scorched unknown on the bad hus- 
 band's overcoat, for the Hyperion Flats will go in the 
 twinkling of an eye. That is its ultimate fate, if it is 
 not rattled down this summer by the blasting of a big 
 rock next door, that it is necessary to remove so another 
 flat-house (the Satyr) may be put up. 
 
PREVALENT PERFUMES. 
 
 How happy shall I be when the catarrhal r-eign of old 
 King Pneumonia and Queen Diphtheria is over ! The 
 druggists have expended their invention and nastiest 
 drugs in concocting evil-smelling ammunition with which 
 to repulse the enemy. At the Madison Square, the other 
 night, a dapper man sat beside me who was eating for 
 his cold those diabolical lozenges called " Coldine." 
 There are moments when my friend Caswell, under the 
 Fifth Avenue Hotel, breaks out in the cellar with an odor 
 of assafcetida simply paralyzing ; but Caswell's cellar is as 
 a tract of land belonging to " Araby the Blest " compared 
 with the man who chews Coldine lozenges. This patriot 
 emitted during the evening this awful smell every time 
 he spoke, and a woman, with a nose, sat beside him and 
 seemed to be insensible of the dreadful state of her escort. 
 
 Directly in front of me was a large, portly woman who 
 warmed up during the evening, and got quite excited, 
 and applauded frantically, and every moment started a 
 flavor of a beautiful plaster she had planted between her 
 shoulders. This was wafted to me continually. During 
 an entracte a gentleman came down to exchange felicita- 
 tions with her about the play, and he was redolent of 
 Jacob's Oil and arnica and opodeldoc and a few little 
 things like that. This concert of sweet smells rose in 
 the auditorium like incense, and I made up my mind 
 that the unique nose I have prided myself on so long was 
 more of a nuisance than an ornament. 
 
Il8 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 But the great trial of the evening was to come when 
 an expiring shrimp of a dudelet dropped into a seat on 
 the other side of me. He had read the Works of Mich- 
 elet. That savant, in " La Femme," says it is a woman's 
 duty to make up like a bouquet, to have one perfume for 
 her hair, and another for her hands, and a third special 
 extract from some chosen flower that shall always distin- 
 guish her person. The gentle dudelet, feeling his case 
 resembled that of La Femme, had got himself up after 
 this fashion for the theatre. Only, " Sweet spirit hear 
 my prayer ! " he had selected those refulgent odors, 
 Ylang-Ylang for his delicate digits, patchouli for his 
 ambrosial bang, and he laid aside a spring overcoat that 
 seemed to be steeped in musk. I could forgive him the 
 Ylang-Ylang and condone the musk, but patchou4i is a 
 criminal offence that should have its penalty along with 
 other lesser crimes. 
 
 There are persons who can be affected by odors in un- 
 pleasant ways. I know one who has a violent headache 
 half an hour after she gets a whiff of patchouli. I am 
 not one of that tender-built brood, but I do get mad over 
 such a concatenation of evil smells as I fell into the other 
 night, and I was telling next day of rrfy sufferings to a 
 mischievous friend. 
 
 "Now," said she, " I have a gentleman admirer much 
 given to strong perfumes, and I have hit upon a plan 
 that is working beautifully. I tell him that the founda- 
 tion of most scents at present is Alkazinine, and that, 
 however charming they are at first, they speedily resolve 
 themselves into this primal factor, which is very unpleas- 
 ant and unhealthy. I'm a graduate of Vassar, and he 
 regards me as a miracle of learning. I gently dab a little 
 benzine on him somewhere, and he begins to complain 
 of the dreadful smell. * That's alkazinine,' says I, and 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 11$ 
 
 the poor man vows he'll stick to cologne, which won't 
 stick to him long. So you see I am breaking up one 
 man's bad habits." 
 
 Hereafter, I think I shall take an atomizer with a little 
 benzine in it to theatres, and contribute to the gang of 
 odors that frequent those places. 
 
 Some people look to me like smells, and remind me of 
 plants. I look about a house at a first-night and think 
 in an instant of a variety of things that never grow in a 
 theatre. There's Joe Howard and John Hoey and Tom 
 Doremus. Their polished, egg-like heads always seem 
 to be inviting some old hen to be sitting on them, and 
 instinctively my thoughts run upon barn-yards and 
 Brahma Pootras. The cotton-pod top-knot of Stephen 
 Massett is always accompanied by a vision of a nigger in 
 a hickory shirt just about to pick him. Lancaster looks 
 like a milk pitcher -of catnip tea my mother made me 
 drink once. A tailor on the Strand fixed up his window 
 one autumn with pantaloons of mixed tweed goods, and 
 in the top of every pair he had a branch of Scotch 
 heather. I always think of that shop-window when I 
 see Harrington. There's a very fine-looking banker at 
 all first-nights with a magnificently dressed wife. I can 
 always see an invisible label on his back on which is 
 printed " Extract of dandelion and rhubarb." Very 
 nasty to take, but it does you a lot of good. Why 
 should I always associate Madame Ponisi with a bunch 
 of lilacs ? I never remember to have seen them to- 
 gether. Yet always beside her, in private life or on 
 the stage, I see a stately bush crowned with nodding 
 branches of purple lilacs, and the odor is as distinct as 
 the vision. 
 
 I can readily understand why, in the presence of the 
 Marquis de Leuville, I always thought of Madison 
 
120 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 Square Garden and the three rings because he is the 
 greatest show on earth. But why should I smell copal 
 varnish every time my dear friend Thompson passes me ? 
 I know why Willie Winter always reminds me of a clove 
 because he's little, got a big head, and usually comes 
 into a theatre after a drink. But what on earth makes 
 me think of a yacht every time I see Jim Collier, and 
 smell the salty air from off the sea as he bears down the 
 aisle ? Is it because of his breezy way, or on account of 
 that picture a railroad paper got out of him with a sailor 
 hat on ? No, it can't be that, because that picture was 
 printed within a year or so, and I've had the yacht under 
 full sail beside Jim ever since I can remember. I won- 
 der if other people have the same associations. 
 
 When Charles Foster, the famous medium, was on his 
 legs holding seances in this town, I asked him once how 
 he recognized the spirits he professed to see as related 
 to this or that member of a party sitting at his table, and 
 he said everybody had for him either a color radiating 
 from every outline of their anatomy or an odor that dis- 
 tinguished them ; that the degree of relationship between 
 the living and the dead was determined for him by the 
 shade of color or the strength of the odor ; that about 
 me he always saw a deep shade of heliotrope. Two or 
 three dead aunts turned up a shade or two lighter. A 
 croupy young cousin, who had a communication from 
 my grandmother, was just faintly tinged, while grandma 
 had the same shade as my aunt, and I hope it was 
 becoming to the dear old lady ; it isn't to her grand- 
 daughter. 
 
 I think I met a woman similarly afflicted with myself 
 on the cars the other day. She had a lad with her, and 
 all of a sudden she broke out with : " I think your Aunt 
 'Liza will be to home when we get there. I've been 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 121 
 
 smelling molasses gingerbread all day." Revolving this 
 mysterious utterance, it can only be accounted for in this 
 way. Heaven knows I don't want to expect anybody 
 who is heralded by the smell of Coldine lozenges, and I 
 trust I shan't sit near any more warm porous -plasters. 
 
DOWN EAST. 
 
 THE late John Phoenix used to describe some chemical 
 or mechanical process " known only to God Almighty 
 and Mr. Paine, of Worcester, Mass.," and you'll find 
 plenty of men to-day in the Eastern States, who, 
 speaking of their partnership with Providence in some 
 great work, say " I and God." This good opinion of 
 self is not confined to the male animal. I think for 
 genuine conceit, insufferable importance and rank airs, 
 a journey to Boston is the quickest way to get the 
 greatest quantity of female idiocy I know of. 
 
 It begins at Hartford. The Hartford woman is quite 
 a departure from the New York article. At that place 
 the incipient crank sets in ; at Springfield it takes on 
 a deeper shade, and at Worcester it rages with true 
 Bostonian virulence. 
 
 The doughy complexion, the eye-glasses, the scientific 
 assertiveness of the Beantown woman are all there. I had 
 occasion to stop a night at Worcester at the Bay State 
 House, and I don't know when I have been so much 
 amused. 
 
 Time was when the Atlantic Monthly was the correct 
 periodical for Yankee consumption, but it seems to be 
 superseded by the Century. The aesthetic cover has some- 
 thing to do with its popularity, and it looks well ; its bizarre 
 back and wild lettering have an air of intellect. The 
 December number was just published, and I think seven 
 out of every ten Worcester women were taking Centuries* 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. I2J 
 
 Dinner occurs near the centre of the day down East, 
 and at six and later they take a nondescript meal called 
 a supper-tea. Hot griddle-cakes have the call at this 
 feed. They must cook a thousand cakes every night at 
 that Bay State Home. 
 
 The pasty-looking ladies of that hotel meandered down 
 about seven with their Centuries, adjusted their glasses 
 it's incompatible with intellect to have good eyesight 
 and opened on cakes and syrup. . I sat opposite a most 
 aggravated specimen of the genus. 
 
 A putty-complexioned woman, who set her Century up 
 against a milk-pitcher, bent her eyes on a chapter con- 
 cerning " Molecular Circumspection," and blindly shov- 
 elled in the cakes. A passage of great abstruseness 
 would absorb her. She would pause in the good work 
 and abstractedly poise a forkful of buckwheat and 
 molasses in mid air ; recover, and feed herself with a 
 gulp. She was simply fascinating. I couldn't leave off 
 watching her. I asked the waiter if the funerals from 
 indigestion took place in the house, or if they sent the 
 bodies home to the friends. And he told me the cakes 
 were not immediately fatal. They generally lingered 
 long enough to pay their bills and leave. 
 
 A certain class of sporting people have, with a few 
 exceptions, passed away. Such horsemen as Hiram 
 Woodruff, such old sports as Tom Battelle, are long ago 
 dead ; but in Worcester there lives a patriot named 
 " Pug " Wesson, in whose muscular frame and rollicking 
 face glow the fire and fun that made the sports of the 
 olden time vastly superior to the specimens of the pres- 
 ent day. Take the Dwyer brothers of this racing period 
 and the Golden brothers of the Mystic Park. There 
 isn't a horsehair on their heads. They could call on the 
 Episcopal Advent Conference and pass themselves off as 
 
124 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 country clergymen, so unlike turfmen are they in appear- 
 ance. But you take Wesson and put him into clerical 
 black, with a white choker and gold-rimmed spectacles, 
 a volume of Watts' hymns in one hand and Scott's Com- 
 mentary in the other you would never ask him where 
 the text was going to be, but sing out at once : " Hello, 
 old sport, what's this disguise worn for ? " 
 
 He's horsey, he's doggy, he's fighty, he's bully, from 
 his iron-grey cropped head to his active feet. He's a 
 record of the turf and ring, when there was a turf and 
 ring. It's a pleasure to sit in the little old-fashioned bar 
 and talk over real sporting times opposite a fine steel 
 engraving of Heenan taken before he went to Europe, 
 and surrounded by quaint old colored prints of race- 
 courses, the Epsom and the Derby, and lithos of the 
 famous mares Flora Temple and Lady Suffolk. 
 
 Yes, amid the bean-baking, cake-eating citizens of 
 Worcester, there are some very good things in the way of 
 men. I heartily enjoy their companionship, but I'm 
 mighty glad to get back to New York. We're a very 
 human gang here, and mighty few of us are troubled with 
 cranks, or strain ourselves to make an impression. To 
 have a good time seems to be about the size of our usual 
 aspirations. Putting on airs is a business that occupies 
 a very slim number of the community. 
 
AT THE INDUSTRIAL EXHIBITION. 
 
 THE supremacy and the idiocy of man are nowhere so 
 strongly demonstrated during the year as at the Autumn 
 Industrial Exhibition. I go up and look at the crunch- 
 ing machines for eating cobblestones, and the Goliath 
 looms for weaving wire fences, and I feel like leaning 
 up against the first old man as a sick kitten does against 
 the kitchen stove. Then I strike an old pump with a 
 patent unbreakable corset-steel, or a healthy idiot with a 
 needle-threader, and I want to scalp him as he stands. 
 
 The man who invents an article to meet a necessity of 
 his fellow-creatures, and the man who invents something 
 to enable him to provide for his own necessities, are 
 two distinct animals. I wandered about the Sixty-third 
 Street establishment one evening, and out of the hun- 
 dreds of inventions I didn't see more than a dozen that 
 I wouldn't have been ashamed to have fathered or 
 mothered, as the case may be. A variety of men have 
 come to the conclusion that a portable Russian bath is 
 one of the stern necessities of our checkered existence. 
 One Teutonic individual has evolved a chiffonnier that 
 opens, takes apart, comes down, spreads out and takes 
 in till it assumes the proportion of a vapor bath. A seat 
 is hung in, a lamp screwed on, a flap turned up, your 
 head stuck through, and after a week of preparation, 
 along about Sunday, if you are industrious and have 
 good luck, you can take a bath at home about half as 
 well as you can abroad. 
 
126 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 A Yankee got to thinking out the same problem. He 
 took the regular old tub and ran in a pipe at the side, 
 perforated with holes to keep up a spray inside, and he 
 hung over the top a rubber sort of a counterpane with a 
 hole in it where you were to come through while you sat 
 up in the bath. Over your shoulders you are to wear a 
 sort of campaign cape, such as the Plumed Knights sport, 
 and all you need is a torch to complete you for a politi- 
 cal boomer. I can't think of a more senseless pair of 
 inventions, except it be the sanitary efforts of a lot of old 
 chumps to wring money out of you for traps to make 
 your sewer-gas reach you with more ceremony than it 
 will if left to its own way. One dear old gentleman has 
 originated a glass bulb that seems calculated to show up 
 any impurities in the gas, and to prove to you, if you 
 watch it, that you get a full supply. 
 
 I suppose a year ago I should have said that there 
 were no more ways of building a surprise bed unless you 
 elaborated my idea of a combination stepladder, churn 
 and bed that I thought out last winter. But now at the 
 Industrial I stumbled upon an innocent fire-place. The 
 mantel was draped with plush, and on its shelf rested a 
 variety of bisque and majolica ornaments. In the midst 
 was a framed picture of Henry Ward Beecher, and his 
 features were wreathed with theological smiles as he 
 gazed at the well-filled trunks of a Parian marble 
 bather about to take a header. The ancient inventor of 
 this surprise party whisked away the plush lambrequins 
 and looked me in the eye to watch the general effect. 
 There was a clash of springs, a sound a's if Belva Lock- 
 wood was chuckling over an electoral vote, and down 
 before my astonished eyes dropped a ready-made bed. 
 
 u Now, then," said I, " what becomes of the cannel- 
 coal fire in the grate ? " And then I was told the grate 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 127 
 
 must be like the stove of Col. Sellers an affair of red 
 glass and a candle. I fairly tore myself away from this 
 ingenious invention that seemed to promise a still further 
 change of base, and was fascinated by the ugliness of 
 two old hens who were rivals in advertising dress-cutting 
 systems. 
 
 One of these monstrosities had yards of cloth checked 
 off into sections to be scissored out and sewn together 
 and warranted to fit the slimmest or fattest female in the 
 city. The other was a system comprising a square com- 
 pass one of those wooden things with glass phials of 
 water bedded in 'em and a pair of dividers. I never 
 saw so much machinery, and all to accomplish so small 
 an object. A hay-cutter hasn't so many attachments and 
 movements as this dress-cutter, and the unearthly ugli- 
 ness of the woman who tended the machine drove me 
 wild with delight. 
 
 " Now," said I to her, with a view to having a little 
 fun out of my evening, " I have just been at the booth 
 of a Mr. Palmer, who has a lovely face-powder, and with 
 great stupidity that man has provided himself with a very 
 plain young lady as assistant. If he had only secured a 
 lady with your complexion and features, the success of a 
 cosmetic used by a person so beautiful would be assured." 
 
 That blind old female pill simpered and smiled, and 
 took it all in like an evening breeze. I tell you, my gen- 
 tlemen friends, if you ever want to say a sweet thing for 
 any base purpose to an ugly woman, and hang back 
 because you think there isn't enough worm on your hook, 
 fling her out ; it's something wonderful how they will 
 catch on. I thought there was money in gambling that 
 I'd be snubbed for my outrageous kidding. Not for an 
 instant. She smiled on me like a Cheshire cat, and said 
 she had noticed that girl and thought Palmer was stand- 
 
128 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 ing in his own light. And I nearly burst with laughter 
 as I crawled away and fell on dear Father Fairbanks' 
 scales and found I weighed a hundred and sixty pounds, 
 which was a rough awakening from a dream I had of 
 being aesthetic and fragile. 
 
 Passing a lot of nicely assorted doors, set in good solid 
 frames, I saw a glass pane lettered, " Almost human 
 intelligence." This was a condition I had been seeking 
 in the blessed monkey up at the Park, and Jo-Jo, the dog- 
 faced boy, in the Bowery. So I stopped and investigated 
 it. On each door was a brass tube, and you could take 
 that door and give it a bang like one of Macy's shop- 
 girls, and it would go on a dead run till within five inches 
 of the jamb, when, as if arrested by a human hand, it 
 would gently, but firmly and noiselessly, go quite shut. 
 This is a boon to mankind. So many people dwell in an 
 atmosphere of clashing doors that this invention will 
 prove a God-send. And if this brass tube can only be 
 put on some young men I know it will effect a revolu- 
 tion. It lays a firm hand on a fellow when he has gone 
 just far enough, and brings him up with a round turn. 
 It checks him in his mad career, and gently shuts the 
 door on him in a manner not to be denied. It's a daisy, 
 and I ordered a gross to be sent down to me at once. 
 
 " What is home without a mother ? " sang a chicken to 
 me, from an incubator. It knew more about it than I 
 did, and so I told it, though I stopped and looked into 
 the business that seemed to have robbed a hen of half 
 the pleasure of life. I wish I could have presented that 
 scene to the north eye of a speckled Dorking I know in 
 Connecticut, who is always laying on my remorseful soul. 
 It was my business to chase and duck and drench that 
 unhappy fowl when she made a nest and began to sit, as 
 she would on a china door-handle. If her fond heart 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 129 
 
 could be made to understand that a little cotton-wool 
 and a handful of charcoal could do the weary work of 
 weeks in a few mechanical days, she would think less 
 hard of me ; and, by George ! I never wilfully injured 
 the feelings of a hen. 
 
 To turn from life to death is a much shorter step than 
 one thinks. I withdrew my fascinated gaze from a shell 
 through which a ragged little chick was dazedly picking, 
 and was confronted by a new thing in gravestones. Of 
 a properly unhealthy color, something like an air-tight 
 stove in its shape, there stood a number of white zinc 
 monuments and headstones. " Sacred to the memory of 
 Piltha Anee, etc.," I read in the place of Excelsior, or 
 Eureka, or Radiator. The noble inventor had got ahead 
 of me. I did intend to file a caveat this week on my 
 Aunt Susan's raised biscuits. As a material for tomb- 
 stones they are vastly superior to white zinc. It is a dis- 
 couragement to death and should be opposed by the 
 undertakers : this new idea in gravestones. Let intending 
 suicides go up to Sixty-third Street and see those monu- 
 ments. It will reconcile them to life and disgust them 
 with the consequences of their crime. Let them be told 
 that all suicides will have zinc headstones erected over 
 'em, and it will do more to stop the practice than making 
 it a misdemeanor punishable with imprisonment. 
 
 I noticed with pleasure a falling off in the number of 
 scroll-saws usually exhibited, and a consequent diminu- 
 tion in those remarkable racks and frames and toy rock- 
 ing-chairs produced by them. There are not as many 
 coffee pots dispensing samples of their productions as 
 there should be, and that pleasant person who had a 
 waffle-iron in operation every evening at last year's show 
 is not with us this fall. Perhaps he found the exhibition 
 unprofitable. Women used to walk round, get a waffle 
 9 
 
130 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 with their cloak on their arm ; put their cloak on and go 
 get a waffle ; turn it the furry side out and go get a 
 waffle ; hand it to a friend, look cross-eyed and go get a 
 fourth waffle out of the confused baker. 
 
 Poor man ! I pitied him almost as much as I do Pur- 
 sell. I often watch the sweet-scented old dames who 
 patronize his Broadway establishment. They go across 
 from Lord & Taylor's and Arnold & Constable's at two 
 o'clock lunch time. Pursell sets out a counter loaded 
 with all kinds of cakes. One of those fine ladies with a 
 coach and two men on the box outside will eat her way 
 'round the store. I have seen one devour four cream 
 cakes, a bun, five chocolate eclairs, two meringues and a 
 doughnut, and placidly point out with a sapphire-like 
 finger three modest ginger-snaps and one cooky as the 
 extent of her lunch, pay four cents and walk out with a 
 dollar's worth of truck in her wicked old stomach. 
 
 Up at the fair it's the same way. A woman way up in 
 society, rich enough to buy up the building, paid twenty- 
 five cents in my presence the other night for a little tin 
 box of something to remove dirt from all fabrics, and she 
 put one box in her pocket, another in the hands of her 
 attendant, and took the third from the unsuspecting man 
 who wrapped it up for her. 
 
 Said I, " Will that stuff remove all unpleasant substances 
 from clothes ? " 
 
 " It will," said the man " grease, pitch, paint, var- 
 nish ; it will extract any unpleasant substance from the 
 clothes." 
 
 " Then," said I, " chuck a bucketful on that old woman, 
 and we'll have her dancing in a flannel petticoat here 
 while the band plays the ' Rogue's March.' " 
 
A REAL HOME FOR THE AGED. 
 
 IT'S very seldom you see a Jew beggar, for that race 
 takes care of its own in the noblest fashion. The hos- 
 pitals, the magnificent orphan asylums, and the various 
 homes their charity keeps going, nurture and protect the 
 sick, the poor and the old so thoroughly that only occa- 
 sionally do you see a Jew in need. 
 
 I went to the Jewish Home for the Aged recently, and 
 my earnest recommendation to all my friends is to get in 
 proper condition at once for admission to that institution. 
 You have got to embrace the faith and be sixty years old 
 at least that's all for us girls, and in return see what you 
 get : A nice bed in a commodious room in a fine, large, 
 luxurious house ; five meals a day ; three suits of clothes ; 
 a half-pint of whiskey for every twenty-four hours ; all 
 you can smoke ; wine two days in the week for dinner, 
 and beer two days ; a couple of hundred pounds of the 
 best coffee made for you every month ; a two hours' out- 
 ing every day, and once in two weeks a whole day, and 
 twenty-five cents for car fare, if you have friends you care 
 to visit. 
 
