There were a few muffled groans as the handle slowly descended upon the doomed man, and as the breath rushed out of his body into his favorite pipe, the wild 'high C of agony that ran through the sacred edifice told them that all was over.
Let us draw a vail over the horrid picture."
I was very much interested in this story, very much indeed, and so I jostled the long-haired man--who was about falling asleep--and asked him if anything was done to this wicked SLUKER.
He looked at me reproachfully. "What's the matter with you, my friend?" he said, in the same melancholy voice. "Don't you know who I am? I write for the _Ledger_, and whenever 'I draw a vail, etc.,' that ends it, that does!"
As we stepped from the steamer to the landing, I observed a youth of about six summers dressed in the most elaborately agonizing manner. He had two Schutzenfest targets in his cuffs; in one hand he held an enormous cane, in the other a cigar, and through an eyeglass he gazed at the ankles on the gang-plank with an air of patient weariness with this slow old world that was very touching.
"Where," I exclaimed as I surveyed this show-card of a fast generation, "O! where have our _children_ vanished? Take from childhood the sparkling water of its purity--the sugar of its innocent affections--its ardent but refreshing spirits--and what, ah! what have we left?"
"Nothing," said the melancholy voice at my elbow. "Absolutely nothing save the mint and the straw!"
And he was right, my dear PUNCHINELLO, he was right.
Perhaps very few persons--and especially very few members of the Republican party--are aware that a monument to ABRAHAM LINCOLN has at last been completed, and that it has been placed on the site allotted for it in Union Square. It is very creditable to the Republican Party that they exercised such control over their feelings when the day for unveiling the LINCOLN Monument arrived. Some parties might have made a demonstration on the occasion of post-mortuary honors being accorded to a leader whom they professed to worship while he lived, and whom they demi-deified after his death. No such extravagant folly can be laid at the door of the Republican Party. "Let bygones be bygones" is their motto. They allowed their "sham ABRAHAM," in heroic bronze, to be hoisted on to his pedestal in Union Square in solitude and silence. That was commendable. A live ass is better than a dead lion; and so the Republican Party, who consider themselves very much alive, went to look after their daily thistles and left their dead lion in charge of a policeman.