A Seditious Slide
We learn from a special despatch which has been cabled via Shanghai and Yokohama to Britain’s representatives abroad that the demon of anarchy has again broke loose in Ireland, that the flood-gates of sedition have been once more thrown open, and the pestilential torrents of a whole lot of things are deluging society. We feel that a Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary and a very fair acquaintanceship with the slang of nearly thirty States are utterly inadequate to express our tumultuous thoughts on reading the following touching epistle from Cornet Gadfly, who is at present attached to the suite of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland:—
There is some dark plot afoot here to destroy the peace of mind and happiness of her Majesty’s defenders.
I was wending my cheerful way last evening toward my temporary lodgings in the bosom of that highly interesting family, the Higginses, who never did anything so low or ignoble as to work for their country, and are, consequently, enjoying the reward of their virtue, in the shape of a big pension from a grateful government. I was whistling contentedly the refrain of England’s “Marseillaise,” “We don’t want to fight, but by jingo when we do!”
On turning the corner of Rutland Square, my legs evinced a sudden and unexpected interest in the atmospheric and astronomic condition of the heavens, for I found myself progressing homeward at the rate of twenty miles an hour on the back of my head, with one foot pointing triumphantly to Saturn, and the other indicating the whereabouts of the Milky Way.
Having satisfied myself that my bodily inversion was not the result of an earthquake, I wound myself up at the Rotunda railings, ejected a few front teeth and some powerful ejaculations, and surveyed the position.
I had come to grief on a slide some eighteen inches wide and about forty feet in length. The mutinous, seditious, rebellious, and barbarous juvenile population of that ward must have been nearly a week improving that slide, until it was so slippery that a bucket of pitch couldn’t have stuck on it, and a coating of Dublin mud as adhesive as a dish of Boston baked beans, attached to my boot soles, afforded no protection to either person or property. The whole fiendish arrangement must have been organized with devilish ingenuity by either a Fenian engineer or a National League architect. Rage, anguish, revenge, agony, surged through my bosom as I contemplated the icy snare.
But it is strange how the misfortunes of others reconcile us to our own. In this instance, balm was poured upon the troubled waters of my soul and my head was metaphorically bandaged and plastered as I saw approaching the fatal spot, Ensign Wilson of the Lancers, and the fair Araminta Higgins.
They were mashing.
He, in all the pristine glory of a new tunic and a re-dyed sash, preserved the best traditions of the British uniform by the ardor of his suit. He was passionate, eloquent, effusive; she was bashful, simpering, and lackadaisical, as became a pensioned Higgins.
“Araminta,” he murmured softly, “believe no base calumnies. I am as true to thee as—as—as thy father to his pension or the needle to the pole. I am thine—thine only. No power on earth can sever us.”
At this moment he shot off suddenly, leaving his hat at the lady’s feet and slinging his umbrella out into the roadway. A few minutes afterward a dejected and dilapidated British officer was indulging in profane observations of a remarkably ornamental and original description as he supported himself against a friendly lamp-post, while the dormant Irish blood in the fickle Araminta asserted itself through the medium of a coarse laugh.
They vanished in the darkness, but I do not think the enamored ensign spooned any more that night. Barely had they disappeared, when two prominent members of the Constitutional Club crossed the street from the direction of the house of a certain eminent judge. They were energetically discussing the National League campaign in Ulster. They neared the precipice—I mean the slide.
“This Parnellite invasion will fail—utterly fail—if we remain firm,” said the taller of the two, Col. K—H—. “Unity and perseverance must be our watchwords. United we stand—”
He did not finish the sentence, for they became divided, and his head rang out a hollow note of defiance to the breeze. However, despite his desire for unity, the Tory victim did not remain long rooted to the soil, but made tracks for the nearest saloon to recuperate his exhausted energies.
The next visitor to the insurrectionary skating-rink was a well-known attorney, who is at the present moment engaged in an abortive effort to discover an Irish constituency that will have him at any price. Mr. N. looked an attorney in every inch. You could read six-and-eight pence in every wrinkle of his rugged countenance; his protruding coat-tails were veritable embodiments of fieri-facias; his stiff, angular collar had the disagreeable similitude of a bill of costs, and the leather bag he carried in his hand was a positive arsenal of writs and decrees and processes. I felt horror-stricken as I saw this legal luminary stepping briskly to destruction.
Just as he reached one end of the glassy line a little milliner with a bandbox and a brown-paper parcel stepped upon the other.
They had never met before, but the instant their feet touched that atrocious slide they darted together with the enthusiasm of old lovers.
Then there was a collision, and a confused combination of legal documents and straw bonnet, proceedings in bankruptcy and colored ribbons, opinions of counsel and hairpins; and when the law adviser got home he found in his bag an artificial bang where he had been looking for the draft of a will, and that poor little milliner’s duck of a bonnet had vanished out of her ruined bandbox, while its place was filled with a horrible notice to claimants and incumbrancers.
When the law and the lady had gone from my gaze the pantomime was continued by new artists. A poor-law guardian, who had voted against the North Dublin Union adopting the laborers’ act, was explaining his reasons therefor, and appealed to his auditor thus: “You would have done the same yourself in my position. Put yourself in my place.”
And away he went, express speed, on his hands and knees, till he was brought to a stop by his head thundering on a policeman’s belt. Then the policeman sat on top of him, and a postman threw a double somersault over the pair, and the band of the Coldstream Guards marching smartly round the corner got mixed up with them, and it wasn’t till the policeman had half swallowed the trombone, and the poor-law guardian had got the double bass round his neck for a collar, and the postman had been engulfed in the big drum that order was restored, and constitutional peace triumphed once more over revolutionary chaos.
But I ask the civilized and great British Empire, how much longer are we going to tolerate a state of society which permits slides and pitfalls and chasms to be laid for loyal feet, and bruised heads, smashed ribs, and pulverized hip bones to bring woe and desolation to loyal homes? It’s awful!