 Mr. Haine, the superintendent, told me many amusing 
 stories of his experience with the one hundred and fifty 
 aged people he has to look after up at io5th Street. A 
 very old Polish Jew applied for admission lately. The 
 very first thing they do with new-comers is to bathe 'em 
 no matter how clean they may be. This old patriarch was 
 in a frightful condition. 
 
132 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 " In you'll go to the bath three times," thought Mr. 
 Haine, as he deliberated which part of the open lot in the 
 rear he should use to burn the Jew's raiment, when it came 
 off. 
 
 He led the way to the bath-room, but at its door the 
 dirty old Pole revolted. He would not be washed. The 
 superintendent explained that it was a rule an imperative 
 condition of his admission. 
 
 " I have lived eighty years without taking a bath, and I 
 won't begin with a foolish custom at my time of life," said 
 the Pole, and he picked up his bundle and trudged off. 
 
 But Mr. Haine has got one hundred and fifty clean old 
 men and women polished up till they shine. They have 
 nothing to do but keep themselves in order, and they fairly 
 glisten. The order issued by the directors of this institu- 
 tion to those having it in charge, is to make the inmates 
 happy. The filial affection of the Hebrew race is excep- 
 tional, and in their management of this place the love 
 they bear their own fathers and mothers crops up. " Make 
 those lonely old creatures comfortable. Do for them as 
 we would wish some one would do for our parents if we 
 were not on earth to care for them," said a Jewish lady 
 connected with the Board of Directors ; and that is the 
 rule on which the place is run. 
 
 If there is such a person in the world as a rich man or 
 woman who has found the married estate comfortable, do 
 let him or her endow an asylum for aged married people. 
 The Christians have no such place. Now, the distinctive 
 feature of the splendid institution on io5th Street is this: 
 it does not part the Sarahs and Abrahams who have 
 journeyed through the shadows of poverty together and 
 reached their hospitable doors hand in hand. No, thank 
 God ! The poor old withered hands are not unclasped. 
 They are assigned their room, where everything is kept 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 133 
 
 in a state of delightful cleanliness. The two little three- 
 quarter beds stand close and lovingly together. The 
 two big easy rockers each side of the polished plate glass 
 window have only a little stand between them, handy for 
 granny's knitting and grandpa's pipe. Their troubles are 
 past, their future assured, they are in that blessed Home 
 where nothing will ever part them till that unseen, view- 
 less hand that is reaching slower or faster for every one of 
 us is laid in undenying summons on one or the other. As 
 I looked at couple after couple who had reached this haven 
 of rest, I felt my heart swell with thankfulness to those 
 wise, generous people who have fostered this charity. 
 
 Is there anything sadder than the fate of a man and 
 wife who have stuck together till they are old and feeble, 
 to be separated at the last ? 
 
 "I'll take care of father," said a man to me one day, 
 " if mother will go and live with my sister." 
 
 That man thought he had sat down on a hornet's nest 
 when I began in my wrath to abuse him for his inten- 
 tions. 
 
 An old wife misses the daily growl with the old man. 
 She needs the bother his superior foolishness occasions. 
 She would be lost without the care he is and always was 
 to her. No, God bless 'em ! If the people love each 
 other long enough to reach helpless old age together, 
 keep 'em together, ye sons and daughters, if you have 
 to take in washing or go out sawing wood to do it. 
 
 Somewhere in heaven there is a saint whose name on 
 earth was Leo. She founded this asylum, on Seventeenth 
 Street, years ago, that now flourishes on io5th Street 
 to-day. I went and looked at the noble face of this 
 noble woman in a picture, and took her features well 
 to heart, that I may call on her the first thing after I 
 climb the golden stairs. 
 
134 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 I'm all the while thinking what I shall do when I get 
 to heaven. Its resources, as set forth in the pulpit, are 
 not very extensive. They understand the requirements of 
 woman, I have no doubt. That verse stating that there 
 is no " marrying or giving in marriage " shows conclu- 
 sively that terrestrial affairs have guided their manage- 
 ment of celestial ones, and we girls are going to have a 
 much better thing hereafter than we have had hereto- 
 fore. But that other statement, " they toil not, neither do 
 they spin," alarms me. As a cherub, of course I can't sit 
 'round, and how I'm going to exist without occupation puz- 
 zles me to say. I remember, when a child, having a long 
 talk on this subject with old Aunt Hannah, as industri- 
 ous a woman as ever lived. 
 
 " I dunno, child," said she. " Parsons is onsartin on 
 that pint ; but I want them knitting needles put along- 
 side me in my coffin, partly becos I may get a chance to 
 use 'em, an' partly becos I don't want 'em spiled by the 
 gals pickin out nuts wid 'em." 
 
 A year after Hannah took her last stitch, and all the 
 neighbors' children went over to see the faithful old col- 
 ored servant who had been our confidante and adviser 
 in many a tough time. I looked at the knotted black 
 fingers clasped on her bosom. Some one had put a few 
 white flowers in them, but they didn't look natural. I 
 went to the broken work-basket in the corner of the room, 
 where Aunt Hannah's knitting lay as she had dropped it. 
 A half-finished little red stocking for the youngest child 
 was set up on the needles. I stuck the ball of worsted 
 on the points and put the whole business in Aunt Han- 
 nah's hands in place of the white blossoms, which were 
 laid beside her wrinkled cheek. 
 
 An instant after this alteration was made the members 
 of the family came in, and one after the other they broke 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 135 
 
 down as they looked at the knitting work going to 
 heaven in Hannah's hands, and realized the stockings 
 they were losing. And Joel Hawes, the parson of the 
 period, took the knitting needles for a text and preached 
 a sermon on faithful servitude and the wages paid for it 
 in Zion that was unusual for its tenderness and sym- 
 pathy. 
 
 Hannah was planted, needles and all, for I explained I 
 had carried out one of her last requests. And when 
 Gabriel calls all up to begin, the little red stocking will 
 long ago have dropped from the rusty needles, but those 
 four wires in her bony grip will tell the story of her life- 
 long, loving industry ; and if there's any knitting in 
 heaven Hannah will get in her graft and show 'em what 
 a Connecticut colored woman can do. 
 
THE PLAN OF THE BOOMERANG. 
 
 I HAVE been observing Professor Gleason and his 
 methods, and I come to the conclusion that his is the 
 most successful form of government for man as well as 
 beast. The introduction of that cunning little upper- 
 lip strap that yanks half the wearer's head off when he 
 hoists his heels would make the marital condition twice 
 blessed. 
 
 The plan of the boomerang is the one on which to 
 build a happy home. Once let a man know that the 
 stone he throws will come back and break his own head, 
 and bricks will soon cease to fly. If you mend your hus- 
 band's trousers with pins, you won't be sat on in a hurry. 
 Let these men once learn that to make things unpleas- 
 ant for you will be to hurt themselves, dear women, and 
 you've got the pull. The family horse will come down 
 to a safe and easy gait and double harness will not be 
 such a dreadful thing to go in. 
 
 Gleason takes a vicious brute, warranted to kick the 
 liver pin out of every one who handles him. He slips on 
 the persuader and invites him to use his heels. The first 
 aggressive movement brings all the straps and pulleys into 
 action. Mr. Horse thinks he's scalped ; he knows some 
 one has tried to break his jaw, and he looks out for his 
 enemy. The instant he understands he's kicking the top 
 of his own head off, his kicking days are over. Yes, 
 dear girls, adopt the Gleason method of control and your 
 comfort is assured. 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 137 
 
 I knew a man not many years ago balky, bad-tem- 
 pered, a chronic kicker. His record was fast, but nothing 
 he had ever done justified the opinion he had of his own 
 speed. That he was put on earth to show his points and 
 paces and never to draw a pound, he firmly believed. 
 It fell to one unhappy woman's fate to handle this lad, 
 and a lively time she had of it. She never knew where 
 she was, nor what was going to happen. He had more 
 moods and tenses than a High School grammar. Gen- 
 tleness, kindness, persuasion were thrown away, and the 
 poor woman was discouraged. But one day she was 
 taught a lesson by an old market-woman. It was over in 
 New Jersey, and Aunt Hannah had a horse as stubborn 
 as a mule. There was no getting that nag to do a 
 straightforward thing. It took the old lady three hours 
 to go half a mile, owing to an infernal trick the horse had 
 of backing. He would leave the stable, setting off as if 
 his destination was the object of his life ; but at the first 
 hill he settled back against the dashboard and began the 
 return trip with the wagon on his wrong end. 
 
 Hannah worked faithfully with mild " ge-yeps " and 
 "hud-ups"and persuasive pulls at the reins. She 
 would climb out and lead him a rod. He'd go two 
 more on his own account, and then back a quarter of a 
 mile. 
 
 One day the old lady saw a neighbor coating the top 
 of his fence with strips of tin that bristled with gleam- 
 ing rows of tacks. A bright thought struck her. If the 
 cats were opposed to a little strip of this invention, what 
 couldn't she effect with a square yard of it ! 
 
 That day saw a coat of mail put on the front of the old 
 market wagon. Aunt Hannah bought a big piece of cat- 
 dissuader and nailed it carefully where it would do the 
 most good. Bucephalus was hitched up and went off, as 
 
138 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 usual, in fair style. At the usual hill the usual business 
 occurred. Mr. Nag settled back with a mighty bump. 
 He struck the invention and a galvanic shock streaked 
 up his spinal column to his ears. Of course, he didn't 
 think he did it himself to himself. After a mile or two 
 he tried it again, and finally it struck him that backing 
 was unpleasant business and he held to his course like a 
 lamb. 
 
 Maria saw this operation, and it comforted and sus- 
 tained her with new hope. The virtue of tacks and tin 
 had never occurred to her before. She went home 
 determined on a new line of action. She began a most 
 aggressive life. She dealt the kicker a dose of his own 
 medicine, and she kept it up for awhile ; but, being of a 
 loving nature, enjoying peace, this warfare was unpleas- 
 ant. She went over to Jersey to see if tacks and tin were 
 permanent reformers, and she met a hearse coming from 
 Aunt Hannah's door. The old woman was undergoing 
 the process of planting. 
 
 " She died of disappointment," said a neighbor. " You 
 heard how she got round that balky horse ? " 
 
 Maria said she had seen the whole thing. 
 
 "Well," continued the historian, "for a month she 
 had the upper hand ; but one morning she drove out of 
 the barn in a more than usually triumphant manner. 
 She reached that hill, and never in her life did she get 
 such a setback. It landed her on her beam-end. Down 
 went Bucephalus against the dash-board ; what cared he 
 for tacks any more ? Aunt Hannah crawled up and 
 looked over the balky brute gave a horse-laugh, flung 
 up his tail and showed the astonished old lady a piece of 
 sheet-iron neatly riveted on under it. She fell back par- 
 alyzed as the sheet-iron and the tacks came together 
 like a pair of cymbals. Some said the collision injured 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 139 
 
 her spine ; but I know it was disappointment she died 
 of," concluded the neighbor. 
 
 Maria crept back, like a bird with a broken wing, to 
 her nest. She took in the tacks. Ichabod should never, 
 on her account, shingle himself with sheet-iron. She 
 would at least save herself from a death by disappoint- 
 ment. There was safety in flight, and when the balky 
 one came home to his oats, he found an oat that told 
 him to kick to all eternity ; he could never do that one 
 lone woman any more harm. 
 
 This little story should not discourage you, girls. Go 
 and study Gleason, and see how the thing can be done 
 with a little nerve and a little strap. 
 
A STUDY OF BALD HEADS. 
 
 I HAVE been making a study of bald heads lately, and a 
 very interesting branch of science it is. 
 
 There are the bald heads submissive and the bald heads 
 defensive. 
 
 There are the rosy, hearty, jolly fellows, scudding 
 along under bare polls, and the indignant, sour old pumps 
 who have taken up arms against the fine-tooth comb of 
 Time, who clutch at their few remaining hairs and utter 
 curses, not loud but deep, at the damnation of their tak- 
 ing off. 
 
 These are the men given to devices and self-deceits 
 (they never cheat anybody but themselves). They cre- 
 ate a parting in that unexpected region close to the rim 
 of their ears which should be like Canaan's shore, where 
 we part no more. They take the forty-seven hairs thus 
 accumulated and make a thin layer, one hair thick, and 
 diffuse it with mucilage over the bald skull. Then ensue 
 the splits. 
 
 There was dear Tom Stewart, who was once a Senator, 
 and afterward lawyer for the Gilsey estate, whose care- 
 fully-arranged top-dressing used to crack and exhibit the 
 bumps of Deuteronomy to the admiring fellow that sat 
 behind him. 
 
 There's an addled ticket-speculator who owns a blue 
 coat and brass buttons, a No. 10 pair of dead white kid 
 gloves, and the regulation forty-seven top hairs. He 
 reserves for himself a seat in the front row for all the 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 141 
 
 Patti nights. He brings in a bouquet in a paper over- 
 coat ; he carefully feels of the delusive hirsute veil that 
 disguises his veneration, and he waits for the first impor- 
 tant aria. Then he rises, fires his floral feelings, waves 
 a pocket-handkerchief, cries " Brava " in the key of D 
 (Mierzwinzki's top note), sits down and puts his hands on 
 the apex of his identity. Ye gods ! his emotion has pro- 
 duced a split. His Fowler & Wells is visible, and he 
 rushes for the foyer, and in some secluded place, with a 
 pocket-comb, he renovates himself. 
 
 I always feel sorry' for the man whose capillary pos- 
 sessions go off as our sable muffs do, in spots, when the 
 moths get into 'em. Now, when my blessed skye-terrier 
 got under the nose of a boiling and overflowing tea-ket- 
 tle, and the hot water took off a patch of hair the size of a 
 94-cent dollar, I tied a rose-colored ribbon about the root 
 of his tail and hid his loss beneath a rosette bow. This 
 remedy is denied to man, and I can hardly blame him 
 when he glues a little hair pen-wiper upon the spot where 
 Nature has unkindly treated him. (This forgiveness does 
 not extend to the careless gentleman in row E at the 
 theatre the other night, who, in the convulsions of a well- 
 executed sneeze, deposited a little mat of hair in my lap 
 which left an aperture in his shining locks for all the 
 world like a cyclopean eye looking for its lost blinder.) 
 
 Then there's the eccentric bald head, where every 
 feather falls save on one fruitful bit of soil. This top- 
 knot is one of unfailing delight to me the wee tuft that 
 thrives on an oasis in the desert gives such a low-comedy 
 cut to the severest class of face. 
 
 I read the other day the affidavits of several well- 
 known men in behalf of some hair-compelling remedy, 
 and it struck me, in view of Thomas' head, that Profes- 
 sor Doremus as a recommender was a very neat and 
 
142 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 cheerful thing. There's a man to whom every avenue of 
 chemistry and medicine is open. If there is a wile by 
 which a hair can be lured from its lair r certainly Dr. 
 Doremus knows it. Now look at his young son Thomas 
 why, his head and Billy Birch's look in an audience like 
 a pair of roc's eggs in the parent nest ! 
 
 Has it ever occurred to you, reflective Mirror, that 
 baldness is associated with the name of Joseph? The 
 baldest head that ever surmounted the difficulty we call 
 man is that worn by Joseph Polk. The lamented Judge 
 Joe Dowling had another. Joe Coburn is running around 
 town with a neat hairless disk mapped out on top of him. 
 Joseph Proctor has nothing between him and heaven 
 when his hat is off. I believe Mrs. Potiphar would never 
 have laid hold of the original Joseph by his under-cloth- 
 ing if he had had a lock of hair available for detaining 
 purposes. And look at Joseph Howard ! The baldness 
 and polish of that Shakespearean head are beyond descrip- 
 tion. I saw a fly make an appointment with his lady-love 
 to meet on Joe Howard's bump of veneration. What 
 was the result ? The old girl got there first she usually 
 does slipped up, slid off and broke both her hind legs. 
 The hero arrived next, lost his balance, undertook to walk 
 off on Joseph's ear instead of his own, broke his back, 
 and there was ended one of the sweetest little love epi- 
 sodes of the past summer. 
 
 Now all these bald-headed facts are public property. 
 I'm going to disclose a discovery I have lately made that 
 rendered me sleepless and alarmed my friends, who feared 
 it would be temporary. There are as many bald women 
 as bald men ! 
 
 One day on Sixth Avenue I wandered into a myste- 
 rious bureau for the renovating and general repairing 
 of females. I represented that I had a much dilapi- 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 143 
 
 dated aunt who needed fixing up, and I found a very 
 jolly woman, who presently got to laughing heartily at 
 the diagnosis of my relative's case. Then we became 
 confidential. She showed me some hair-standing inven- 
 tions for the improvement of the human form, and dwelt 
 with persuasive eloquence on a new front of her own 
 manufacture. One after the other, customers dropped 
 in in pursuit of this marvellous front. She had an end 
 of the room screened off by several curtains, behind which 
 the trying on was done. 
 
 " I'd like to tend shop an hour or so, and get a further 
 insight into the front business that's carried on in the 
 back," said I. 
 
 Now, Madame was fascinated by my winning ways, and 
 replied "that I might if I chose." In two seconds I had 
 my hat off, my coat hung up, a large blue apron pinned 
 over my dress, and, armed with a comb, I began to stir 
 up boxes of scalplocks and switches as if I'd been in the 
 hair trade since the war of 1812. 
 
 Two women came in. One of them is conspicuous in 
 society for her profuse silver hair. She disappeared 
 behind the curtain with Madame. I seized a box of hair- 
 pins and dashed fearfully in after them. The customer 
 removed a strawberry-colored hat created with particular 
 reference to " that lovely silver hair." She unhooked a 
 mysterious rubber cord ; she took out a young herd of 
 invisible hairpins, while Madame tenderly dandled a 
 structure of waved and puffed white hair designed for 
 her use. Then I turned to watch the other's operations, 
 when O, transformation scene in a Christmas panto- 
 mime ! there stood the dame, picked as clean as a goose 
 on a market stall. A little fuzz stuck up here and there ; 
 but from the front clear back to the centre of her head 
 she was as bald as any Joseph in the batch ! 
 
144 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 I fell over on a friendly chair and spilled all the hair- 
 pins. Madame said : " Maria, you ain't well. I guess 
 the holidays is too much for you." 
 
 So, saying " I think I'll go sit by the stove and get a 
 little air," I crept out. 
 
 Then in bounced the wife of a prominent jeweler on 
 Broadway a tall, lean woman with a good deal of black, 
 shiny hair inside a fishwife hat. 
 
 " I want to see one of those Langtry fronts," she said. 
 A girl stepped forward to wait on her. I picked out a 
 lovely snarl of brown curls, and, smiling like a Cheshire 
 cat, took this customer in hand myself. 
 
 " That's not a match for my hair," said the customer. 
 
 " No," I blandly responded ; "but it would suit your 
 fair complexion so well that it would be worth while mak- 
 ing your hair match this front." The lady hesitated. I 
 glanced at the name on the wrapper of a bottle behind 
 me, and continued : " Two applications of our celebrated 
 Drury Lane [" Ameoline," whispered the attendant] 
 would bring your head up to the proper shade." 
 
 " I've a good mind to try that front on," said the lady. 
 
 I seized her muff and umbrella and whisked that wo- 
 man behind one of the curtains quicker 'n a wink. We 
 had that hat off, and then the embankment of black hair 
 thrown up in front. Great Scott ! I had unearthed 
 another Joseph. Her skull fairly gleamed at me. 
 
 " Your hair is pretty thin on top, " said I, desiring to 
 flatter her. " Yes," said she, " I wear those false pieces 
 to rest my part'' 
 
 My head struck the surbase as I shook the house with 
 a heavy back fall, carried clean off my feet by this last 
 remark. I lay on a sofa in the outside room, while a 
 dozen customers came and went, when I was roused to 
 immediate action by the well-known voice of a friend who 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 145 
 
 has worn her hair in a bang with a bow on top for a year 
 past. I climbed up and followed Madame and my inti- 
 mate, whom I will call Louise, because that is not her 
 name. They disappeared into one cubby-hole, while I 
 took the one next door. 
 
 Louise explained that she " wanted something to look 
 natural and obviate the necessity of wearing any orna- 
 ment to hide the meeting." These were her mysterious 
 words. By this time I was on a chair and looking over 
 the top of the partition. Louise took off her feather tur- 
 ban, unpinned that everlasting ribbon bow she loved so, 
 picked up a beautiful fringe of hair that was bandaged 
 on by an invisible net, and, horror on horror's head ! she 
 was as bald as a billiard ball ! 
 
 The concussion was heard in the street. They say the 
 chair can be mended. I have been put together, and 
 bodily may call myself mended. Mentally I am much 
 broken, and it's doubtful if I am ever again the same 
 Giddy Gusher, 
 
 10 
 
THE GREEN PAPER BOX. 
 
 THERE is no place like the express office to study the 
 home-made bundle in its native enormity. There are 
 bundles and bundles. There's the symmetrical package 
 that the deft hands of the tradesman sends home. But 
 there's the dear old bundle from home that comes by 
 express to you at Christmas. Seven kinds of string 
 knotted together hold Aunt Hannah's knit socks and 
 mother's mince-pie in sweet communion. It is neither 
 square, round, nor octagonal, the home-made bundle, but 
 it's a daisy all the same, and represents all the loving 
 kindness this earth holds for its poor human creatures. 
 
 There are two things in this world I honestly respect 
 the home-made bundle and the green paper box. I 
 believe every woman has a green paper treasure box an 
 insecure receptacle for the collected trophies of the 
 changeful years. 
 
 The average human being begins the box business at 
 ten. Armless dolls and scraps of broken tea-pots fill it 
 up to that age. Most children hold the belief I did, that 
 pistols grew to be guns and enjoyed an old age of can- 
 nons ; that my father's watch would in middle life be a 
 family clock, and later on retire to a church steeple ; 
 that my beloved brother's roundabout would put out tails 
 as it grew up, and in the form of a surtout or overcoat 
 would finish a life of usefulness. 
 
 Believing this, how can children forsake broken toys ? 
 So the babies treasure one of this kind till school tickets 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 147 
 
 and rewards of merit and pretty crochet patterns give 
 place to pink -tinted notes signed Charlie, and withered 
 rose-buds and a cheap little ring with a yellow stone in it. 
 Then the green paper box undergoes a house-cleaning, 
 and clippings from newspapers of sentimental poetry, 
 and pictures of adolescent young men and a love-letter 
 or so take possession of the receptacle. 
 
 This class of treasures generally holds the fort till the 
 twenty-year-old girl is forty. 'The inevitable friction 
 fluctuates ; now it is side whiskers, and now it is not. 
 About the time the woman of the box is forty it begins to 
 hold a bang-up pair of eye-glasses, a copy of " Over the 
 River," " Beautiful Snow," and recipes for sugar ginger- 
 bread ; then tickets to a fair to which the old lady didn't 
 go, and an old silver thimble as full of holes as a sieve. 
 
 And later on come the treasures at which one cannot 
 laugh. The old green paper box is broken now, and 
 numberless white cotton stitches hold the bottom and 
 sides together. The hands that tremblingly untie the 
 faded ribbon that binds it are wrinkled and withered ; 
 the dim eyes peering fondly within can scarce see for 
 blinding tears the treasures lying within. In the yellow 
 paper there's a lock of hair of the dear side-whiskered 
 Adonis that waltzed into her affections forty years ago ; 
 but that's the least valuable of the mementos. Side by 
 side with a boy's top lies a tiny creased stocking the 
 swell of the fat leg is in it yet, but the little foot that 
 shaped it has wandered far from the quiet paths of home. 
 In one corner lies a bunch of withered flowers. Will the 
 anguish of the hour in which she first saw them ever fade 
 from her suffering heart ? It was a woman's thoughtful- 
 ness that took them from the pulseless breast of her dead 
 boy in a foreign land and sent them to the bereaved 
 mother. 
 
148 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 There's a rusty, blackened penny and a school ticket 
 in another corner. From the ticket the bad marks have 
 long been washed away by tears. These relics were 
 found in Johnny's little pants pocket, when Johnny, with- 
 out his little trousers, went swimming in Boston Bay 
 and never was heard from again that's twenty years 
 ago. I find I've been recounting to you the contents of 
 Aunt Sally's box, and I may as well go on and relate the 
 sequel. 
 
 One bitter December day, the last of a cheerless year 
 for her, Aunt Sally had opened the box, tenderly touched 
 all her treasures, sighed over the stocking, and dropped 
 a tear on the grave flowers. She picked up the black- 
 ened penny, Johnny's one bit of filthy lucre, and rever- 
 ently kissed it. Johnny was her youngest, and a merry 
 elf ; she could never feel quite sure he was dead, though 
 twenty years had elapsed since the accident in Boston 
 Harbor. 
 
 Aunt Sally was all alone but for the married daughter 
 in Connecticut with whom she lived. The old green box 
 was carefully tied, and far into the evening the old 
 woman sat and nursed her treasures and memories of 
 the past till the necessity of darning stockings for her 
 unruly grandchildren brought out her specs and put 
 away the box. 
 
 Aunt Sally had a hard time with growing, ill-mannered 
 youngsters and a hulking son-in-law, and on this New 
 Year's eve her dependent and forlorn condition came 
 home to her with such strength that she couldn't see 
 through the tear-stained glasses to thread her needle. 
 
 When of a sudden the maid-of-all-work came in to 
 announce that a strange gentleman wanted to see her. 
 
 " Wants to see my daughter, you mean," said the old 
 lady. 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 149 
 
 " No ; he's none of our town folks. He's come to see 
 you Mrs. Sally Cheney." 
 
 And so Aunt Sally got up and took off her apron and 
 laid her specs on the green box, and courtesyed bashfully 
 to a tall, strong man who stood in the "best room " wait- 
 ing her. 
 
 " Did you want to see me, Mrs. Sally Cheney ? " said 
 she. 
 
 "I do," answered the man. 
 
 " What for ? " asked Aunt Sally. 
 
 " Because you are Mrs. Sally Cheney. I am your son 
 Johnny who was lost in Boston Harbor twenty years 
 ago ! " 
 
 And so the little old creature was gathered to his 
 breast and heard how the wicked Johnny went sailing off 
 in a Chinese junk that lay in the bay these many years 
 ago ; and how he had made a fortune out of Ah Sin ; 
 and how at last he thought of home and mother, and so 
 this New Year guest made of her sad life a joyful one, 
 and changed an existence of bitter dependence to a brick 
 house in Boston with white window shutters tied with 
 black ribbon. 
 
ASA FARWELL'S CHERRY. 
 
 THERE are occasions on which I should like to be 
 present, and I am just now hoping fervently I may be 
 permitted to witness the meeting between the Lord and 
 Mr. E. T. Thompson of Indianapolis. It's not enough 
 for me that I read he has been violently thrown to the 
 ground by some lawyer out there. I hunger to see him 
 handed down on a pitchfork to the quarters to which by 
 nature and acquired ability he belongs. 
 
 I can understand how a decent, well-behaved man 
 (allowing, for the sake of the argument, there is such 
 an article) can be suddenly demoralized by some dread- 
 ful discovery of infidelity at home ; but how it lies in 
 any man's boots to coolly, calmly work on a wretched 
 woman's feelings beleaguer, deceive, draw on to de- 
 struction, an unhappy wife and mother who had erred 
 and suffered, acknowledged, confessed, entreated mercy, 
 and lay broken at his feet, I can't make out. 
 
 Unfortunate Mrs. Thompson ! She accepted the false 
 theory that man's position is on the judgment seat. She 
 begged for mercy ; she sued for forgiveness she got 
 treachery, insult and abuse till she went and committed 
 suicide, leaving behind her a lot of letters so full of abject, 
 pitiful misery that even other men are pointing the finger 
 of scorn and turning down the thumb of condemnation at 
 the wretch. The papers say he is in the last stages of 
 consumption. Take away his cod-liver oil and let him 
 spend the last afternoons thinking up the subject. That 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 151 
 
 desperately suffering soul confessed over and over her 
 one dereliction from the path of virtue. Why didn't 
 she brace up and ask E. T. Thompson for a small confes- 
 sion of twenty-hornet power ? Why, instead of leaving 
 this earth on his account, she would be to-day thanking 
 heaven that he wouldn't speak to her. 
 
 I remember that once on a time an old fellow in my 
 native town named Farwell invented a sweet, seductive 
 fluid that worked on the inner man, or inner woman, with 
 such dire effect that straightway he unbuttoned his soul 
 and aired that which was worst within him. Asa Farwell's 
 Cherry was the name of this cordial, and wild cherries 
 and French brandy entered largely into its composition. 
 
 Well, there was a strait-laced, sanctimonious old 
 pump, whom we will call Comstock, and he had a pretty, 
 frivolous wife, of whose conduct he was ridiculously 
 jealous. They got a gallon of Farwell's Cherry into the 
 house and sampled it on Sunday night. I was a kid of 
 ten years, but I enjoyed the sight of old Pop Comstock 
 getting very lush on Farwell's Cherry. 
 
 " Now, acknowledge, Myra," said he, " that you flirted 
 last summer with Dr. , and that you were off sleigh- 
 ing with him last week when you said you sat up with 
 Miss Middleton's little boy with the measles." 
 
 And Myra, with Farwell's confession-fluid on board, 
 got up and confessed, and during the confession I filled 
 Pop Comstock 's glass twice. My dear friend Myra was 
 weeping dismally on the sofa when I dosed Pop for the 
 third time. 
 
 " I'm sure I meant no wrong," bleated Myra, " and 
 you'll forgive me, won't you, darling ? " 
 
 Pop's features were fixed in a Spartan expression of 
 unforgiveness, but of a sudden the last dose of Farwell 
 did the business. He broke down into a maudlin state 
 
1$ 2 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 of sloppiness. He confessed hired girls, and a cross-eyed 
 seamstress ; he confessed a whole chapter of New York 
 iniquity when he was " down on business ; " he confessed 
 Myra's cousin from Vermont and the wife of the last 
 minister. Well, it's no use recapitulating what he didn't 
 confess a much easier task than what he did. Myra 
 fainted, and I ran home, and when the divorce case that 
 she instituted was called I only escaped a witness-box by 
 being under age, and unreliable even then. 
 
 It was a lesson for me, and when I see a contrite spirit 
 and a female in a Niobic condition I always long for Asa 
 Farwell's Cherry and its property of wringing confession 
 from the male sect. 
 
THE INEQUALITY OF THE SEXES. 
 
 " ALL men are created free and equal." There's no 
 living sort of doubt about that free enough, and equal 
 to most anything ; but where's the nice little text about 
 the equality of women ? One of those bursted old adages 
 used to run : " What's sauce for the goose is sauce for 
 the gander." Not in my time, let me tell you, and I've 
 had a great time. 
 
 There are two distinct laws on every subject for man 
 and woman. There are two distinct customs on every 
 point for man and woman. The only thing they take 
 the same way is a coffin, and there wouldn't be any 
 equality about that episode if the man could chip in for 
 a minute after his last check was played. Most men 
 entertain the Persian idea of the next world. They don't 
 believe there are to be any women in heaven. That they 
 will have visiting bands like Rentz's Female Minstrels to 
 minstrel to 'em, they think is likely ; but none of the 
 ordinary house-keeping, button-sewing, baby-spanking 
 kind of women people the average man's paradise. 
 
 There's an awful surprise in store for some of those 
 men when they hang round and brace Peter for a pass. 
 I don't suppose there are two he-angels to the dozen in 
 all the heavenly host. Never mind where I get my theo- 
 logical views. They may be drawn from George But- 
 ler's Analogy or Charlie Foster's Stances, or I may have 
 been under Pa Beecher's teaching. I don't say. But I 
 do say to these arrogant and gallivanting men, " Look 
 
154 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 out for a pullback when you get to heaven. It'll upset 
 every theory you have ever had on earth." If I had no 
 better information on the subject than the inequality of 
 the sexes here, I should know that in the next world 
 woman would have the chance to get even. 
 
 I have had some words with you already about the 
 sufferings of us girls ; but the cruellest blow we get 
 in life is when we get a husband. It's the dreadfullest 
 shock of all. It's quite the belief that none but profes- 
 sionals get bad husbands. That's a mistake. Most all 
 husbands are bad ; but the doings of public people are 
 made public oftener, and that's the way this idea gets 
 about. 
 
 And the conceit of these men ! It just drives one wild 
 to see 'em. I declare it acts on me like a dose of medi- 
 cine to walk through that square and see 'em holding up 
 posts and scratching the sidewalk with little canes, and 
 twiddling their moustaches, and pulling their side -whis- 
 kers, with their poor wives at home washing and darning 
 tights, or curling wigs, for making 'em pretty, to " mash " 
 country towns next season. 
 
 No difference, indeed ! Why, even in the way people 
 think of men and women's personal appearance there's 
 an awful difference. Where's the woman who enjoys a 
 bald head properly ? I've yet to find her. What a howl 
 would go up if Mrs. Le Brun or Emma Skerritt should 
 walk into a hotel dining-room without any false hair on ? 
 And just look at Jim Collier, Joe Polk and Jack Studley 
 all of 'em balder than so many pats of butter sunning 
 themselves on the square and fanning themselves with 
 their straw hats ! Why, Studley came on a line of Pope's 
 (not W. H. or Charles) one day, and had it framed for 
 his own picture : 
 
 " And Beauty draws us with a single hair." 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 155 
 
 [I believe he had just one on top at that time.] 
 
 Look at that duo of dramatists Daly and Rowe ! They 
 haven't got a full set of teeth between 'em, all put together. 
 That doesn't prevent their smiling like Cheshire cats on us 
 girls, and we don't mind if there is a stage wait between 
 their molars and incisors, or twenty years elapse between 
 their eye-teeth without an event. 
 
 But WE we girls have got to get in a row of piano 
 keys just as soon as the men's awful conduct makes us 
 gnash our first teeth to pieces. WE have got to take 
 to scratches just as soon as grief has snatched us bald- 
 headed. Bah ! talk of equality, there's no such thing. 
 
 It's a pretty cool day, and if you stop here in the shade 
 of the paper costumes in the Domestic Sewing Machine 
 window, I'll show you just a few instances of man's base 
 ingratitude. The square is full of them. And oh ! how 
 many have folded their tired hands above broken hearts, 
 and gone to take the first rest they have had in many 
 seasons ! We girls have planted a dozen instances dur- 
 ing the last few years. 
 
 There was Eliza as good and true and sweet a woman 
 as ever lived lumpy and plain in form and features, with 
 a big bank account wrested from small towns by years of 
 hard work. She had every comfort, and what on earth 
 she wanted of a husband no one of us could imagine ; 
 but she would marry, and she did. From being sought 
 for, and admired for her various virtues, and undoubted 
 talent, she subsided into a humdrum wife ; lived in fam- 
 ily hotels ; went nowhere ; saw her money invested and 
 lost on non-paying but amusing ventures ; had the great 
 felicity of hearing occasionally how well Miss Polly This 
 or Dolly That looked out driving behind her husband's 
 fast horses with her husband as driver. As the gentle- 
 man took no meals at the family hotels, save a breakfast 
 
156 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 in their private parlor, the boarders were not familiar with 
 his frontispiece, and it led to dreadful blunders. 
 
 Poor Eliza, sitting one day in the public parlor, was 
 saluted by a female patron of the house and the theatres 
 in this fashion : " Wouldn't you like to go to a perform- 
 ance this afternoon ? I made the acquaintance of Dolly 
 Dasher, the juvenile lead at the Lycopodean, when I was 
 in the country, and we got to be no end of friends. She 
 sent me tickets for to-day. It might cheer you up a bit 
 to go. She's such an imp on the stage. I don't think 
 she'll be long there, however, as Melchisedec is so fond 
 of her." 
 
 Eliza (faintly}" Melchisedec ?" 
 
 "Yes, the manager. He came down to Greenwich 
 every Saturday she was there. I think they are engaged ; 
 out every day together, and such presents just a stream 
 of 'em. He's a deal older ; but he's very rich. His first 
 wife, I heard Dolly say, was awful rich." 
 
 Eliza groaned as she interrupted her tormentor with 
 the feeble remark : " Well, she is not so awful rich now ! 
 I'm his first wife." 
 
 She felt poor enough, I'll be bound, just at that min- 
 ute. 
 
 It wasn't long after that word was passed around 
 among us girls that Eliza had closed her earthly engage- 
 ment. Melchisedec was a widower for a few months, 
 and then married some young snip of a thing, who will 
 serve him right before long, or I'm no judge. 
 
 Just as I said here comes one of the deeply injured. 
 She's rather a pretty little woman and she's a nice little 
 actress. Looks a bit like Lolta, doesn't she ? Well, she 
 hasn't had Lotta's luck. She got married some years ago 
 to a common sort of fellow, very common to look at, but 
 she loved him dearly. What an affectionate wretch he 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 157 
 
 was, to be sure, during those first years ! Then he went 
 abroad and met another actress who had a lot of spare 
 change to take him about upon. The story reached the 
 wife and she cried and mourned over him, but believed 
 in him. Oh, yes, there was no end to her trust in him. 
 Finally he came back on a visit, and the little wife and 
 he passed a week in a country place where the one-sided 
 love was as plain as the handle on a jug. But she clung 
 and clasped and blushed and beamed on him. It was a 
 sort of little second-hand honeymoon for her. Then the 
 time came for him to sail away to his London engage- 
 ment, and the sad thing was not allowed to go into town 
 to see him depart. But her heart-breaking farewell was 
 taken in the early morning. There she stood on the 
 stoop, looking through blinding tears at the figure climb- 
 ing a little hill a sort of good-bye hill, where all the 
 husbands kissed their hands every morning as they went 
 to the city to the girls they left behind them. Did this 
 European scarecrow look back ? Not once. He clutched 
 his carpet-sack in one claw ; he struck out for " England, 
 home and beauty " with an umbrella in the other claw, 
 and never turned till he got on board the steamer. 
 
 Oh, well, I wouldn't have given a last year's love-letter 
 for the whole outlook ; but poor Sis " laid the flattering 
 unction to her soul " that it was all right. Then one day 
 she got a letter coolly setting forth an incompatibility of 
 something or other and telling her, in so many words, 
 that she might better herself as soon as she could, as he 
 should never live with her again. If she had bettered 
 herself would you blame her ? There she is, smiling just 
 now as she sees us, but wearing out her very soul in tears 
 and lamentation for the living and the dead both equally 
 dead to her. 
 
A RAILWAY ACQUAINTANCE. 
 
 THE GUSHER is an awful cockney. New York during 
 almost any month, and particularly through the heat of 
 summer, is good enough for her. She has been beguiled, 
 when she was younger and more gullible, into a week at 
 Long Branch, where she had to stand on her Saratoga to 
 put on her swell harness, the room was so small and the 
 trunk so big, where she slapped herself black and blue 
 trying to break the backs of Jersey mosquitoes. She has 
 put in a season at Saratoga, and poisoned herself drink- 
 ing the nasty water, and perished like a frog in the dust 
 and din of the place. But now she just enjoys the sum- 
 mer in the cool and shady sanctity of her own city home, 
 and when the cold weather comes she takes a hack at 
 the country, where she has found a truly comfortable 
 home. 
 
 Way up among the Berkshires, with rare old woods 
 outlying, and a grand prospect stretching out with a 
 glimpse of the Catskills cut in blue, beyond the gor- 
 geous autumn-dyed hills, there is a country house as is a 
 country house with marble baths and a city range, a 
 billiard-room, a library of thousands of r?.re books, a 
 gas-house, an ice-house, a grapery under glass, where 
 bunches grow that would cost five dollars each in New 
 York with a perfect armory from which to choose, and 
 go blazing away at the birds over the wooded hills. 
 
 That's the sort of country place, where one can browse 
 about and get a bag of birds and walk in and have a 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 159 
 
 warm bath to take the tire out ; sit down to a capital 
 dinner of soup, fish, game, vegetables, and fruit manu- 
 factured on the premises ; drink wines that have lain 
 fifty years in the cellars of the family, and go off to bed 
 in a room furnished by Marcotte, where the carpet cost 
 $800. That's the sort of country life the Gusher loves, 
 and she's been having a good time leading it for a week. 
 Out in these wilds there are some of the most surpris- 
 ing entertainments. There I found the posters of a Mr. 
 Spaulding Foster's Oliver Twist combination. And on 
 a rickety little train branching off from the Harlem line I 
 came across the gayest specimen of the profession I ever 
 met. She was gotten up in a cheap imitation of some 
 of the actresses of old times. I've seen pictures of Men- 
 ken and the Western girls, Lucille and Helen, upon 
 which she had modelled her exterior. Since Absalom 
 got hung by his back hair there hasn't been so much 
 o c it in the woods. This girl had a dozen long curls 
 depending from an immense waterfall ; she had a braid 
 hitched on falling amidst the curls ; she had a hair 
 doughnut built up on her brow and plastered down a la 
 Menken on her forehead ; she had a couple of regular 
 backwood beau-catchers in front of each ear. And, sur- 
 mounting all this, she wore a hat such as one sees in the 
 first act of " The Hunchback " on the head of the Julia 
 of some travelling company pink silk, wax beads, and 
 a sweeping feather and bunch of " artificials," all more 
 or less broken up by a life led in trunks and cham- 
 pagne baskets. With this excited-looking hat she wore 
 a number of yards of tartan plaid wrapped round her in 
 Helen McGregor fashion, and this wrap was surmounted 
 by a lace shawl thrown over one shoulder in the Camille 
 style. In her hand she bore the unmistakable brown 
 paper cover " part," and ever and anon she referred to 
 
l6o THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 the inner leaves then shut her eyes and moved her lips 
 as if in prayer. 
 
 The temptation was too much, and down 1 I sat beside 
 her. There were the usual remarks about the weather, 
 and then I asked if she liked travelling. The flood-gates 
 were opened. I just sat still and listened. 
 
 She made answer : " No, I can't say as I do ; but I have 
 to be travelling all the time. I belong to the Barrett and 
 Booth Mary Anderson combination. 'We played in Chat- 
 ham last night, and to-night we show in Stephentown. I 
 'spose I'm foolish to take an engagement for this route, 
 as Warde telegraphed me from Chicago last night that if 
 I would join him he'd wait for me there till I'd finished 
 the week with this troupe. You know who Warde is, I 
 suppose ? He plays Virginius beautiful, and he told me 
 he never see any Virginia come up to mine. Virginia 
 is his daughter, you know, in the play. But Mr. Booth 
 won't hear of my going." 
 
 " Indeed. I someway got the idea Mr. Booth was 
 playing in New York." 
 
 "Yes. Ned Booth is playing there, most probable. 
 This is Mr. Eglington Booth, the famous tragedy actor." 
 
 " Oh, indeed ! I know nothing of theatrical affairs." 
 
 " What a pity ! there's nothing so interesting as play 
 acting ! I'm studying my part for the next piece. 
 We do the ' Two Orphans ' Monday night. This part 
 of Louise was written for me. She's a blind girl, and 
 gets lost, and has to beg for a dreadful old woman. 
 We shan't have the old woman, because our company 
 is a little short, and our old woman has to play my 
 sister ; but Mr. Booth he doubles the Chevalier Vaudrey 
 with Antoine ; and Pierre, that's Mr. Barrett " 
 
 "Lawrence Barrett?" 
 
 " No, not Larry Barrett ; this is Sam Barrett, the great 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. l6l 
 
 low comedian. He's great in Pierre, sings the ' Cork 
 Leg,' and does a lame hornpipe. Oh, he's immense ! 
 We shall play it much better than it was done in New 
 York. I'm very strong in it. The gentleman who wrote 
 it for me, Mr. Boucicault, said nothing was ever seen 
 like me in the part. I let down all my hair " 
 
 "All that hair?" 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " Your hair is very remarkable ; some of it is curly 
 and some of it straight." 
 
 " Yes, I've ruined my hair wearing wigs ; it takes the 
 curl out frightful ; but I was telling you Mr. Barrett 
 plays Pierre and the Prefect of Police and a Sister of 
 Charity, and speaks outside when he ain't on for Fro- 
 chard that's the old woman. And when he's on, Mr. 
 Booth speaks her lines at the wings it's just as good." 
 
 " Much more compact ; I should think it would be 
 better." 
 
 " It is ; we give a great rendition of it." 
 
 " And what is your name ? " 
 
 " Anderson Mary Anderson I see you look there's 
 another Mary Anderson somewhere out West ; she's a 
 bread-and-butter school-girl, I have heard ; I haven't 
 seen her. She's a cheeky one, too ; has her pictures 
 taken as bold as brass, and puts my name on them, and 
 she looks no more like me than chalk is like cheese." 
 
 " Is your company a large one ? " 
 
 " Yes, it is, when we all get together ; but we are 
 somewhat scattered just at present. There's five of us 
 altogether now, but we hire some new actors in every 
 place just for the night. We shall have to hire some one 
 to play the Doctor in ' The Two Orphans.' " 
 
 " Who plays the part that Robson made so much of in 
 the piece, the comic servant ? " 
 ii 
 
1 62 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 " Oh, Mr. Barrett ; he's awful funny." 
 
 " And who plays the Marquise ? that's an important 
 part." 
 
 " Why, how well you know the piece ! Well, Mrs. 
 Stanislaus Rockeby ; she doubles with Louise." 
 
 " How convenient ; I would like to witness this unique 
 performance." 
 
 " That's just what the Vineland Farmer calls me and 
 a more ' lucky ' actor you never saw in your life. What's 
 your name, by the way ? " 
 
 " Do you ever see the Mirror ? " 
 
 " Oh, to be sure ! Mr. Booth gets all the theatrical 
 papers." 
 
 " Well, my name, my dear, is Miss G. Gusher, and 
 you'll find it appended to a column in that paper, where 
 the interesting editor chooses to style me the Giddy 
 Gusher." 
 
BLESSED ARE THE HARD OF HEART. 
 
 THERE was a season of scholastic repose in my youth, 
 when our young ladies' academy was kept by Eunice 
 Billings, and Eunice was courted by a young shoemaker 
 in Natick, Mass. 
 
 The postman was the postmaster's daughter, who 
 brought Eunice her daily letter ; and according to the 
 length of that letter our studies were regulated. The 
 Natick man was jealous, and wrote one day that his mind 
 was full of "strange and dark imaginations." Eunice 
 went into the class-room weeping, and we played all day. 
 
 It was the custom of this love-lorn maiden to make us 
 each commit a verse in Holy Writ to memory. We did 
 not all recite our verse, but she snapped us up one by 
 one about the school, and woe betide the girl who 
 couldn't jump on her hind legs and strike out plump from 
 the shoulder with chapter and verse ! 
 
 Eunice had several big girls she cottoned to who did 
 most of the Bible verses, and little Giddy just got used 
 to it, and never studied a verse. But one day, when a 
 niece of Henry Wore Breeches delivered herself of a jaw- 
 breaking chunk out of Deuteronomy, down the hall rang 
 the fatal call, " Miss Gusher next ! " 
 
 Now, even my enemies admit that I'm not backward 
 in coming forward. I sprang to my feet without an 
 instant's delay. Not a verse could I bring to mind, if I 
 ever knew any ; but that was no reason why I should not 
 speak one, so I bravely sang out : 
 
164 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 " Blessed are the hard of heart, for they shall inherit 
 the salt of the earth. MALACHITE v. x." 
 
 Eunice Billings was the own child of\a minister and 
 had been brought up on Bible. She never winked. A 
 dozen of the big girls were regular Bible sharps. Not 
 one fell over that verse. I had a dim sort of idea that a 
 lot of little reports of Biblical affairs tacked on to the Old 
 Testament bore the names of Esau, Gideon, Malachite, 
 and with persuasive confidence I put forth my authority 
 as Malachite. 
 
 That was, like dear little Buttercup's confession, " Many 
 years ago "; but I look on that verse in a new light. That 
 was not a composition of my own. The fact that I can't 
 find it between the covers only convinces me that it has 
 been left out. It's the essence of prophecy ; it's the 
 quintessence of truth : " Blessed are the hard of heart, 
 for they shall inherit the salt of the earth." 
 
 The other night at the theatre, the Gusher from her 
 perch above surveyed the crowd beneath, and a crowd 
 of notabilities they were. 
 
 There sat under that far-away dome three bravely 
 attired dames, whose ossification of heart began early. 
 One of them belonged to Eunice's school, and as a girl, 
 betrayed such a refrigerated condition of the right and 
 left ventricle that Nellie Marcy prayed for its softening. 
 Nellie was a gentle creature, who prayed for everything 
 and everybody. She took me into her confidence one 
 day, and told me that she was praying for her husband ; 
 "because, dear Giddy," said she, "if I am ever to marry, 
 somewhere on this earth my dear husband is now living. 
 So I pray for his proper guidance." 
 
 God bless the girl ! She prayed to some purpose ; for 
 to-day she is Mrs. George B. McClellan. 
 
 Well, this stony young woman who displayed, so early 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 165 
 
 enough cruelty to entitle her to our small prayers, flour- 
 ished like a green bay tree, and is one of the richest 
 women in the State. Her father, in the days of Eunice 
 Billings' educational academy, was a hard-working cabi- 
 net-maker, and on cold days was not above pulling 
 Icyanne (as we'll call her) to school. She told us he was 
 " the hired man," the young upstart ! The poor, kind 
 soul was a widower, and Icy was his only child. He 
 slaved in his factory year in and year out, and in some 
 lucky moment hit upon some invention of window shades 
 that made his fortune. Icy married a pushing young 
 man pa furnished capital, and the money came tum- 
 bling in. 
 
 The old father in time broke up, as old fathers will. 
 Madame Icyanne is in possession of all the property ; she 
 boards the old man in a rough farmer's family. Monday 
 afternoon a seamstress, who is fixing over my plum-col- 
 ored silk, showed me a bundle of clothes half a dozen 
 hickory -shirts (if you know that cheap and awful gar- 
 ment), shirts of a small make, " let out " and patched to 
 fit a big one ; this was Madame's spring outfit designed 
 for that dear old man who pulled her to school on her 
 sled, and went without an overcoat one winter to pay for 
 a plain silk dress Icy insisted on having. 
 
 Oh ! I know the whole interior of that adamantine 
 career. You can always find good skating in Madame's 
 vicinity ; and sitting in the balcony, looking down on 
 her crimson plush fox-fur-trimmed dolman, watching the 
 twinkle of the immense solitaires in her ears it's a won- 
 der they didn't burn I prayed, as Nellie Marcy did, for 
 the cruel old thing ; and then for the hundredth time I 
 said to myself, as I felt a saline atmosphere exude from 
 her person, " Blessed are the hard of heart, for they shall 
 inherit the salt of the earth." 
 
THE BABY. 
 
 AT just the hour last Thursday that the Mirror 
 reached the news-stands a bleak November blast was 
 sweeping down the hillsides, a dark, forbidding sky hung 
 overhead that leaked dismally all the morning and 
 announced the storm that finished the day. 
 
 The houses are occasional along a patch of road lead- 
 ing off beyond McComb's Dam bridge, and for two hours, 
 between eleven and one, no person traversed it but a man 
 and woman and a helpless baby. 
 
 I can understand how a baby can be left on a rich 
 man's doorstep. I can understand how a baby can be 
 deserted in a railway station, left in a carriage, forsaken 
 anywhere in haunts frequented by human beings. But 
 how the heart of man, much less of woman, could take 
 a mite of a weakling, who had been just eleven days in 
 this cold world, and leave it on the sodden ground, with 
 a heavy storm already begun, where its feeble wail could 
 not reach the ears of any one fifty feet away, and where, 
 in all possibility, no foot would pass in days, is beyond 
 me to conceive. 
 
 But that man and woman left the road, and in a patch 
 of bushes laid the forlorn thing down to die. A misera- 
 ble rag of dress, a bit of coarse red flannel and a skirt 
 formed his wardrobe, and every article was soaked through 
 and through. 
 
 The gods lent him breath for one despairing yell just 
 as the tramp of a mounted policeman broke the monotony 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 167 
 
 of the scene. Roundsman Wilkins says his horse scented 
 the find and pricked his ears and halted. Again the per- 
 ishing infant wailed, and in another minute the bundle 
 of red flannel was on horseback pounding away for the 
 station-house. 
 
 The bundle disclosed a dear little man child, eleven 
 days old, perfect in form and intelligent in face ; but so 
 near the kingdom of heaven that had not help reached it 
 when it did, Mr. Baby would have needed nothing but the 
 cruel ground on which it nearly perished. 
 
 I worked over that atom till the blue arms and legs 
 got limber enough to use. Then the law laid its strong 
 grasp on the baby. It was raining cats and dogs, but 
 down to the Central Office the baby had to go. By this 
 time every heart in the hotel ached for the wretched little 
 guest, so it was decided Mr. Baby should be entered on 
 the register, assigned rooms, and remain. These hospita- 
 ble intentions could not be carried out ; to the Central 
 Office went the baby, followed by the landlord, whose 
 bachelor heart had been touched. 
 
 At headquarters he found the Charity Commissioners 
 could alone relinquish the child ; and then again a lot of 
 rules and regulations provided Randall's Island for a 
 certain time, and off next day, with the worst rain of all 
 falling, went the miserable traveller. 
 
 On its track was the rescuing party, however ; and in 
 all the awful storm of Friday, in an open row boat from 
 Randall's Island to New York, and from thence by train 
 to High Bridge, went the young and travelled gentleman; 
 and I've got him. 
 
 He has readily adapted himself to the new conditions. 
 He takes to his bottle like a real man and he gives no 
 trouble. His sad little story got into the papers and 
 raised up powerful friends. Dr. Phelps, the Mellin's Food 
 
1 68 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 man, sent a box of that wonderful stuff, with a poetical 
 letter, in which he hopes " He may always remember that 
 day in November when he was saved from a croup and a 
 swim in the soup." 
 
 He will certainly remember and revere the name of 
 Mellin and the thoughtfulness and kindness of Dr. Phelps. 
 The Gusher had a wild idea of feeding it on milk punch 
 and oyster soup. 
 
 At all events here he is, with the dogs sniffing curiously 
 about him, the birds singing as if they liked him, and 
 Chicot, the blessed monkey, as friendly as possible, shar- 
 ing the tending, dividing the care, and doubling up at 
 night. Baby on one arm, Chicot on the other, I in the 
 middle all three happy. 
 
ABOUT INFANTS' NURSES. 
 
 WHEN a woman is weakened in mind by old age, and 
 when she is young and silly and has had no experience 
 and is unfit for any other work, she advertises as an 
 infant's nurse. 
 
 After parading the house like a torchlight procession 
 for four nights ; after firing up patent nursery^lamps and 
 heating food ; after singing until I was hoarse as a crow 
 and walking until my feet ached, it occurred to me a 
 nurse wouldn't be a bad investment, and I proceeded to 
 answer advertisements. 
 
 The mite of a baby I have taken in is twenty-two days 
 old and weighs five pounds. A mother will tell you that 
 this age and this weight does not describe a rugged and 
 robust citizen. Any one's finger is bigger than poor 
 baby's legs. His little powder-box would cover his wee 
 head to the shoulders, and altogether the Gusher's waif 
 is a wafer so frail and delicate that the tenderest care, 
 the softest touch, and the closest attention are. necessary 
 to make a voter of him. 
 
 The remembrance of his awful bed in the bushes clings 
 to his baby memory. The big blue eyes fill with tears, 
 the little lip quivers, and he clutches at warm surround- 
 ing flannels to reassure himself that he is only dream- 
 ing, and that the hard, cold hillside is not his fate after 
 all. 
 
 Therefore, as a nurse I wanted a motherly person with 
 a wide, warm lap and caressing touch ; with deft fingers, 
 
170 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 and above all a loving interest in the weak creature 
 against whose life miserable wretches had conspired thus 
 early. 
 
 The applicants began to arrive. They helped one old 
 woman up-stairs whose breath made a ginny fog in the 
 room. If ever she had tried to blow out the nursery 
 lamp she'd have taken fire and had spontaneous com- 
 bustion. 
 
 They brought up a hard, sinewy piece of crackled ware, 
 whose bony fingers suggested the " laying out " business 
 of the undertaker's assistant. She was the most mor- 
 tuary bit of property I ever met. She was in a state of 
 rigor mortis. Her teeth looked like babies' foot-stones in 
 a family lot. 
 
 I was at a loss how to address her, but the words came 
 instinctively. 
 
 " In the midst of life we are in death," began I cheer- 
 fully. 
 
 " I have had great experience with infants," said she. 
 
 I sighed as I thought how great the mortality is 
 among those of tender years, but feeling called on to 
 reply I remarked : 
 
 " Man is of few days and full " 
 
 " I am a great disciplinarian," continued she, " and 
 believe in system." 
 
 I looked at the bundle in my arms and felt that the 
 enclosure would stand little discipline at the present 
 time, and the human system was the only one for him 
 for quite a while. 
 
 There's a man at the Institute Fair peddling zinc 
 tombstones, and I recommended her to get a situation 
 under him to exhibit and promote his sales. 
 
 Five more old women in various stages of decay and a 
 pretty German girl named Gretchen turned up. I was 
 
THE GIDDY .GUSHER PAPERS. 171 
 
 that glad to see something that looked alive that I 
 engaged her on the spot. 
 
 She was very nice and neat, but she knew as much of 
 a baby as I do of a steam engine. 
 
 She was utterly incapable and I told her so, and the 
 following day found me sitting up with the little man 
 inspecting new applicants. 
 
 I had answered an advertisement in Seventy-first Street 
 of a Scotch woman of great experience and ability. She 
 arrived a regular Mrs. Gamp and though I didn't 
 like the old party's looks, the case was becoming 
 desperate. 
 
 " You have brought up children ? " I asked. 
 
 " I have five daughters of my own. " 
 
 " I mean, have you brought up babies on the bottle ?" 
 
 The old thing looked me over. 
 
 " Why don't you nurse the child yourself ? " she ques- 
 tioned. 
 
 " Because the child is not mine it is an adopted child," 
 said I. 
 
 " Oh ! " said she. 
 
 Then, knowing if she stayed she must hear all about 
 it, I said : 
 
 " You have heard of the baby left to die in the woods 
 at High Bridge ? " 
 
 " I have " (with much asperity). 
 
 " This is the baby." 
 
 " And what are you doing with it ? " 
 
 " Trying to get the life living in its puny, abused body 
 at present," answered I. 
 
 " It's a child of sin more than likely," sniffed she. 
 
 "An undeniable fact," snorted I. 
 
 " And you expect a respectable person to take care of 
 it ? " said she. 
 
172 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 " I do," said I. " No such old, disreputable party as 
 you are will do to nurse this child." 
 
 " I'm a God-fearing woman," wailed the. Scotch Pres- 
 byterian. 
 
 I won't quote profanity, so I can't tell you the next 
 shot fired into the Scotch locker. 
 
 " You'd have taken a place with a drunken old father 
 and a wanton mother if such a married couple had 
 wanted a nurse ? " 
 
 u If the child was born in wedlock, I could mind it 
 not otherwise," said she. 
 
 44 Well, confound you ! you canting heathen, you want 
 to get to New York as soon as possible ! I'll land you 
 in the station-house as a burglar and a thief." 
 
 Now I was mad. 
 
 " You flatter yourself God made you, do you ? Who 
 do you suppose created this innocent creature ? Have 
 you got a manufacturing company in your creed ? You 
 pitiless, flinty-souled old hypocrite you evil-smelling, 
 unpleasant-looking old woman I wouldn't let this sweet, 
 weak baby into your arms any sooner than I'd trust it 
 with a lunatic ! The ground from which I took it is no 
 colder than your nature the sky that dripped above it 
 no crueler, and the November wind that swept the wet, 
 rotting leaves about it no worse a nurse than you would 
 prove." 
 
 I was on my hind legs, madder than a hornet. Whether 
 I was going to throw the baby at her, or the coal-scuttle, 
 was only a matter of choice in her belief. She gathered 
 her skirts and pelted off down the stairs and out through 
 the bar like a black bombazine cyclone or a rusty crape 
 blizzard. 
 
 Then I got desperate. A multitude of friends had 
 called, and I was confused by their directions. 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 173 
 
 "The only thing to raise that baby on is Cuddles' 
 Food." 
 
 " The only chance that child has is in the Monarch 
 Substitute." 
 
 " The baby may pull through if you go right to work 
 and feed it on the Lacteal Champion." 
 
 " That baby must have the great new food called 
 Breast Milk Eclipsed, or Mother Wiped Out." 
 
 " Condensed milk is the best Spread Eagle brand. " 
 
 " Condensed milk makes fine-looking children, but they 
 die the minute they get a little sick. Put lime water in 
 the milk. Don't put any lime water in the milk. Pour 
 boiling hot water over a soda cracker, add teaspoonful 
 of sugar and tablespoonful of cream, you'll save that 
 baby." 
 
 " Barley water is the only thing one cow's milk may do 
 the business for you but he'll die if you don't try that. " 
 
 I began to cry, and two persons speaking at once said : 
 'Get a wet nurse." 
 
 I advertised. I believe every mother deserted her 
 own child and came up here. 
 
 "You'll kill that child if the wet nurse's milk is too 
 old," said one. 
 
 " If that woman's milk is too young there won't be 
 any nourishment in it, and your baby will fail," said 
 another. 
 
 " How can I tell ? " I moaned. 
 
 " Get a doctor to get the nurse." 
 
 I went and enlisted the services of a Human Lactome- 
 ter, and the good work went on. 
 
 The doctor visited an intelligence office for wet nurses, 
 and related his experience. He questioned and examined 
 several applicants, and finally came to a pretty German 
 sitting quietly by. 
 
174 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 " How old is your milk ? " asked he. 
 
 " I haven't got any," said the girl. 
 
 " How old is your baby ? " returned the doctor, think- 
 ing the German girl didn't understand. 
 
 " I haven't got any baby," she replied. 
 
 " Good Lord ! what are you here for ? " cried the doc- 
 tor. " If you haven't had a baby, or got any milk, what 
 are you doing here among the wet nurses ? " 
 
 "I thought I might learn," said she meekly. 
 
 It was Gretchen, and I believe she was encouraged by 
 something one of 'em told her, and she was gone away 
 to "learn." 
 
 The doctor made a selection and a portly female came 
 up that afternoon. She is to have a young girl to wait 
 on her, she must have a milk punch every half-hour, six 
 quarts of cocoa made at nine every evening to drink dur- 
 ing the night. She must have a broiled chicken for 
 breakfast, milk toast, baked potatoes, boiled rice and a 
 quart panada. She must have a porterhouse steak and 
 baked sweet potatoes and a bottle of porter and a quart 
 custard for lunch. She must have a pair of partridges, 
 chicken soup, more baked potatoes, a nice bit of boiled 
 fish, and farina or tapioca pudding, a mould of blanc- 
 mange, a quart of calves'-foot jelly for dinner, and a few 
 things for supper I have forgotten to put down. 
 
 She can't wash anything ; for putting her hands in 
 water might give her a cold. She can't dress the baby 
 for the same reason. She can't sleep with the baby, as 
 being broken of her rest would occasion weariness and 
 anxiety that would impair the nourishment. 
 
 So the Gusher begins to think she has opened a 
 restaurant that will not relieve her condition in any one 
 way. I presume you'll hear shortly that I've gone back 
 to the bottle. 
 
DREAMS. 
 
 IT'S a great pity some contrivance can't be built that, 
 being applied to me at night, will catch and retain the 
 visions that visit me during sleep. I believe I am the 
 boss dreamer of the world. In less time I can dream 
 more wonderful dreams than I ever heard spoken of, and, 
 like those of Joseph, they are no unmeaning chumps of 
 dreams. 
 
 I dreamed the night my folks moved into a new home 
 that of a sudden, with terrible noises and full bands of 
 brass instruments, the heavens rolled up like a patent 
 window-shade, and I beheld tier upon tier of old gentle- 
 men that resembled Peter Cooper and Horace Greeley. 
 They were all in their shirt sleeves, and between the 
 layers of old men there floated streaks of steam, through 
 which their faces shone like benignant old washer-women. 
 On a raised seat, similar to a leader of an orchestra, 
 was a particularly noticeable party, whom I instantly 
 recognized from the pictures to be Gabriel, even before 
 I noticed the horn under his left arm. An enlarged kind 
 of hotel register was opened before an angel of stentorian 
 lungs, and the roll-call commenced. There was a wide, 
 shining roadway opened at the right of this patriot, and 
 a gloomy, cavernous descent led off at the left. As 
 each name was called I saw my friends take them off by 
 one road or the other. Most of 'em took the other. 
 
 I don't think there was a soul I ever knew but his or 
 her name was called by the chairman, and amid much 
 
176 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 clashing of cymbals and despairing howls they left the 
 scene of their earthly troubles. This dream had begun 
 by my looking at the skies rolling away through a win- 
 dow ; but, by one of those inexplicable irregularities, I 
 was directly after out upon a vast plain with the multi- 
 tude whose names were being called, and, forgetting in 
 the excitement of the minute how good I had been, I con- 
 cluded a shade tree would be about the thing I wanted. 
 The nearest approach to such a thing seemed to be a 
 chunky huckleberry bush, and into that I crept with less 
 grace than celerity. 
 
 Through page after page went the loud-lunged angel. 
 He got through the G's without ever breathing the name 
 of Gusher. Once he began " Gid " and I felt ill ; but 
 he finished " Gideon Welles," and I felt relieved. At 
 last the end of the book was reached. I was pleased to 
 pieces. A huckleberry bush was good enough for me, 
 after seeing my friends take on so about going. The 
 bands tooted ; the angel shut the book with a rever- 
 berating bang. All the old men sitting on steam stood 
 up, and the whole affair started off very much like a 
 transformation scene. 
 
 " This lets me out," I said softly to myself ; but just 
 then I began to wonder what was going to become of 
 New York after its depopulation; and being a gregarious 
 animal, hankering after the society of my kind, I felt 
 indisposed to be left, so I coughed feebly " Ahem ! 
 ahem ! " 
 
 " Who's that ? " asked the County Clerk. 
 
 " It's me," responded I, timidly and ungrammatically. 
 
 "Who's me?" 
 
 " The Gusher of The Mirror" 
 
 " Indeed, indeed ; let me see." Evidently The Mirror 
 has circulated among the higher circles, for the selectman 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 177 
 
 began to go over the list ; page after page he turned, 
 after I crept out of the bush, but nowhere did the name 
 of the Gusher appear. 
 
 "You have been very bad," began the bookkeeper, 
 " but then you have been very good, and the good has 
 so evened up the account that I can't say whether you 
 should go up or down ; your record is so middling and 
 strikes such an average that nothing remains but to 
 assign you a place betwixt and between." 
 
 With that Peter Cooper and Horace Greeley came 
 forward. William Cullen Bryant opened a little door 
 into a narrow place like an old-fashioned brick oven. 
 When the first couple undertook to run me inside this 
 thing head first, naturally my first act was to kick. No 
 solitary confinement for me. The kicking waked me. 
 Behold, there was I, face down on the floor, sand-papering 
 my nose on the carpet, and scraping the skin off my 
 back trying to slide under the low side of a French bed- 
 stead. 
 
 Now, the other 'day I had a pretty dream. I have 
 never stood before a bit of handsome old furniture that 
 I did not wish that trees had tongues so that the expe- 
 rience of a bit of mahogany might delight my ears. 
 
 One of my best friends and one of the best fellows in 
 the world is Perkins, of Boston. He has lately fitted up 
 a road-house just out of the city. The night he threw his 
 doors open some of his many friends made a presentation 
 of an old-fashioned clock that had a record for going 
 as good as any that Golden could show out at Mystic 
 Park. 
 
 A thousand dollars had been contributed in as many 
 minutes to get up something handsome for " Perk." As 
 much of it as could be used in a clock was expended ; 
 and brass-bound, heavily decorated, fitted with a face 
 
 12 
 
178 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 that beamed with intelligence, and a pair of hands always 
 ready to put up for a friend and for the right ; with a 
 voice as deep and musical as Boyle O'Reilly's there was 
 Perkins's clock. And Perkins is as proud of it as a boy 
 is of his first trousers (providing they are not of the side- 
 door cut). 
 
 Now, on a warm spring afternoon, sitting near that 
 clock, above the hum of voices round me I began to 
 hear a pleasant little treble singing, and paying attention 
 I disentangled the words with very little trouble, and 
 here is 
 
 THE SONG OF THE CLOCK. 
 
 I am thinking now of a far-away time, 
 
 Back through many a score of years ; 
 I was newly finished, and in my prime, 
 
 When the s'ound of a bargain reached my ears. 
 I was being sold to a noble old man 
 
 As a wedding gift to his favorite boy, 
 And I laughed as only a young clock can, 
 
 And struck my hands together for joy. 
 I was carted away to a splendid place, 
 
 And received with delight by a lovely wife, 
 And I thought, as I looked on her girlish face, 
 
 'Twould be purely pleasure to time her life. 
 They stood me up in a corner tall, 
 
 Next a big bay-window, through which I could look ; 
 And very little in park or hall 
 
 Escaped Miss Clock in her cosey nook. 
 Then an heir was born to my master dear ; 
 
 And I struck all day to denote my joy, 
 And to let the very remotest hear 
 
 Of our proud possession a baby boy. 
 But at last the home life of hall and park 
 
 Was broken by crowds of city folk. 
 Among them was one I couldn't but mark, 
 
 Whose lips breathed music whenever he spoke. 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 179 
 
 Proud lipped and haughty when others were by, 
 
 For my mistress he'd ever an altered tone ; 
 Another expression came into his eye 
 
 When by chance they were left in the room alone. 
 She saw not the shadow beneath the smile, 
 
 She drank her life's poison from out that look, 
 Forgetting my noble master the while. 
 
 They sat near the clock in the ingle nook 
 One stormy night shall I ever forget ? 
 
 The wind had been muttering sullen and low ; 
 They came to my side. I can see them there yet, 
 
 With their arms intertwined, walking silent and slow. 
 When she glanced at my face, by a dim light's gleam, 
 
 I could see her turn pale, and knew by her look 
 She wished in her heart she had not been seen 
 
 With him by the faichful old clock in her nook. 
 I trembled with fear when, at early dawn, 
 
 Careworn and pale my master stood 
 Uttering words of hate and scorn, 
 
 And watching the path that led from the wood ; 
 And when hurrying steps came flying past, 
 
 And they questioned which road of the two he took, 
 I felt that some trouble had come at last 
 
 To the heart of the clock in the ingle nook. 
 Another day and another went ; 
 
 I heard no sound ; it was still in the Hall, 
 Till, just as the week was nearly spent, 
 
 My master came to me but under a pall. 
 The story was old : she was false to her vow, 
 
 And the bride that with pride to his bosom he took 
 Had fled with that man. and had broken his heart. 
 
 Why, it nearly broke mine in the ingle nook. 
 From that day on I have suffered more pain 
 Than I hope I shall ever know again. 
 Wet, tearful faces have watched the dead 
 And gazed into mine as the sad hours fled ; 
 Dim-eyed, faded, deserted wives, 
 Leading the saddest of human lives, 
 Have come to me, and I had to show 
 The cause they had for grief and woe. 
 
l8o THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 Ah, well, that's passed, and a happier fate 
 
 Has reached me, though it cometh late. 
 
 Henceforth only in scenes of joy 
 
 My scoring faculties I employ ; 
 
 I mark the flight of pleasant hours, 
 
 I look through windows on beds of flowers ; 
 
 The loveliest home on earth I've found 
 
 At Perkins's place, on the "One Mile Ground." 
 
 " I honestly believe you have been asleep," says Perk, 
 as he sends a Pommery cork against the ceiling, " perhaps 
 dreaming ; for while Conant has been telling that dismal 
 India-rubber story you have been smiling like a cherub, 
 and just now you cried out as if something amused 
 you." 
 
 " It did," I replied ; " I've been listening to your clock 
 relating something of its past life." 
 
 " You have been dreaming, I tell you ; that's a noble 
 clock. I will believe 'most anything of it but that it tells 
 stories." That's what Perk said. 
 
 But the clock really did ring that doggerel in a dream 
 to the champion dreamer. 
 
DECORATIVE ART. 
 
 I REMEMBER feeling ill myself after a prolonged inter- 
 view with some of the works of art hung in the Capitol. 
 One particularly aggravating picture, representing the 
 battle of something or other a sort of military erysip- 
 elas gave me the painters' colic. And I came near 
 having total collapse when I struck Powell's boat-load 
 of terrors. Here, now, Louis Tiffany decorates that 
 unfortunate mausoleum of the beautiful, and straightway 
 poor old gentlemen of unimpaired eyesight lie down and 
 die. Throughout the length and breadth of the land 
 female America is at it. Art shops are springing up on 
 every street and avenue, where pigments and plaques, 
 and turpentine and tambourines, and palettes and plaster- 
 of-paris can be bought by the idle and idiotic. 
 
 To stand at a counter in one of these places and hear 
 the adolescent artist prate of underglaze and firing, is 
 to form some idea of the extent to which this disease 
 has spread ; and to visit the homes of about fourteen 
 girls out of twelve, is to realize the extent of female 
 malignity and male endurance. 
 
 Maria Gushington (a second cousin of the Gusher) 
 has been decorating her father's chamber ; the old man 
 has been confined to his bed ever since the work was 
 completed. She has hung two-ribbon-bowed tambou- 
 rines on each side of his bed. On their sheepskin heads 
 she has painted apoplectic roses and consumptive calla 
 lilies. You know the lilies from the roses by their 
 
l82 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 complexions. On a satin screen a tableau, taken from 
 " Mary had a Little Lamb," is beautifully daubed. You 
 have no hesitation in selecting Mary from the lamb, 
 because Mary has fewer legs than the lamb and is not 
 so woolly. 
 
 But then Maria soared to higher flights. Above the 
 mantel is an ambitious representation of Tannhauser and 
 Venus, and she can give you twenty-seven guesses and 
 you wouldn't come within three blocks of the subject. 
 I firmly believed it to be the Annunciation, for some 
 time, till, discovering the leg of a bed, I concluded it 
 was the Raising of the Widow's Son (for in some way 
 I understood it to be a Scriptural subject). Finding I 
 was mistaken, it was to me, until yesterday, an interest- 
 ing reproduction of that exciting episode, " The Charge 
 of the Light Brigade." But Maria alluded to it then as 
 her great picture of Tannhauser and Venus. I feel 
 much upset in consequence : a ruthless change of 
 opinion taking place suddenly inside me is as bad as 
 an entire change of diet. No wonder the old man's 
 sick ! He has slept amid these pictorial puzzles for over 
 a week, and he's all broken up. 
 
 History repeats itself. It's the old story of theorem 
 painting and sampler working over again. My grand- 
 mother, of blessed memory, prosecuted to her latest days 
 an art taught in ladies' academies during the administra- 
 tion of George Washington and his immediate successors. 
 She possessed a multitude of little cards in which holes 
 were cut the shape of fruit and flowers. She laid her 
 card-board pattern on the article to be decorated, and 
 passed a sponge wet with paint over the holes. This 
 was simple, and the effect was as ample as that of the 
 average painted tambourine. 
 
 However, if theorem painting was easy, the sampler 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 183 
 
 was a struggle. When the Lord's Prayer, the girl's age, 
 two willow trees, and a selection of strawberries had been 
 delineated on a piece of linen with laborious stitching, 
 woman found that life was not a thornless bed of roses ; 
 and when it was hung up in the best room, over a horse- 
 hair sofa, it was no unusual thing to have a hearse 
 backed up to the front door as often as once a month, 
 while the weak-kneed succumbed and only the fittest 
 survived. 
 
 In view of the great increase of mortality and decora- 
 tive art, would it not be well to take legislative means to 
 restrain the young women ? Let the unfortunate girl 
 who doesn't know one tune from another, and has not 
 a note in her voice, be prevented by law from under- 
 taking the study of music. Let the artist who paints a 
 rose so much like a bunion that a chiropodist would hang 
 it out for a sign, be forcibly detained from disfiguring 
 our homes. 
 
THE SERGEANT'S STORY. 
 
 I HAVE a little story to tell you that is, it's Brophy's 
 story, and it's too pretty to keep to myself. 
 
 Sergeant Brophy was sent up here to this precinct from 
 down-town about half a year ago. The Police Commis- 
 sioners have an idea that any little indiscretion on the 
 part of an officer, or any little spite of their own, is 
 properly balanced by sending 'em to my precinct. They 
 don't know how pleasant I make it for 'em. 
 
 During the six months or more that -the Sergeant has 
 looked after our personal safety, we have been fast 
 friends. He is an observant, kindly, clever man, and 
 tells me many interesting things. Last week he had a 
 letter from a lady at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, recalling 
 an incident that happened five years ago, and asking him 
 to call on her immediately. 
 
 Down went the handsome Sergeant, with his sweetest 
 smile. He met a very lovely girl of seventeen, who 
 cried out when she saw him : 
 
 " You have changed somewhat, Mr. Brophy, but you 
 are the man ! I have never forgotten your face." 
 
 ' But you are so changed I should never suspect you 
 were the little girl on Fourteenth Street that I recollect 
 so well," returned Mr. Brophy. 
 
 And this was the incident she had mentioned in her 
 note : 
 
 Five years before there was a middle-aged German 
 and his wife, and daughter of twelve years, who resided 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 185 
 
 on Fourteenth Street, near Third Avenue. The man was 
 a cabinet-maker, who had for a wife a delicate, cultured 
 woman, evidently bred in a different circle from that in 
 which she moved. The pair were both discouraged by 
 their fate in this country. He took to drink and she 
 broke down in health. The slender, pale little girl went 
 back and forth to the shops, and on the streets she met 
 and was noticed by Mr. Brophy. Many times he had 
 seen her late at night searching the saloons for her 
 father. Many times he had helped her pilot his unsteady 
 steps home. Finally the mother died, and the girl and 
 her father lived on together, getting poorer and more 
 wretched every week. One night one of their neighbors 
 came in search of the officer, as a row was occurring in 
 the Uhiinger rooms. Mr. Brophy found the father more 
 than usually intoxicated, the little girl almost wild 
 with grief, and a fine-looking, well-dressed woman in a 
 great state of excitement. 
 
 He learned, that the lady was a sister of the little girl's 
 dead mother ; that she was a wealthy woman from Ger- 
 many ; that she had come from over the Rhine in search 
 of her little niece ; that the father had executed papers 
 giving her a legal title to the child. But now that the 
 hour of parting was come he clung to the girl, and in a 
 drunken frenzy repulsed the aunt, who proposed taking 
 the little one on board a steamer that night that would 
 sail early next morning. 
 
 The officer's familiar features calmed the child. She 
 begged and prayed not to be taken from her father. 
 The aunt was stern ; she knew her rights. There was 
 no pity in her heart for the man who had taken her 
 sister from comfort to die in poverty in a strange land. 
 
 Brophy felt sorry for them all, but he recognized that 
 the girl's salvation hung on the decision of the night ; 
 
1 86 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 for the daughter's love for the wretched father was fast 
 weakening the aunt's interest in her niece. So he took 
 the little one into a neighbor's room and explained that 
 nothing but the workhouse lay in waiting for them both ; 
 that if she went with her aunt she could become an edu- 
 cated woman and able to help her father ; that her father, 
 no longer having two to provide for, would find work 
 and get along much better than he could with her. And 
 finally he induced her to carry out the original pro- 
 gramme and start that night for a brighter home in Ger- 
 many. But the girl made him promise, as her only 
 friend, to look out for the old man. The officer accepted 
 the trust. The aunt took the girl away, and Brophy 
 went 'round to the station-house to go on duty, with the 
 Dutchman on his mind. 
 
 He made Tony Pastor joint executor of his legacy 
 next day, and Tony took the old German into his thea- 
 tre as a sort of upholstering scene- shifter. He pulled 
 himself together and turned out very well on the helpful 
 hands of Pastor and Brophy. 
 
 When George Knight wanted a useful man to manage 
 his scenery on the road, Tony recommended Uhlinger. 
 By this time he was as steady as Old Time's rocks. Over 
 half the United States he travelled with the popular 
 stars, Sophie and George Knight. 
 
 Time flies almost unnoticed ; though Sergeant Brophy, 
 when he stopped to think of it, remembered that he first 
 adopted old Uhlinger in 1880. He couldn't quite realize 
 that the weeping, miserable little girl of Fourteenth 
 Street had blossomed into the lovely woman who wel- 
 comed him at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. But it was Miss 
 Uhlinger, well grown, well educated, in search of her 
 father, after all. 
 
 The years of separation and the well-meant efforts of 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 187 
 
 the aunt to alienate the daughter's heart from the 
 father's fate had been ineffectual. 
 
 Only a few months before the aunt had died, leaving 
 all she had to her adopted child, and the girl's first 
 thought was of America and the poor old loving man, 
 who had had his failings, to be sure, but who had always 
 loved her. 
 
 I don't suppose there was a better pleased man in New 
 York than Sergeant Brophy. He knew just where to lay 
 hands on his legacy for the Knights were playing in 
 Harlem, and old Uhlinger, his ward, was at his post. He 
 had nothing to tell the daughter of her father but good. 
 The man was sober, steady, contented, and happy. He 
 had talked but lately with him of his daughter, and the 
 father had said sadly : 
 
 " I know nothing of her ; her aunt would prevent her 
 communicating with me. But if she is alive, she is a 
 lady, and in that I rejoice. I feel that some day the 
 thought of her father will come over her and she will 
 write. My girl will never forget her poor old father." 
 
 And as Mr. Brophy repeated the conversation, the 
 tears fell thick and fast from the girl's bright eyes. 
 
 It was 7.30 when the coupe rattled up to the One 
 Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street Theatre, and the Ser- 
 geant sought George Knight in his dressing-room. In a 
 few words the actor was told the officer's mission. 
 
 " Why, it's delightful ! " said Knight. " Do you know, 
 I'm as excited as a boy about it. I must see that meet- 
 ing. I'm so glad for Uhlinger, poor old chap ! " 
 
 And then Mr. Knight proposed that the girl should 
 see the performance, and father and daughter be brought 
 together afterwards. 
 
 " You know the sudden joy may be more than an old 
 man can bear," said Sophie. 
 
l88 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 So Mr. Brophy and his charge went into a box, and the 
 girl agreed to curb her impatience till her coming should 
 be broken quietly. 
 
 Poor Uhlinger couldn't understand why the sympa- 
 thetic Mrs. Knight asked him if he wouldn't be good 
 enough to go into the dressing-room and fix up a bit, as 
 she wanted him to go somewhere with her after the 
 show. So his ruddy face shone with recent soap, and his 
 gray, thin locks were carefully brushed, as the curtain 
 was going up for the last time. 
 
 Mrs. Knight called him to the wing and pointed out 
 the girl in the box. 
 
 " Seems to me I know that lady ; did you ever see her 
 before, Uhlinger ? " 
 
 " No, I can't say I have. And yet and yet ! " 
 
 The old man stood and gazed, as the actress was 
 obliged to go on the stage. He couldn't take his eyes off 
 that strange lady's face. All of a sudden he caught 
 sight of the ruddy face and blond head of her escort, the 
 Sergeant. Then came a tremor at his heart an undefined 
 thought. The poor man rushed up to the back as Mrs. 
 Knight came off. 
 
 " I know the party that lady is with. He's a good 
 friend of mine. Oh, Mrs. Knight ! someway I don't 
 know," stammered out the old man. 
 
 " Wait here for me," whispered Mrs. Knight. " The 
 curtain is on the drop in just two minutes more. Wait 
 here for me." 
 
 And off she ran. The applause that followed came 
 dimly to poor Uhlinger's ears, as he stood, getting each 
 instant more nervous and dazed, as one thought after 
 another presented itself. Past him flew one after the 
 other of the company on the way to the dressing-rooms ; 
 then George, his boyish face glowing with pleasure ; 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 189 
 
 then Sophie, the tears ready to start in her laughing 
 eyes ; then the well-put-up figure of the Sergeant, and 
 beside him the charming, elegant young lady. 
 
 "We've got a big surprise for you," began Knight. 
 
 " Now, you mustn't " We shall never know what 
 
 Mrs. Knight was going to say he mustn't do, for just as 
 Brophy laid his hand on the old man's shoulder the 
 young lady cried out : 
 
 " Oh, father ! don't you know your daughter Annie ? 
 I've come back to get you. I've come back ! " 
 
 And she threw herself into his arms, and Mr. and Mrs. 
 Knight turned away with tearful eyes, and Brophy went 
 up stage and blew his nose like a trumpet. 
 
 " Why," said he to me, " I've been taking in theatres 
 all my days and have seen the tallest kind of emotional 
 acting : long-lost fathers and returned daughters have 
 fallen into each other's arms on the stage a hundred 
 times before me ; but this was the real thing, and I 
 wouldn't have missed it for the world." 
 
FIRST LOVE. 
 
 I THINK the Lord had just finished the seasons when 
 he made woman ; there's so much in her that is reminis- 
 cent of the previous performance. The four seasons 
 occur and are as natural in her life as the year's ; just as 
 the other four seasons pepper, salt, etc. belong to the 
 other sex. 
 
 But the budding, blossoming, fruitful year is repro- 
 duced in the changing lifetime of a woman. And these 
 autumn days, with their soaking rains and close-following 
 gusts of wind, that dim the glory of the year's maturity and 
 strip the trees that they may reach their naked arms to 
 Heaven when left defenceless in their age why, what 
 more like the tears and passion of a lovely woman, cry- 
 ing out against the pitiless hand that is stealing her 
 freshness and her beauty ? 
 
 There's a catalpa tree beside my windows that I 
 likened this year to a coy young girl. When sturdy 
 maples stretched their welcoming green branches towards 
 her, when a silver ash trembled with ill-concealed affec- 
 tion for her, she stood until late in June with timid, half- 
 decided buds breaking out all over her, when suddenly 
 the air was filled with perfume, and Kate Alper was 
 covered with white blossoms, like a bride. 
 
 It was a beautiful honeymoon for all of us. 
 
 We lived in an atmosphere heavy with sweets for one 
 entire month. Then the maple, who had plainly won the 
 coy Kate, had what you might call a revulsion of feeling. 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 191 
 
 The servants said it was a " high wind." Anyway, two 
 huge arms that had held her lovingly, broke close to the 
 trunk, and fell down about her astonished roots. 
 
 I went out and inspected the ghastly accident. 
 
 " Was there vitality enough in the still adhering frag- 
 ments to animate those branches if I just wired 'em into 
 position?" I asked myself and experience yelled 
 " No," like the echoes in a cavern. 
 
 Try to resuscitate corpses ; endeavor to teach the 
 statues on monuments to read their own inscriptions ; 
 seek to put an old, sour apple back into its blossom but 
 don't try to put a pair of arms around an object of past 
 affection when once they have lost the hugging pro- 
 clivity. 
 
 So Kate was left without companionship, and, though 
 other and younger green things courted her, she has been 
 slowly dying all summer. 
 
 To-day her crown is bleached ; the air is laden with 
 withered leaves that, like unfulfilled hopes, are leaving 
 her when most she needs 'em ; clumsy, fattening beans 
 hang where the blossoms swung. She's old and ugly, 
 and looking forward with some uncertainty to a resur- 
 rection. 
 
 I can't think of a thing to do or say to her that will 
 comfort her, so I just go out and sing in a low, minor 
 Harry Miner key : 
 
 " It's a world of sorrow and sin, 
 A world of trouble and care ; 
 And the nicest crown a woman can win 
 Is very unpleasant to wear." 
 
 There's no nation on the earth that contains so many 
 self-supporting, intelligent women as the Yankee one. 
 In England, when John turns out a failure his Mary 
 
192 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 Ann accepts the situation, and lives along to a fat old 
 age with the busted trust company, never thinking of 
 taking the remedy into her own hands. 
 
 But, good gracious ! Look at us ! About six women 
 to the dozen are on their second lap before they quit the 
 track. They give it a fair trial, but the grand majority 
 finish their journey alone. 
 
 I honestly believe the popular marriage certificate 
 twenty years from now will have a divorce coupon attached, 
 to cut off and use in six or twelve months. 
 
 And very much of this is brought about by a prema- 
 ture decision. Most of us who waited a reasonable time 
 laughed to scorn the earlier objects of their idolatry. 
 
 A man ignorantly says: " Let me be the first love of 
 the girl I marry;" when the blessed goose, if he only knew 
 it, would find his chances a great deal better if he was 
 the fifteenth. 
 
 In some of the cantons of Switzerland they don't 
 allow parties to contract marriage until the girl is twenty- 
 five. It's a wise dispensation of the law. It gives a girl 
 a chance to have a few love affairs and find out what 
 suits her. 
 
 When the Gusher was thirteen she was madly in love 
 with a young fellow who drove a baker's cart and served 
 the rolls in the morning. He was underwitted be sure 
 of that ! for one day he suggested we should elope to 
 Weathersfield, where his uncle was keeper of a feed-store 
 and occasional preacher in a meeting-house. 
 
 The prospect was simply delightful. To me that 
 bake-cart driver, who always smelled of fried doughnuts, 
 and had warts on his hands as big as his own tea-biscuit, 
 seemed a fate supremely blest. 
 
 Someway, a large order for sugar ginger-bread, given 
 by a circus, deferred the elopement. I went to the circus, 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 193 
 
 and realized how inferior is first love to a really great 
 second attachment. A spangled-trunked young man 
 who threw a double somersault dethroned the baker boy. 
 Fortunately, the departing circus cut short this affair of 
 the heart, and I made up my mind, being in sight of 
 fourteen, that I had escaped the follies of youth and 
 knew what a grand, lasting, life-long affection was. 
 
 I then met my fate. He was somewhat elderly and 
 wore eye-glasses. I congratulated myself on having 
 placed my heart on a man worthy its possession. For a 
 long time nearly six months I believed all that was to 
 arrive had arrived in my life. We were engaged. 
 
 He was a sort of Casaubon, such as marches through 
 -" Middlemarch ; " and to bring sunlight into that man's 
 existence was my sole object for a half year. The war 
 gobbled this adorable being, and about thirty-six real, 
 enduring, undying devotions occupied my affections 
 during the next five years. Casaubon was wiped out. 
 Here last week a card was brought up to me, and with 
 much difficulty its owner was hoisted into the apartments 
 a mummy of the Cheopean era. 
 
 I looked at him in horror. Was this the hero whose 
 dignity and priggishness had established him in my 
 youthful esteem as a very superior person ? What an 
 escape ! 
 
 As I thought of the long years in which, but for an all- 
 wise Providence and an indignant parent, I might have 
 been watching the dreadful change to the horrible, I 
 fairly shuddered. 
 
 So I made a mental note that the vast inventive ability I 
 possess shall be directed to the construction of a machine 
 that shall not, like Edison's, reproduce the utterances of 
 the past, but shall forecast the changes of time and show 
 a demented girl what sort of an old man she'll have in 
 13 
 
194 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 twenty-five years, if she takes up with the present infatu- 
 ation. 
 
 A machine that can take an engaged young man and 
 give him a private view of Emma Jane at the age of 
 forty-five will work a big reformation in things matri- 
 monial. 
 
 All this is not to get into the Is-Marriage-a-Failure 
 question, but to answer one a girl sends me. She " is 
 fifteen and very mature for her years," and she asks, " Am 
 I too young to marry? " 
 
 And I say emphatically, yes! She'll be too young to 
 marry until she's fifty, and then she'd better think she's 
 too old, and so pull through and be comfortable. 
 
ABOUT DOGS. 
 
 IF any one can suggest an attachment an anodyne or 
 preventive to attach to a dog to break him of eating 
 shoes and boots, will he or she please forward it to the 
 Gusher ? Around the halls of dazzling light occupied by 
 the subscriber you can find hooks and shingle-nails galore. 
 These are there for the purpose of suspending all foot- 
 gear when it's out of use. Guests are usually informed, 
 before taking their clothes off, that Mr. Perkins is a set- 
 ter, addicted to a diet of Oxford ties. 
 
 There are nights when I go to bed in a hurry, under 
 an impression that the bed is trying to run away ; and on 
 these occasions the hooks are neglected and the shoes 
 reach the floor-^-a sad occasion, I assure you, for that's 
 the end of 'em. Perkins breakfasts early on an indigesti- 
 ble boot-heel and scraps of patent leather. 
 
 Monday morning was a wild one chez moi. A wail 
 came up the corridor from Eleanor Morretti. " Some one 
 has carried off my boots ! " 
 
 Simultaneously a cry came from the next room, and 
 Madame Ponisi held up a shoe, half gone. 
 
 In an instant I thought of my own pedal gear, and 
 sprang up. The shoe drawer had been left open, and 
 Perkins had fed ; some villanous instinct had led him to 
 select one of each pair ; and a boot, a low shoe, and a 
 slipper mourned its mate. 
 
 Later in the day a sad-eyed woman appeared in a New 
 York shop, wearing one Oxford tie and one Louis Quinze 
 
196 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 slipper. The fact that one was black kid and the other 
 bronze added a keener pang to her misery, perhaps ; but 
 she is learning that the lesson of life is one of sorrow. 
 Dick (who is a railroad man) brought over to-day a super- 
 annuated tin ticket-box, with a slot in the top and a pad- 
 lock on the side. This he recommends as a boot and 
 shoe repository, and it has been accepted and gone into 
 immediate use in most of the rooms. 
 
 As we sat on the piazza that evening the conversation 
 turned on the mournful event of the morning, when Per- 
 kins went through our effects ; and numerous were the 
 anecdotes his exploits elicited. 
 
 Edwin Forrest once told Madame Ponisi of his adven- 
 ture with a boot-chewing dog. It was when he was very 
 poor that he shared his hard fate with Brutus, a fine, 
 fond retriever. An engagement was offered him while in 
 Cincinnati to play in Dayton, and the embryo eminent 
 accepted it. Alas ! railway fares were not provided, and 
 all the sleepers his contract called for he found under the 
 rails as he footed it from Cincinnati to Dayton in com- 
 pany with Brutus. Footsore and weary, the actor and 
 his dog reached a boarding-house and a bed, and Forrest 
 slept sound and dreamless, you may be sure. But a 
 horrible sight met his eye as he commenced to dress next 
 morning. Brutus had feasted on his left boot ; there was 
 little more than the straps and heel left, as evidence that 
 he had ever had a left boot. 
 
 This was not the era when a strapped actor could brace 
 a box-office and ask for an advance. There was always 
 an obtainable chance that the ghost would refrain from 
 pedestrian exercise at the close of the week, and certainly 
 no inducement for its taking the air so early in the 
 engagement. 
 
 Forrest knew all this. Not until the following Monday 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. IQ7 
 
 could he hope for boots, and his pride suggested an 
 excuse for his bootless condition. He unpacked a russet 
 sandal that inclosed his mighty foot in "The Gladiator." 
 He vowed he had sprained his ankle, leaping from the car 
 on its arrival at the Dayton depot. He went lame till salary 
 day, and wore his sandal with a limp till he clutched the 
 stamps to buy a new pair of boots seven troubled days. 
 
 Virginia Buchanan began to laugh as she told of a 
 much worse predicament her father had once been in. 
 He was on a tour ; and sending his trunks on, he went to 
 spend Sunday with his wife and daughter, equipped with 
 a hand-satchel and the suit of clothes on his back. 
 Mother and daughter went to church, and returned at 
 noon to find the tragedian in bed. 
 
 " Why, this is simply dreadful ! " said Mrs. Buchanan ; 
 "twelve o'clock and you are not up yet." 
 
 " You can't expect a man to get up without his trousers, 
 can you ? " growled the bed-ridden sufferer. " Look at 
 my pants ! " 
 
 They tried to/but there was so little left to look at 
 that the invitation seemed thrown away. The favorite 
 house-dog had ribboned those trousers ; and as McKean 
 Buchanan was a very tall man he remained in bed most 
 of the day, while a village tailor lengthened a pair in his 
 stock to fit the requirements. 
 
 Will Elsbre related his adventures. He had been off 
 one warm day for a stroll, taking a pet bull-dog as com- 
 panion, when he reached a quiet bend in the river, far 
 from the haunts of man, and concluded to indulge in a 
 swim. Grip was in the distance interested in the track 
 of a mole ; so while his back was turned Elsbre stuck his 
 umbrella into the ground and grouped his raiment round 
 it. Having erected this monument to the cardinal virtues, 
 he shouted to Grip to come and watch the wardrobe, and 
 
198 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 took a header into the water. Grip trotted up, recog- 
 nized his duty, and sat down on a shirt, like a girl on the 
 Casino roof, determined not to leave till the show was 
 over. Elsbre had a noble swim, and clambered out to 
 dress. Not much ! Grip had no acquaintance with his 
 master in that condition. He refused to recognize the 
 voice and gestures of the distracted bather. Every time 
 Elsbre got within ten feet of him the hair on Grip's back 
 rose in a straight line. His teeth became the most 
 prominent features of the landscape, and a curdling growl 
 probed the adjacent air. 
 
 For one mortal hour did Elsbre coax and cajole the 
 beast, until, getting desperate, he began to throw stones. 
 Grip deserted his post to take a short run, and Elsbre 
 seized his pants, only to find that the agile animal had 
 whipped back and got a death grip on one leg of 'em. 
 Elsbre pulled, and the dog hung on. Of a sudden they 
 parted, and Grip flew over the hills with the entire half of 
 a pair of gray pants ! 
 
 Consternation reigned in the Elsbre family when Grip 
 landed on the piazza with the leg of gray trousers in his 
 jaws. There was Will's note-book in the pocket ; there 
 was his knife ; there was his cigarette case. Lamentation 
 rent the air. As Grip had the trousers, a son and brother 
 was gone nothing left but half Irs pants ! Then a 
 search for the body was made, that resulted in finding 
 young Elsbre on a sand-hill trying to make an off leg of 
 trouser out of his coat sleeves. 
 
 After this Julia Percy related the life and times of 
 Puck. Puck was a tiny skye terrier the Gusher once 
 gave her, and it inherited the slipper-slaughtering, boot- 
 butchering instincts of its mother and father. Mrs. 
 Percy and Puck on one occasion journeyed to Newton 
 Falls, and the lady's vacation was filled with anxious care. 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 199 
 
 Her room opened on a piazza that girdled the house, and, 
 on an average, Puck plunged through the window lugging 
 some one's boot or shoe half a dozen times a day. 
 
 The worry of returning property and the excitement of 
 the chase kept the lady up in G most of the time. But 
 Puck's prowess as a catcher of mice atoned for his 
 depredations. 
 
 In the next room to Mrs. Percy stopped a venerable 
 couple, who seemed to be idiots on the subject of mice. 
 They would rap on the wall and shriek for Puck, as they 
 climbed on chairs and waited for the small champion to 
 come and collar a mouse the size of a chestnut. 
 
 One day the old lady was ill, and the old gentleman 
 went to a bureau drawer to get her a clean cap, when he 
 spied a mouse in the corner of it, and, hastily shutting 
 it, sounded the usual battle-cry of " Puck ! Puck ! " In 
 rushed the vigilant, and the old man carefully opened the 
 dreadful drawer, and in plunged Puck. 
 
 " Shake it up ! " shouted the old man. 
 
 Julia stood on a chair with gathered skirts, and cried, 
 " Sick him ! " 
 
 But it was a " Sick her ! " when Puck emerged; for he 
 had torn the false front of the invalid into 20,000 hairs ; 
 and Ma lay abed while Pa took some of the " mouse " 
 up to Helmer and had another toupee made before she 
 could enter polite society. 
 
 Sidney Rosenfeld then told of Spider and the late con- 
 vulsions in his peaceful home. Spider is a bull-dog, but 
 a bull-dog of such a languid, cataleptic nature that he 
 gradually got himself despised for his gentleness. Sidney, 
 the other day, between the verses of a topical song, 
 addressed himself to the dog, and anathematized his 
 milk-and-water character. 
 
 " You are a doglet that's a blotlet on your race ! " said 
 
2OO THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 he. " There's no fightlet in your makelet ; there's no 
 bloodlet in your eyelet, despite the dotlet on your 
 eye." 
 
 And Spider got up and went out to the barn, and 
 engaged in an encounter with a big mongrel retainer, and 
 licked him, and got a taste for gore, and ran amuck 
 through Yonkers eating dog. 
 
 This unexpected change of base kept the Rosenfeld 
 family busy. Spider is at last around ; he's fighting 
 everything. Mrs. Rosenfeld took a meek and lowly 
 follower of the Lord out to air him after the family 
 horse, followed by the family dog Spider. 
 
 They journeyed to a neighboring village, and the par- 
 son was speaking instructively of the work of St. Paul in 
 Ephesus, when Spider clinched with a yaller dog. The 
 yelps brought, as usual, recruits from all directions. The 
 parson got out, and broke up the carriage-whip. Mrs. 
 Rosenfeld got out and sought to grasp Spider's tail. The 
 natives gathered, and they reviled the parson for coming 
 over there to have dog-fights. Finally, torn, bloody, but 
 victorious, Spider abandoned his victim, and went home 
 behind the chariot-wheels, a disgraceful spectacle of the 
 triumph of brute force. 
 
 Mrs. Rosenfeld wants a recipe to make Spider return 
 to the pristine amiability that animated him before Sidney 
 roused his spirit ; and I want a cure for boot-chewing, 
 before it gets too cold to go barefoot. 
 
 ****** 
 
 Did I ever tell you how I became possessed of one of 
 my most faithful and best-loved dog friends ? 
 
 It was a good many years ago in the spring, I think 
 that I went down Broadway in my best clothes. It 
 was a brand-new costume. I was a streak of velvet and 
 jet, and on such good terms with myself that I thank- 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 2OI 
 
 fully accepted my reflection as I passed the shop win- 
 dows. 
 
 It was to look at my satisfactory condition that I 
 paused somewhere about Ninth Street at a dry-goods 
 store display. Against some black goods in a show-case 
 I came out in great form ; but behind the show-case lay 
 curled a dog, the most miserable specimen of the ash- 
 barrel kioodle I ever beheld. 
 
 Want had pinched him ; hunger had collapsed his 
 flues ; some wretch had scalded him ; he was deserted, 
 friendless, and utterly forlorn. He raised his eyes 
 humbly and hungrily to mine, and met a glance that 
 caused him to feebly thump a thank with his hairless 
 stump of a tail. I felt a lump in my throat and a ten- 
 pence in my pocket, and I marched round the first cor- 
 ner and walked till I struck a butcher shop. I invested 
 in some well-chopped beef, and concealing a good big 
 paper horn of it in my parasol I trotted back to Lazarus, 
 shook out the meat in a grateful stream under his nose, 
 and departed, better pleased with myself than before, if 
 such a thing could be. 
 
 About Fourteenth Street I began to see people pass 
 me in a strange way. Admiration sat on their coun- 
 tenances as they approached. As they got even with 
 me, a smile of ridicule spread like a plaster over their 
 faces. 
 
 " Good Lord ! " thought I ; "am I losing anything off ? 
 Has anything burst in the rear ? Something surely is 
 the matter with my behind me." I felt. I tried to 
 investigate the difficulty. All at once I looked in the 
 shop windows. One glance explained the truth. That 
 dog was as close to me as if he'd been tied to my sash. 
 He put his feet down in my tracks. We were doing the 
 Sing Sing lock-step up Broadway. 
 
202 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 Ye gods ! but he was a spectacle. The meat had 
 taken effect, not on his body, but his affections. I jumped 
 into an omnibus. He laid his head on the lower step 
 and came right along. I flew to my home, and he weakly 
 turned into the same street. I got in and up-stairs, when 
 the girl told me a dog was taking the skin off the front 
 door in an effort to get in. 
 
 It was fate ! I invited Lazarus to the back yard, and 
 he lived for many happy years, until death claimed him, 
 an awful specimen of what nature can do in building 
 dogs but the attached, valued friend of the Gusher. 
 
THE BEST TIME TO DIE. 
 
 I DON'T know that those hilarious young people are 
 far wrong who take the elderly members of their families 
 to the banks of the Ganges and stop up their eyes and 
 ears with sacred mud and leave them for the crocodiles 
 to attend to. I see so many old pumps making them- 
 selves ridiculous, that it is a matter of regret that the 
 Hudson River doesn't furnish the right sort of mud for 
 the stuffing process. 
 
 I have been lately assisting in a lodge of sorrow cele- 
 brated by four sisters. Their mother died eight years 
 ago, and for eight years they have kept a marvellous 
 house, set an irreproachable table, dressed the old man 
 like an advertisement for a Troy laundry, and made the 
 most agreeable home a miserable old he- sinner ever had. 
 In April last they took in, out of charity, the overgrown, 
 gawky daughter of their washer-woman. 
 
 Linda was a flaxen-haired, snub nosed, Teutonic dam- 
 sel of sixteen. She washed dishes, ran errands, and was 
 a sort of maid-of-all-work to the mature old party who 
 cooked and did the heavy business in the family. 
 
 Old Pa owns a farm over near Orange, in New Jersey, 
 and it has been the custom to retire to this abode in June 
 and stay there till October. In June they all departed, 
 taking the faithful cook, and leaving Linda in the city 
 house, to which Linda's ma also went, to keep it till 
 the family returned in the fall. Last August one of the 
 daughters came into the city, shopping, and I met her at 
 
204 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 a dry-goods counter. It occurred to me that I had met 
 Pa once or twice during the summer, so I said : " Your 
 father is not out at Orange with you, is he ? " 
 
 " Oh, yes ! but he's been making alterations in "the 
 house on Sixty-third Street ; so he has been in town fre- 
 quently," replied Miss . I didn't tell her that I'd 
 
 seen him at Wallack's and Coney Island with one of the 
 11 alterations." Old Poppy was just about the age when 
 they stuff 'em with mud along the Ganges, and, of 
 course, was making the usual fool of himself. 
 
 I bade my friend good-by, and heard nothing more 
 till last week, when the four sisters turned up in a state 
 of mental woe bordering on distraction. 
 
 It seems a neighbor wrote 'em that Pop and Linda were 
 seen continually together ; that Linda occupied the best 
 room, as they saw by the gas in the window, evenings ; 
 that she sat in the parlors, and had taken all the linen 
 covers off the furniture, and that their ma's picture was 
 gone from over the piano in the front of the house, as 
 they had discovered by observations from the street and 
 back yard. 
 
 The girls piled into town. Alas ! too true was the 
 information. The dreadful, snub-nosed, freckle-faced, 
 sixteen-year-older was boss ! 
 
 " You dreadful creature ! " cried Minerva, who is 
 twenty-five. " Pick up your clothes and leave this 
 house." 
 
 " Not much," returned Linda. "I was more to home 
 here as you. I vas married to your fader more as six 
 weeks. Dere vas my marriage bapers." 
 
 Sure enough, the old noodle had married the girl ; and 
 the former washer-woman was mother-in-law, and on 
 deck, as poor Minerva found. 
 
 Poppy is seventy-two years old, and manages his busi- 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 205 
 
 ness with intelligence. There's no ground for a lunatico 
 inquirendo, that I can see ; but be ought to be stuffed 
 there's no doubt about that ! 
 
 ****** 
 
 The doctrine of euthanasia is not a bad one ; but much 
 better it would be for a lot of theatrical people, if, with 
 unimpaired powers, they stepped down and out. 
 
 How many thousands who saw Ristori, when, in the 
 grandeur of tragic strength, she played at the Fourteenth 
 Street Theatre, but who witnessed a shaky old woman's 
 struggle with a strange language in which she was badly 
 worsted can believe what a gorgeous actress she used to 
 be! 
 
 Had it pleased the gods to strike down John McCul- 
 lough as he left the stage one night in the flowing robes 
 of Virginius, what " an end devoutly to be wished " it 
 would have been ! 
 
 Then the pomp, and the pageantry, and the big fune- 
 ral, and the columns and columns of adulatory reminis- 
 cences in the papers ! 
 
 Instead, a weekly report of imbecile utterances ; a 
 description of the enfeebled man tottering, step by step, 
 downward all the time ; statements of the terrible indica- 
 tions of a wrecked mind and dying body, harrowing those 
 who remember him with tenderness. Finally, a going 
 out of the flickering light, and a quiet laying away, by 
 those who cannot say "We are sorry he is dead " ! Then 
 the obituary record of his life, its work, its triumph and 
 its slow destruction a column that has been set up in 
 every newspaper office in the country for months, await- 
 ing the end ! 
 
 There are numberless members of the profession scat- 
 tered about the world, in alms-houses, insane asylums, 
 charity hospitals, and the like, who in their time have been 
 
206 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 the favorites of the fickle public, but, forgotten and for- 
 saken, having outlived their usefulness, they linger on the 
 scene unloving and unloved to what purpose? They 
 are burdens to themselves and the world. Ah ! if they 
 had only died while yet the bloom was on 'em ! Descend- 
 ants would like to speak of " My uncle, the celebrated 
 artist, who died " ; and the Lord knows they will 
 never mention " My uncle, who is just now on the Island," 
 or " My aunt, Mrs. - , now insane " ! It makes a 
 heap of difference, I tell you. 
 
 I think a most admirable characteristic is that which 
 induced John Matthews, in a burst of prosperity, to go 
 and get measured for his coffin and pay his funeral 
 expenses. He won't die any the sooner, and he carries 
 the receipt in his pocket a potent charm to cheer many 
 an impecunious hour. 
 
 There's the coffin, finished years ago, standing up in 
 the undertaker's shop and seasoning. There'll be no 
 unpleasant shrinkage or warping to annoy him. The 
 latest fashion in trimmings can be run in when wanted for 
 use. They will just polish up the plate and add one 
 word and a few figures to the legend upon it, and genial, 
 erudite Johnny, with his Latin quotations, will rest all the 
 happier that he left little for friends to do but lay their 
 flowers and regrets on the coffin he bought years ago for 
 himself. 
 
 We all remember Adelaide Neilson, radiantly lovely 
 the ideal Juliet ! As I write her name there seems to 
 float back to me, amid the hum of a thousand approv- 
 ing voices, the odor of sweet flowers, so indissoluble are 
 the words triumph, tribute, and Neilson. 
 
 The greatness of Heron's past was dimmed by the 
 later exhibitions of her decadence. I always see her as 
 I saw her last dishevelled, gray, obese, and generally 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 207 
 
 broken up and down; called out at a benefit at Niblo's 
 Garden, indulging in a maudlin, sentimental wail before 
 the footlights, and then deliberately sitting on the stage, 
 so overcome with emotion was she. How much better 
 had she been called earlier off the scene! 
 
 I mind me of a man who struggled for years amid the 
 poverty of journalism, with a pleasant wife and promising 
 children to urge him to further endeavor. In an unex- 
 pected hour success perched upon, his banner, and with 
 astonishing rapidity he made a fortune. 
 
 He was far from being an Adonis, but, like my friend 
 old Pop, money made him attractive. He found a 
 younger woman than madame, who had shared youth 
 and poverty with him. 
 
 The spectacle of this gaunt gallant and this shrewd 
 young party has been constantly seen about town. 
 
 A lady who had crossed the Atlantic a year or two 
 before with him and his family sat with me, about six 
 months ago, in a certain theatre. 
 
 "Why, there's Mr. ," said she, recognizing the 
 
 newly made rich man. " Who's the girl ? He has no 
 daughter." 
 
 Some member of the party made a pertinent reply, and 
 my friend held up her hands in dismay as she remarked: 
 
 " Well, I'm beginning to doubt there is a Providence, 
 as I see the faithful, helpful wives and mothers forsaken 
 in their waning health and strength by these wretched 
 men. Why, that chit wouldn't look at that crane if he 
 hadn't made a little money ! " 
 
 Ah, well ! The retributive justice is coming along very 
 steadily. " The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they 
 grind exceeding fine." 
 
A SPECIMEN BOARDING-HOUSE. 
 
 THE Gusher, thank Heaven ! knows little about board- 
 ing-houses, and she means to know less before she knows 
 more ; but she has just had a short experience that will 
 furnish forth a few remarks to her congregation. 
 
 Miss Snip and her ma board at Mrs. Huckleberry's 
 high-toned establishment, and misfortune elected that 
 my lot should be cast among 'em the entirety of Wednes- 
 day last. The widow of a General Somebody and the 
 relict of the Rev. Hebron Waters have the second floor ; 
 two extremely swell young theological students and an 
 old maid hang out on the third ; Miss Snip and ma occupy 
 the back, and the front parlor is to rent, with first-class 
 board and a turn-up bedstead. Miss Snip and ma said 
 .it would be "sweet for me and Ichabod," if Ichabod 
 could be brought to think so. 
 
 Anyway, I was to try a visit to the Snips' and see how 
 I liked it. Miss Huckleberry showed me the "apart- 
 ments," as she called 'em. There was a sort of arch 
 thrown up in the ceiling that constituted the saloon par- 
 lor two rooms, in the landlady's eyes. My soul revolted 
 at the mechanical apparatus she exhibited as the bed and 
 put through its paces. On first acquaintance this affair 
 looked like an etagere. "An Etegerry bedstead," Gen- 
 eral Somebody's widow called it. Mrs. Huckleberry 
 pulled some stops and valves, detached the front, and it 
 became a wash-stand. She turned some cranks and 
 shoved some bolts, and it turned gracefully on end, and 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 2Op 
 
 there were four pillows, their flues collapsed by mutual 
 pressure. Then a second crank and cog-wheel began the 
 work of uncoiling. The thing stretched out and yawned 
 till it fell at my feet, a bed all made up. 
 
 " It's beautiful! " said Mrs. Huckleberry. I allowed all 
 that, but asked her what guarantee she gave that it 
 wouldn't get a-going during the night and turn into a 
 step-ladder or a fire- escape ? 
 
 She said, with a lack of confidence, that it never had 
 done so as yet. The Rev. Thomas Miraculous had 
 slept in it all winter. This reference didn't establish my 
 faith. An " Etegerry " bedstead might get through'the 
 winter safely with the Rev. Thomas, and yet be roused 
 by the Gusher in one week to flights of fancy surpassing 
 those in Young's " Night Thoughts.'.' 
 
 However, I passed on the bed, and she ordered up the 
 dinner. Oh ! how sweetly swell we were. The widow 
 of the Rev. Hebron Waters, in a dyed purple silk, with a 
 portrait like a door-plate, of the late Hebron in his robes, 
 on her bosom. I had Pinky Fay with me, and she asked 
 promptly " who the old man in his night-gown was ? " 
 Miss Snip and ma sat up like Stoughton-bottles lashed in 
 by new spring frocks, till a swallow of water pinched 'em 
 like a soldier-crab. The two students, buttoned up to 
 the neck with clerical collars, and steel-bowed eye-glasses, 
 looked like breeding a famine at their end of the table. 
 The relict of Hebron asked a blessing (just a little one, 
 to go round the corner where she and Mrs. General took 
 their food), and the feast began. Mrs. General praised 
 everything, and I must think she owes a board-bill. 
 
 " This Jumbo soup is delicious," moaned that lady, as 
 she tasted a grayish fluid that was offered as gumbo. 
 
 " Is this Jumbo's soup ? " asked Pinky. 
 
 " Little children should be seen and not heard," said 
 
210 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 Mrs. Huckleberry. (Pinky climbed on her chair and raised 
 both arms.) 
 
 "How is Jumbo soup made ?" murmured Miss Snip, 
 blushing and looking at the sickest of the two theological 
 students. 
 
 " What a question, sis ! One would think you was 
 going to housekeeping," laughed the jolly old Mrs. Gen- 
 eral. 
 
 " Could you make Jumbo soup, Miss Gusher ? " 
 
 " I could make this, I think, by soaking one of Bar- 
 num's advertisements in a pail of water over night," I said 
 authoritatively. This created discussion. The fish was 
 brought in, a nice little creature boiled in a bucket of 
 thin paste, with a lemon at his head and a sprig of green 
 at his tail. 
 
 " How did he get drowned ? " asked Pinky. 
 
 All the boarders picked at a dab of this course, and 
 looked hungrily at the sideboard where Mr. Huckleberry 
 was carving a piece of beef with such care and dexterity 
 that I felt sure his place was in a hospital not a boarding- 
 house. Eight leaves of salad and a hard-boiled egg were 
 placed before Johnny Nicodemus, the theological student. 
 " Do make the salad for us to-day! " chirped Mrs. Huckle- 
 berry. " You have no idea, dear Miss Gusher, what a 
 delicious salad he makes ! " 
 
 I thought by the size of it, it was unlikely I ever should, 
 as there were ten of us to help, and not a leaf would be 
 left to leave me to judge by the time it reached the 
 head of the table. 
 
 The price of spring vegetables became the topic of 
 conversation, and Hebron's widow and Mrs. General 
 betrayed a nervous anxiety and an amount of information 
 about the markets that can only be entertained by people 
 half starved. I can imagine Robinson Crusoe fishing up 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 211 
 
 a newspaper washed inshore from some passing vessel, 
 and sitting down and reading about lamb and green pease 
 and the latest way of serving French artichokes. His 
 expression was on the faces of these poor boarding 
 women. I began to feel depressed, and when a wedge 
 of pie was handed me and a teaspoonful of ice-cream laid 
 beside my plate, and Pinky began to plead to go home to 
 Mamma McGiven, who was making a plum-pudding that 
 day, I escaped with the little child, promising to send a 
 note in the morning about the " apartments." 
 
 Now, Mrs. Huckleberry had fine service and cut-glass 
 and decorated china, and a waiter in white cotton gloves, 
 whose thumb gave such little flavor to the dishes as the 
 dishes boasted. An aristocratic taste pervaded the halls. 
 There was much that was aesthetic about the rugs and par- 
 acres, the panels and the screens. All were on their 
 good behavior, and I could have thrown the house into fits 
 by bringing in a few cases of Pommery Sec to last over a 
 Sunday reunion. I think a small bottle would provide 
 an orgie of the wildest kind for the water-color family of 
 Mrs. Huckleberry. 
 
OUR PROFESSORS OF DRAMATIC ART. 
 
 I HAD a call last week from Mrs. P. C. Pokeberry and 
 her daughters. Some idea of their ages may be arrived 
 at by their names : the eldest is Amanda Malvina Poke- 
 berry, and the baby of the family is called Pamela. Now 
 " Pamela " was a fashionable novel in the early part of the 
 last century, and that cherished work of fiction called 
 " The Children of the Abbey " was contemporary. 
 Amanda Malvina Fitzallen was the heroine of the latter. 
 I once said to an old lady standing by a horsehair trunk 
 on which, in brass nails, was the name " A. M. F. Welles," 
 " I want to bet you a doughnut your front name is 
 Amanda Malvina Fitzallen," and she laughed and said, 
 "yes, her mother had been a great novel-reader, and 
 was a romantic woman." Therefore you can judge that 
 Pamela Pokeberry is no spring chicken ; but you can't 
 judge of my fourth-proof astonishment when I learned 
 that Pamela intended going upon the stage. 
 
 These ladies descended on me from a little hamlet 
 called Lansingburg. up in this State. They had been 
 into Troy and Albany, on great occasions, and witnessed 
 what Ma Pokeberry styled the " draymay," as presented 
 by Joseph Proctor and kindred spirits. It seems there 
 used to be a Green Street Theatre in Albany, run by one 
 Captain Smith ; and he, or some one in the box-office, 
 was related to the Pokeberrys by marriage. Through 
 this means my friends had seen a good deal of acting. 
 It had finally wakened the artistic yearning in the 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 213 
 
 bosom of Pamela. The family had been struggling 
 with this wayward girl till they got afraid she was 
 showing signs of despondency. So they gave in 
 to her great desire ; and, believing I was just the 
 party to put 'em on the right track as I say, they called 
 on me. 
 
 I looked at Pamela a tall, raw-boned woman, with 
 dust-colored hair and boiled-onion eyes, a nose border- 
 ing on the pug, and a mouth full of the best store-teeth 
 to be found in Albany. 
 
 "Can it be possible," thought I, "that this terror 
 is so blind that she takes that mug for a fashion- 
 plate ? " 
 
 The thought was answered by Ma, who said : " Mely 
 is a beautiful figgur, and the pieces she has spoke to 
 entertainments in our hall have took with everybody. 
 There ain't any doubt but she can act out as well as the 
 best on 'em after a few lessons." 
 
 Then it came out they were in pursuit of a teacher. 
 So I gracefully acceded, and went with Mely to inter- 
 view some of the professors of dramatic art. We parted 
 with Ma and Mandy at Twenty-third Street, by the Fifth 
 Avenue Hotel, and Mely imparted to me the astounding 
 information that they were going to Caswell's to get 
 some of Dixey's Salve. Now the night before they had 
 all been to the Bijou, and I had heard unbounded praises 
 of the " plaster-parish man," as Ma called Dixey. She 
 had regretted an exposure of the leg made by Miss Car- 
 son. At this Pokeberry said : " Them uncertain sewing- 
 machines, always a-ripping, was the cause of it ; for the 
 poor gal's dress was ripped nigh to the waist, and only 
 that she had powerful long stockings on, it would have 
 been ondecent." But the performance otherwise had 
 delighted 'em, and the plaster-parish man, Dixey, was just 
 
214 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 too splendid ! So now they were going to get some of 
 his salve. 
 
 This was beyond me. Dixey's Salve ? I questioned 
 my stage-struck old girl. " Why, certainly, salve it was 
 advertised on the curtain." They had asked the usher 
 what that salve advertised on the curtain was for, and he 
 told 'em "corns." They have evidently got a humorist 
 up at the Bijou who interprets the Latin to suit his 
 customers. 
 
 Mely and I went on our way. I had forgotten to say 
 that the Pokeberrys are wealthy, and Mely gave evidence 
 of her condition in the way of sealskin and by diamond 
 ear-rings. I was piloting no impecunious young miss, 
 but a well-fixed old damsel who was willing and able to 
 pay for being a crank. We had taken the names of a lot 
 of actor-builders, who had been on the boards them- 
 selves a few professors who couldn't do it themselves, 
 but could teach others how to. 
 
 The first party we tackled was a playful creature of 
 sixty-five, who giggled a great deal, and told Mely that 
 Rosalind was her pie, and she would be perfectly charm- 
 ing in Beatrice her voice was so light and pleasing, 
 and the roguish dimple in her cheek would add much to 
 the vivacity of such characters. 
 
 Mely confidentially informed me that a vicious hen 
 had pecked a piece out of her cheek, when she tried to 
 douse her off a nest on which she persistently set with, 
 no greater inducement than a china door-knob under 
 her. This scar our obliging old teacher took for a dim- 
 ple. Now, Mely's aspirations were for something grand 
 and terrible she wanted to be, as far as I could make 
 out, a female Jibbenainosay . The flippant dame, who 
 shook some gray curls at us and hopped this way and 
 that as she said " but then there was a star danced, and 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 215 
 
 under that was I born," made a very unfavorable impres- 
 sion on Mely. So we made very little pause at this 
 establishment, but struck out for No. 2. 
 
 No. 2 was a dapper little gentleman, who rolled his 
 r's and made eyes at us. He said the full value of the 
 consonants was the key-note of an actor's success ; 
 that gesticulation was obsolete positively no action 
 was necessary repression of the physical, with mental 
 emphasis, was the article demanded 'by an advanced civili- 
 zation. He asked Miss Pamela to recite a selection, and 
 I nearly fainted when she began Collins' "Ode to the 
 Passions," in 3,000 lines. She howled through Rage to 
 Jealousy ; when she came to Grief I begged her to desist, 
 as it was too much for me a great deal too much. She 
 asked my pardon for harrowing up my feelings so, but 
 said she supposed the professor wanted to judge of her 
 power. As he didn't want to enter her for a walking 
 match, he told her he could form a good idea of her 
 endurance without going any further. But "her con- 
 ception was all wrong ; her intonation entirely false ; her 
 enunciation wholly faulty. The full value of the con- 
 sonants should be her first study. Master them, and 
 the rest, including a first-class engagement and star parts, 
 will follow naturally. You need a full course of instruc- 
 tion, miss," said he. 
 
 " How long a time does that require ?" asked I. 
 
 " From three to four years, according to the density 
 of the pupil," returned he. That settled Mely ; she 
 wants to act this spring, and come out with the apple- 
 blossoms. We promised to call again and skipped. 
 
 The next professor was a lady, who had a sepulchral 
 voice and tragic gestures. 
 
 " Your friend has great capacity for the higher walks 
 of the profession," said she to me ; and I immediately 
 
2l6 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 thought she meant to train Mely to be a Man Fly and 
 do the ceiling act, when she went on to say that her face 
 and figure admirably fitted her to essay "" The Fair Peni- 
 tent " or " The Mourning Bride." When I mentioned their 
 possible unattractiveness as plays, she coldly informed 
 me that her business was to educate the people up to 
 that standard, and she was pursuing her avocation with 
 that amount of success that she was justified in furnish- 
 ing the high-class article there would so soon be a 
 demand for. 
 
 This sounded reasonable, and Mely began to question 
 her about the toilets worn by the Fair Penitent, and was 
 shown a production of the professoress in this charac- 
 ter. The sight of that old-timer closed the interview. 
 We got old molly-grub's terms, and we fled. 
 
 Then we tried two actors sterling artists of enormous 
 ability that managers dare not engage, as they are too 
 rich for their blood. The fat one gargled and the lean 
 one crackled at us. They both said Mely betrayed great 
 talent, and, they thought, had a career before her if she 
 went upon the stage. One recommended her to essay 
 such roles as Fanchon and La Cigale, as her nose was so 
 adapted for such parts, and the other advised her to 
 study Lucrezia Borgia and Lady Macbeth, as she had 
 great tragic possibilities about her mouth. 
 
 Mely finally thought she would try one other teacher 
 before settling with either of these old he-landmarks, 
 and we went off up-town to see a certain reputable actress, 
 who is going to teach the young idea how to act. We 
 found the lady and stated the case. 
 
 " What characters have you seen that you think you 
 would like to play?" asked she. 
 
 " Well," said Mely, " I think there's a good chance for 
 any one in Juliet j but I should dress her modern. I 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 217 
 
 never could abide to wear such clothes as most of the 
 Juliets I see wear." 
 
 " You're not young enough for Juliet" said the fatally 
 frank actress. 
 
 " I don't see why I could not make myself look young 
 on the stage. They all do," retorted Mely, with much 
 vinegar. 
 
 " There's no make-up known to the theatrical pro- 
 fession that can make you look like Juliet. You might 
 do Lady Capulet; but certainly that's the only part in that 
 play you can hope to meddle with. It is throwing away 
 money to pay for lessons ; they can do you no good. 
 You are much too old to think of going on the stage, and 
 the only lines of business a manager would tolerate you 
 in, those of second old women, or utility, are already 
 crowded with people whose experience will get them 
 positions before your claims are heard. I can't for the 
 life of me see why you should dream of anything so wild 
 at your age. If you have a comfortable home and means 
 to keep it, I should advise you to do almost anything 
 before attempting to get upon the stage." 
 
 " I believe you advertise for pupils ? " put in Mely, 
 angry, as a woman scorned is apt to be. 
 
 " I do," retorted the actress, calmly. " I shall be very 
 glad to procure them ; but I shall never waste my time 
 nor another woman's money fostering a crazy ambition 
 that can never amount to anything more than disappoint- 
 ment and regret on both sides." 
 
 Mely is not discouraged. She is going to appear with- 
 out instruction. She heard one professor discourse on 
 teaching the art analytically. She doesn't know what 
 that is, but it must be simple or he wouldn't have laid so 
 much stress on his method. The same man said his 
 principles were derived from nature ; and so Mely, like 
 
2l8 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 the Irish Alderman who opposed buying several gon- 
 dolas for the park lake, but " belaved in getting a male 
 and a faymale gondola and letting nature^take its coorse," 
 will rely on these principles and let nature take its 
 course. 
 
THE HORRORS OF MOVING. 
 
 THERE'S no mortal sort of doubt in my mind that the 
 woman who keeps house twenty years and moves once 
 every five years, goes at the end of her time into a nice 
 rosewood coffin with satin trimmings, content, willing 
 glad to go and escape truckmen and carpet-cleaners. I 
 believe that if any one brought in a first-class casket just 
 now the plumbing in it all right, the gas all on, the 
 hinges working easy, the decorations fresh and becoming, 
 I'd get in by myself and lay a stuffed dove on my 
 stomach, I'm so disgusted, so sick and sorry, so weary 
 and worn out with the inevitable horror of moving. 
 " Three removes are as bad as a fire," says the proverb. 
 Are they ? Well, this one flitting of mine lays as far 
 over the burning of Moscow as the telegraph wires over 
 the clothes-lines. 
 
 I have been the prey of more scoundrelly tradespeople; 
 I have fallen into the clutches of more knaves during the 
 last ten days of my life, than in any ten previous years. 
 About the merry month of May a swarm of defrauders, 
 like the locusts of Egypt, swoop down upon the unwary 
 house-keeper. And, oh .! how they gobbled the Gusher ! 
 Some one advised the repairing of all damaged furniture 
 before moving. She paid out something like fifteen dollars 
 for casters on the legs of chairs. Some one else recom- 
 mended carpet renovaters. She was struck by a gayly 
 painted cart from some Broadway deceiver named Smith, 
 who toted off her floor furniture and brought it back 
 
220 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 several degrees dirtier than it ever was before, and with a 
 bill that shook up the Gusher's nervous system much 
 better than he had shaken the carpets. 
 
 Three guileless-looking men, with cots on their knees, 
 put them down in the new house and came round with a 
 bill of twenty more dollars. Painters, paperers, cleaners, 
 and kalsominers daubed about and shirked work, but 
 never failed to turn up with tremendous bills on Saturday 
 night. 
 
 Thursday will be a day long remembered. Ichabod 
 packed a pair of slippers and fell over exhausted, while 
 some one sent for a cab to convey him to his club. He 
 rattled away as gay and debonair as if moving day was 
 a festival which he had established. 
 
 This was the last pleasing incident of the twenty-four 
 hours. Men and trucks filled in the rest of it. An 
 atmosphere of oaths, beer, and tobacco pervaded the 
 place. A crash occurred with extreme regularity, and I 
 discovered that a man with a centre-table in his arms can 
 swear harder and oftener than under any other circum- 
 stances. 
 
 About eight o'clock on that fateful night, amid the 
 thickening shadows, one might have descried a delicate 
 form, with a section of stove-pipe and the cover of a 
 refrigerator, a plaster cast of George Washington, and a 
 smut spot on the end of her nose. That was the utterly 
 breken-up Gusher, going to her new house ! 
 
 This experience has not been without its interesting 
 lesson. The Gusher will buy new chairs next time ; 
 they come cheaper than casters. The Gusher will kill 
 the carpet-renovater before he ever gets a rug of hers 
 out of the house. It will be cheaper and pleasanter to 
 bury him in the back yard than to pay him at the front 
 door. The Gusher will never move again. She will 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 221 
 
 give her traps away. She will have a bonfire of 'em. 
 She will raffle 'em off as if they were eight-day clocks or 
 turkeys ; but she will never, never move again ! 
 
 The Tribune is authority for a statement that awakens 
 a ray of hope in my heart. The Sunday issue of that 
 journal tells us of a new scheme to be put into operation 
 at once. It promises a big kitchen, centrally located, a 
 first-class chef at its head and a regiment of cooks under 
 him, a lot of patent wagons full of steam-pipes and ice- 
 boxes, to enable 'em to deliver soups hot and salads cold. 
 It assures us a fine bill of fare at reasonable rates, and 
 holds out a hope of rescue from incompetent Biddies 
 to a thousand anxious house-keepers. Professor Blot 
 promised all this long ago. He talked wisely of hot 
 boxes covered with felt (a want long felt), of hampers 
 fed with heat, and feed kept hot with lead. This 
 naturally led us to believe in great things ; but the ful- 
 filment of his promises never came. 
 
 May that benignant fate that sits up aloft ordain the 
 success of this scheme ! Life would become a dream of 
 bliss if only soups could be turned on at faucets like hot 
 and cold water, and steaks be cut off in sections as they 
 do the tape from the ticker. But men will bend their 
 gigantic inventive powers to the perfecting of a machine 
 to make cocktails, or a self-acting swearer, or an auto- 
 matic poker-player. 
 
A RECOLLECTION OF CHILDHOOD. 
 
 THIRTY years ago by the town clock the little two- 
 and-a-half-foot Gusher was led by the hand into a hotel 
 parlor where a select concert was given. A certain Mr. 
 Strakosch played the piano ; a little Russian named 
 Miska Hansen did the fiddle to fits, and a small girl my 
 own size, black as an ink-bottle, with a pair of yellow 
 satin pantalettes on her slim legs, stood by the pianist's 
 side and sang : " Ah ! Non Giunge." There was a lump 
 like an Adam's apple in the little creature's throat, and 
 no canary ever had a sweeter voice. 
 
 We played next day together on a balcony of the 
 hotel, and I lost my child's heart to Adelina Patti. The 
 Gusher had a noble voice of mammoth proportions, that 
 could be heard (and often was) a mile away. We organ- 
 ized an opera company immediately, and sang, " Take 
 Now this Ring," till every one in the neighborhood 
 thought it was a twenty-four-foot rope one, and a prize 
 fight was coming off under their pious Connecticut 
 noses. 
 
 Just as this combination of Patti and Gusher got well 
 under way, a famous painter and a splendid singer 
 entered our improvised opera-house and stopped the 
 performance. 
 
 " Don't do that, my child," he said to Adelina. " You 
 will strain and injure your voice ; and that voice will yet 
 hang your neck with diamonds as big as your handsome 
 eyes. That voice will call all the world to kneel at your 
 feet, and the world will obey." 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 223 
 
 I knew blessed well it was the yellow satin pantalettes 
 that would subjugate the world. I gave in to that, but 
 the jewels I made a stand at. 
 
 " And mustn't I strain my voice, father ? " I asked. 
 " Will my voice ever call the world to kneel ? " 
 
 " I think it will call 'em to stand and deliver," answered 
 that virile parent ; " for if nature ever fitted out at birth 
 a natural highwayman, an incipient pirate, an embryo 
 free-lance, here it is ! " and he laid his hand tenderly on 
 my snarly head. 
 
 The little Patti left that country town on the next day, 
 Monday, and the Gusher mourned her till Tuesday, 
 when she transferred her affection to 'Charles Freeman, 
 the American giant, who, in company with an India- 
 rubber man, came to the hotel for show purposes. 
 
AN INGERSOLL LECTURE. 
 
 I WENT Sunday night to hear Ingersoll tell all about 
 Liberty as if I didn't know all about it, and didn't take 
 all sorts of liberties with everything and everybody ! 
 
 If Ingersoll had studied his background I think he 
 would have altered the position of some of his similes. 
 
 He made a very telling argument by saying that in all 
 things we had progressed the last five thousand years, 
 save in religion. He described the first man in his dug- 
 out, through all the transitions of nautical achievements, 
 till he reached the magnificent vessel breasting the ocean 
 with steam and sail, .to-day. He described the primitive 
 tom-tom, and said if the man who beat it had said, " This 
 is the one perfect instrument, dropped, by an enraptured 
 performer in heaven, upon earth ; no improvement shall 
 be made ; the hair of the horse and the intestines of the 
 cat shall have no voice in the matter ! " why, we would 
 to-day be without our Albert Weber, and devoid of our 
 William Steinway. Ovide Musin would be without an 
 occupation, and Dave Braham never been heard of. 
 
 Then he spoke of the sharpened arrow-head, the cross- 
 bow, the arquebus, the blunderbus, the mitrailleuse, and 
 the last cannon, which carries a detonating, combusting 
 cartridge through a stone wall and round a corner. 
 Then he said that the skulls, from that of the man in the 
 dug-out to that of the inventor of the needle-gun, had 
 undergone the same change ; and naturally we began to 
 examine the heads on the stage. 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 225 
 
 As compared with the orator of the evening, it was the 
 man in the dug-out and the inventor all over again. 
 And 'way down at the end was a man with a particularly 
 small top-knot. Every time Ingersoll wanted to return 
 to the seed of his argument, he said : " And here, my 
 friend in the dug-out " or, " The man with the small 
 skull " ; and he would come down to the very chair, with 
 outstretched hands, as if to lay 'em on that special 
 cocoanut. 
 
 As middle-man of the first row, was a tall, big old 
 fellow who approved heartily of every sentiment, and 
 beamed his approbation ; and on his right sat a sour 
 brother, who had by accident got on the stage, a man 
 who thought he knew it all, and was, as Ingersoll said, 
 "orthodox in consequence." This was a bad lot. A 
 cynical sneer played on his Mephistophelean counte- 
 nance at Ingersoll 's best joke ; and when the philosopher 
 launched his most irrefutable arguments against the doc- 
 trines of Calvin and Luther, he looked unutterable things, 
 and moved in his seat as if to say : "If I should get on 
 my hind legs, what would become of yon orator ? " 
 
 After the manner of " Pilgrim's Progress," I christened 
 all the occupants of the chairs. There was Mr. Ready 
 Believer ; there was Stiffneckstickitout ; there was Little 
 Skullthinksmall ; there was Pugnaciouskickback ; and 
 then I drew comparisons between the landscape and the 
 background, much to Ingersoll's advantage. There's 
 nothing small, apparently, about Robert. He's got a 
 wide smile, and a spreading girth, and generous legs, 
 and plenty of reach, and a cracking big head ! 
 
 And he bids for popularity among women. He doesn't 
 say that cold feet should be grounds for separation 
 between man and wife, but he does say that no woman 
 should live with a cross man ; and I was glad of it, for I 
 
226 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 thought of my chum, who is half distracted, twenty-five 
 hours of the day, about a man who is so supremely selfish, 
 that to read her death in the Herald wouldn't move him 
 half as much as to find the soup he wanted wasn't on the 
 menu of his club. 
 
 Why, that woman has lived days without one word 
 from him, and nights as utterly forsaken and alone as if 
 she'd been on an uninhabited island. She's been snubbed 
 and pulled up, when she's been distancing him on the 
 first quarter. She's known months to pass, and the only 
 evidence of affection he gave was by kissing her lady 
 friends. She could have put a blister on a polar bear's 
 tail, and found him a pleasanter companion thereafter 
 than this husband was, for whom she was putting out 
 every ability and making every effort. She was there 
 Sunday night, and when Ingersoll opened out on the 
 cross husbands, I was pleased ; for she doesn't take any 
 counsel from me. Perhaps the applause that greeted 
 the sentiment conveyed to her some conviction of its 
 truth. 
 
FRAGMENTS. 
 
 TIME brings nothing but decay to us ; and 1 think it 
 the happier fate to drop off the bough with one fatal 
 touch of blight, than linger to come quashing down an 
 unsightly mass of corruption. The good, commonplace 
 woman, who has had in her youth neither beauty nor 
 ability, who has passed through girlhood and middle 
 age without excitement or success, may enjoy all the 
 discomforts of old age. But for women like Adelaide 
 Neilson or Selina Dolaro it seems to me they should 
 fittingly sweep down the breeze, like brilliant autumn 
 leaves, passing from view in all the splendor of crimson 
 and gold, rather than survive the blasts of winter, to be 
 pushed off in their brown and withered state by the pesky 
 
 little buds of spring. 
 
 ****** 
 
 I think there is a great mistake about this business of 
 death. You take twelve dead and twelve living faces, 
 and study their expressions. You will find anxiety, sor- 
 row, discontent, and pain stamped in more or less distinct 
 lines on the living faces. You will find the seal of settled 
 peace and a knowing look, if not almost a smile on 
 every one of those marble" masks. I always turn from 
 the contemplation of the dead with a firm conviction 
 that it is by no means the worst that ever happened to 
 'em. And it's a blessed poor result of the Christian 
 religion, that everybody is afraid to die, and that when 
 death is threatened to any one, the moralists must draw 
 hair-standing comparisons between the past glory of the 
 
 victim, and impending destruction. 
 
 ****** 
 
228 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 As for the atheism and unbelief of the age, it's a very 
 sad thing. There's a certain religion of Nature, that 
 dwells in every intelligent soul, irrespective of forms and 
 creeds. We all feel that our surest hold on any good 
 hereafter, is the amount of good we can accomplish on 
 this earth. We all feel that if an insensate turnip pos- 
 sesses a reproductive power that will enable it to turn up 
 green and lively after being planted, we should be equal 
 in ability to that merry little vegetable ; that some way, 
 somewhere, and somehow, we will " see you later." The 
 loving, faithful, pure, and charitable human heart has no 
 need to buy of speculators outside, when it gets to the 
 ticket-taker called Peter. There are complimentaries 
 issued to such as these : " And of such is the kingdom 
 of Heaven ! " 
 
 ****** 
 
 No ! I maintain that the loss of a little child is the 
 one loss that years never obliterate. The man's strong 
 hand that has made mother's path smooth ; the woman's 
 loving hand that has lain on mother's tired head ; 
 Johnny's big voice that whooped it up after school, and 
 Jimmy's coaxing tones that beguiled you of every new 
 trinket, can leave you desolate for a time ; but the one 
 great, fresh sorrow the one open grave is that made 
 by the baby ! The clinging clasp of that aimless hand, 
 the tiny voice that shapes but one small word, is the one 
 that can reach across all dividing time, and ring in your 
 ears till the day of your death. The human heart 
 recovers from all other losses ; but let an empty cradle 
 once extinguish the light in a parent's life, and there is 
 no power that can re-kindle the flame again ! 
 
 ****** 
 
 There's a great deal of fuss made by most people in 
 getting ready to die. They have to be groomed by 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 229 
 
 ministers; they have to undergo a sort of ante-mortem 
 embalming ; they are stuffed full of good things; as much 
 of the original sin as the theological massage can take 
 out of 'em is taken; they put their thoughts on the ele- 
 vated roads, and get as much of their baggage checked 
 as their ticket will allow. But, believe me, that eye is the 
 steadiest, that heart the calmest, that soul the bravest, 
 that belongs to the man or woman who can see the gates 
 of the tomb, beyond some gates they have builded for 
 sheltering age or fostering youth. The knell of death 
 will be robbed of its terror if glad bells they have set 
 ringing mingle their music with the solemn clang of eter- 
 nity. Set aside enough money to bury you decently, O ye 
 millionaires ! and then invest every cursed dollar you 
 have, before you die, in alleviating the misery this world 
 is full of ! 
 
 ****** 
 
 I believe Peter Cooper is taking more comfort where 
 he is to-day than any other millionaire who ever died in 
 New York. As one after another has joined him, that 
 philanthropic old patriot has asked what they did for the 
 education, protection, and nourishment of the young, the 
 defenceless, and the needy, before they came away. And 
 when each one answered, " Nothing ! " he must have 
 thought of his Institute, his Free Art Union, and his poor 
 man's Reading-room, with genuine satisfaction. Almost 
 every one lives as if there were no hereafter. The stiffest 
 Christians in the pot seem to believe that they will never 
 know anything more of this world after they leave it; 
 otherwise they would fix up the landscape, so that it 
 would be pleasant to contemplate from their bird's-eye 
 bulge on us. 
 
 ****** 
 
 The struggle of man's intellect with the problem of 
 
230 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 immortality is always interesting ; though the usual view 
 of heaven is not wholly satisfactory to a rational human 
 being. That beyond the far, mysterious stars there is an 
 abiding place for the reasoning faculties and affections 
 we possess here, every one hopes; and certainly, if our 
 condition hereafter depends upon our conduct just now, 
 it must be that ministering to our fellow-creatures, doing 
 good to man and woman, is the only way to get a lien on 
 the mansion not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. 
 Appoint for every man an hour to die, and see to what 
 use he would put the intervening time. You would not 
 find him in Wall Street, attending to the stock market. 
 With a dim instinct that he was making himself solid, he 
 would be hurrying up his ante-mortem record of charity 
 and good works. And so, if this legend should be hung 
 out upon the sky " This property on easy terms; be 
 charitable, and move in," earth would be heaven, and 
 sin and sorrow would pass away. 
 
 ****** 
 
 Time doesn't handle a man with a thicker pair of 
 gloves than he puts on for a woman ; but just tell a man 
 at fifty or sixty that he isn't in the ring, and an enticing 
 and inspiring spectacle and you'll hear a verdict, and get 
 an opinion as is an opinion. It's as I have often said to 
 you: Pull every feather off a man's dear head ; yank 
 every tooth out of a sweet, dear man's mouth ; furrow 
 him an inch deep with Time's claw ; rheumatize his 
 joints ; raise Cain with him generally, and he sits up 
 and shows his necktie, and think's he's a darling that 
 ought to paralyze every woman! 
 
 ****** 
 
 Oh, airs ! insufferable airs ! If people only knew how 
 small an impression they make, I believe they would be 
 left at home with account-books, and pill-boxes, and sick 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 23! 
 
 cats, and other disagreeable things. Oh, airs, airs ! pride 
 of place and pride of person ! Of what small account 
 are all the pompous people who chipper and flirt their 
 feathers in the public eye ! If we can only hang on to 
 this dirt-pile long enough, we shall see the gloomy earth- 
 worm sunning himself on the proud head, so full of airs 
 to-day; and a colony of scheming ants carrying out their 
 tiny plans along that breast that to-night is smiling 
 with self-importance. If we don't possess the necessary 
 gravitation, then the airy one will superciliously read our 
 grave-stone, and say: " Really ? dear me dead ! But 
 what could you expect of such a person ? " 
 
 ****** 
 
 Good God ! I want human hands about me, even after 
 I am dead. 
 
 One day, for me the sturdy spade 
 Shall ply its trade ; 
 
 One day its mate, the shovel, shall perform its task. 
 And when those first, last friends of man have made 
 The narrow bed in which my form is laid 
 
 O Mother Earth ! one boon of thee I ask : 
 Send up from out my breast some lovely flowers 
 
 Whose far-pervading perfume shall allure, 
 And in the bondage of those dreadful hours 
 
 The blessed touch of human hands secure ! 
 ****** 
 
 After all, we grow old from the inside. It's the oil of 
 an occupied mind that lights the old lamp of life. It's 
 the loving, sacrificing, busy heart, forgetting self, that is 
 forgotten by Time. 
 
 ****** 
 
 If beyond this heartache and headache we call living 
 there is any reward for the dwellers on earth, the crown 
 must rest on that golden head that never conceived an 
 
232 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 evil thing ; the palm must reach that gentle, generous 
 
 hand that was helpful and open to all. 
 
 * * * * * * 
 
 There is an instinct in every human heart that there is 
 something beyond. There's not a tribe upon the earth 
 but cherishes a belief that this life leads up to something 
 better, from the Persian, with his eternally beautiful houris 
 peopling the Mohammedan heaven, to the woman Down 
 East, who knew paradise was passed in a rocking-chair 
 without even knitting work to do ! 
 
 * * * * * * 
 
 I hold many anniversaries of death, if I cannot escape 
 remembering them, at home. I never want to look upon 
 a picture of my lost ones. There is no panacea for the 
 grave but forgetf ulness. It is a blessed provision that we 
 eternally forget its inevitable call upon ourselves; and 
 the only comfort time brings is its power to efface 
 remembrance of its former visits. 
 
 ****** 
 
 The Gusher, on this Christmas eve, with a reminiscent 
 hand under a retrospective head, thinks of all the kindly, 
 loving words she has heard from the professional peo- 
 ple she likes so much during the year just past, and 
 smiles; looks out beyond the majestic arches of the 
 magnificent High Bridge, that bends its benignant stone 
 battlements above her windows, upon a slender yellow 
 road that, like a sallow finger, points away to a grave in 
 Mount Vernon, where lies the fondest female heart that 
 ceased to beat in all the long year and bows her head 
 and weeps. But, smiling or sighing or crying, she extends 
 both hands to those she loves and to those who love her, 
 to those she has loved and to those who never will love 
 her, and says, at this season when good will reigns 
 " May every joy come to you and with you abide ! " 
 ****** 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 233 
 
 If there's anything on earth I love it's the dawn of a 
 new day. The long, far-singing noises of the night stop. 
 The ashen-gray colors stand. When, low along the hori- 
 zon, appears a streak of light rosy, golden, beautiful 
 each instant it intensifies. Clouds may come ; a tempest 
 may close in with the darkness of the night; but the birth 
 of a new day in its sudden glory is a promise of joy, a 
 setting of Hope's bow in the heaven of the heart; and over 
 the sweet, soft, helpless head of a new-born child I bow 
 in adoration. Mystery, possibility the whence and the 
 where. The waxen calla leaf of a stainless life begun, 
 on which joy or sorrow must begin its history, is to me 
 a wonder a wondrous wonder. 
 
 ****** 
 
 There's no doubt Nature knows her business. It's as 
 well to let the dame alone and ask no questions. If we 
 are all here another Christmastide we shall be glad ; and 
 if we are not here, I earnestly hope we shall still be glad. 
 
"TIGER LILY'S" RACE. 
 From the Play of "Philip Herne." Act /.* 
 
 MRS. HERNE. 
 ( To Philip?) Where have you been all these years ? 
 
 PHILIP. 
 
 Well, it's a long story, mother ; but this much you 
 shall hear at once. You remember Viscaronda, the 
 Spanish ranchman, whose son was in college with me ? 
 Well, we both cut away to his father's place in Califor- 
 nia. I've been with horses till I'm a sort of Centaur. 
 He's brought a stable of " flyers " East for the fall meet- 
 ings, and I'm the crack rider from the Golden Gate. 
 
 MRS. HERNE. 
 
 Oh, my son ! and I had such hopes for your future ! 
 A jockey ! How came you to embrace such a life ? 
 
 PHILIP. 
 
 Accident, mother ! Accident, that shapes a man's 
 fate when education, influence, and endeavor are put 
 forth in vain. Viscaronda's a charming fellow, and his 
 heart was set on seeing the success of his pet racer 
 " Altamont " on the Oakland track, last fall a year. We 
 came down from the ranch with quite a stable. There 
 
 * Published by permission of J. M. Hill, Esq. 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 235 
 
 was " Altamont," his half-brother " Raoul," " Dundee 
 Kate," " Estelle," and half-a-dozen more all flyers 
 and in the party the " Tiger Lily." Now the " Lily " had 
 once been the pride of the Pacific Slope ; but for several 
 seasons she'd just eaten her head off, living in clover, 
 as the mate of " Estelle." They, loved each other so 
 well, that each pined during a separation, so Viscaronda 
 brought the " Lily " to satisfy " Estelle." 
 
 MRS. HERNE. 
 He must be a kind-hearted man. 
 
 PHILIP. 
 
 Oh, the best in the world ! Well, the very day before 
 the opening of the meeting, " Altamont " broke down. 
 I always shall believe he was tampered with, for he had 
 a walk-over with the entries. Viscaronda was incon- 
 solable. No one of all his stud could fill " Altamont's " 
 place, and in his grief he burst out : " The scoundrels ! 
 they've beaten me ! Oh, if ' Kate ' were only the * Tiger 
 Lily' that she once was, I'd substitute her for ' Alta- 
 mont,' and yet redeem the ranch ! " Now for months I 
 had given the " Lily " a daily brush on the circle, and 
 there had been times when, with a little crowding, she 
 had let out with a burst of her old speed that was elec- 
 trical. We understood each other. That's a great thing 
 for a horse and rider. She'd come to know the touch of 
 my hand, the sound of my voice. She answered the 
 pressure of my knee, and was as much company to me 
 as a human being. I went and looked the " Lily " over. 
 Glossy, sleek, light-limbed and alert, in her gentle eyes 
 shone a ray of something that might have been recollec- 
 tion ; but I tried to believe that the fire still burned, 
 though under ashes ; so I just explained things to her. 
 
236 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 MRS. HERNE. 
 Explain things to a horse ? 
 
 FLORRIE. 
 
 Oh, yes ; it's always best ! I have to reason with 
 " Rover " every day. 
 
 PHILIP. 
 
 You're right, my darling. And so I told the " Lily " 
 the strait her master was in. I dwelt upon the necessity 
 of overcoming the infirmities of age for one brief hour, 
 and I showed her how, in that hour, she could cover 
 herself with glory, confuse the conspirators who were 
 " downing " her master, and win my heart entirely. 
 Well, I don't know which argument won. 
 
 FLORRIE. 
 I do ! She wanted your heart. 
 
 PHILIP. 
 
 Perhaps. Anyway, I left her, feeling the tingle of 
 success from my fingers to my feet. I went to Visca- 
 ronda and said : " Put the i Lily ' in ' Altamont's ' place, 
 and leave the rest to me ! " 
 
 MRS. HERNE. 
 
 You enthusiastic boy ! And did you win him to your 
 way of thinking ? 
 
 PHILIP. 
 
 Did I ? Well, I guess I did ! I compelled belief in 
 that dear old deposed queen of the turf. Oh, you should 
 have heard the sneers that followed the announcement 
 that Viscaronda had substituted the " Tiger Lily " of the 
 
THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 237 
 
 past, for the horse they were all afraid of, and that his 
 rider was an unknown ! " Altamont's " rider was a Mex- 
 ican ; he thought, with the rest, that the failure of the 
 star horse had rattled the old man who believed in your 
 boy. Under cover of the night, I gave my pet a lesson 
 or two, and then the morning broke that was to make or 
 mar me as a prophet a day as perfect as a pearl. Oh, 
 mother, a California day is a poem in the air ! You 
 hear music ; you breathe fragrance ! You seem set to a 
 tune that is played by your heart ! I had another talk 
 with my lady " Lily," and even as we came up for the 
 flag, in front of the grand stand, there was something in 
 us both that turned the tide. Oh, mother, that was a 
 race ! Five were in it, but four were followers. On the 
 home stretch of the first heat, we took the lead and kept 
 it. " Good ! " shrieked the crowd, as they saw the time ; 
 " but she can't keep it up ! she can't repeat ! " Now, 
 a triumph that is unexpected always wakes more enthu- 
 siasm than a foregone conclusion. There were twenty 
 thousand people on that track, and they went wild over 
 a miracle. They stormed the shed to compliment me 
 and gaze at the mare ; but. I took my girl aside for further 
 confidences. We were going in for the deciding heat it 
 was a heat-race and everything was yet at stake. I 
 clasped my arms about her neck, and put my face to 
 hers. We promised each other the world if we won. 
 I flung myself upon her back, and, in perfect accord, 
 determined and invincible, we faced the music ! Oh, 
 mother ! there was one moment, when " Pioneer," an 
 iron-gray horse of great speed, stole up. I glanced at 
 the side, where the green growing things and the planted 
 posts had been flying by like the teeth of a comb there 
 was a gleam of gray and a flash of red " Pioneer " and 
 his rider's crimson jacket ! My tightened grasp, my 
 
238 THE GIDDY GUSHER PAPERS. 
 
 warning knee, conveyed the news of danger to my 
 darling. Her beautiful little head stiffened, the delicate 
 pink nostrils swelled with a snort of defiance she let 
 out. I was astride the wind ! The scent of a hay-rick 
 at the quarter-pole, and the " Ess. Bouquet " of the grand 
 stand, struck me full in the face at one time. Fainter 
 and fainter fell the castanets of " Pioneer's " feet, as he 
 was left behind. Alone, victorious, bursting with joy, 
 the " Tiger Lily " and I swept under the wire ! And 
 before I returned, to be made a hero of, I stooped my 
 head, and the falling tears on her glossy neck, and the 
 whispered words in her waiting ear, were sweeter to the 
 dear old mare and me than all the tumult that followed ! 
 
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