Then said the lovely maiden, with a sweet, confiding smile: "I go for chopping of them up in most effectual style.

And as my marriage simply on my papa's death depends, Why, just for fun we'll butcher all my relatives and friends."

The Thug procured a hatchet, and the maiden got a knife; They cut and slashed the Brahmin till he was bereft of life; Then they seized the loving mother, though she desperately fought, And crunched her aged bones beneath the car of Juggernaut.

A consecrated la.s.so, thrown with admirable skill, Swiftly roped her brother in and choked him 'gainst his will.

Her sister's fair young form was hooked upon the sacred swing; And flying 'round until she died, she screamed like everything.

The maiden jabbed the knife into the colored coachman's brain, And stabbed her uncle William and her aunt Matilda Jane.

The Thug he steeped his hatchet in the chambermaiden's gore, And with a skewer pinned the cook against the cellar door.

The maiden cut her grandpa up in little tiny bits, And scared her grandma so she died in epileptic fits.

The dry nurse with the clothes-line was serenely strangled, while They tossed the little baby to the sacred crocodile.

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And when the fuss was over, said the maiden to the Thug: "You'd better have a hole within the cemetery dug; And let the undertaker take extraordinary pains To decently inter this lot of mangled-up remains."

And when the usual bitter tears were at the funeral shed, The lovers to the temple went, in order to be wed.

The priest had barbecued a man that day for sacrifice; They cooked him with the cracklin' on; with gravy brown and nice.

The chief priest asked the maiden, when the services began, If her papa had said she might annex this fine young man?

"Oh no," she said, "my loving wish he foolishly withstood, So him and all the family we slaughtered in cold blood."

"You shock me!" said the pious priest; "your conduct makes me sad; You never learned at Sunday-school to be so awful bad.

I've told you often, when you killed a person anywhere, To bring the body to that old nine-headed idol there;

"The great Vishnu is suffering for victims every day, And here you go and cut them up and throw the bones away!

Extravagance is sinful; I must really put it down; I've half a mind to pull the string and make the idol frown.

"I must punish you with rigor; and I order that you two Instead of getting married shall severest penance do."

So on a piece of paper then he scribbled a brief word; The lovers as they left, of course, felt perfectly absurd.

The Thug then read the order o'er, and bursting into tears, He said, "This paper realizes my unpleasant fears.

Upon my word, my sweetest one, it really chills my blood; I've got to suffocate you in the Ganges' holy mud."

And so he sadly led her down unto the river's bank, And like a stone into the cold, religious slime she sank.

And there she stuck the livelong day, and all the following night.

Until an alligator came and ate her at a bite.

The Thug he felt exceeding hurt at her untimely fate, But his, though not so dreadful, was not nice, at any rate.

The priest, in his fierce anger, had condemned him, it appears, To stand alone upon one leg for forty-seven years!

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CHAPTER XXII.

AN ARRIVAL--A PRESENT FROM A CONGRESSMAN--MEDITATIONS UPON HIS PURPOSE--THE PATENT OFFICE REPORT OF THE FUTURE--A PLAN FOR REVOLUTIONIZING PUBLIC DOc.u.mENTS AND OPENING A NEW DEPARTMENT OF LITERATURE--OUR TRIP TO SALEM--A TRAGICAL INCIDENT--THE LAST OF LIEUTENANT SMILEY.

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A very mysterious package came to me through the post-office yesterday.

I brought it home unopened, and, as is usual in such cases, we began to speculate upon the nature of the contents before we broke the seals.

Everybody has a disposition to dally for a while with a letter or a package from an unknown source. Mrs. Adeler felt the parcel carefully, and said she was sure it was something from her aunt--something for the baby, probably. Bob imagined that it was an infernal machine forwarded by the revengeful Stonebury, and he insisted that I should put it to soak in a bucket of water for a few hours before removing the wrapper.

The children were hopeful that some benign fairy had adopted this method of supplying the Adeler family with supernatural confectionery; and for my part, I had no doubt that some one of my friends among the publishers had sent me half a dozen of the latest books.

We opened the bundle gradually. When the outside casing was torn away, another envelope remained, and as this was slowly removed the excitement and curiosity reached an almost painful degree of intensity. At last all the papers were taken off, and I lifted from among them a large black volume. It was only a patent-office report sent to me by that incorruptible statesman and devoted patriot, the Congressman from our State.

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I have endeavored to conjecture why he should have selected me as the object of such a demonstration. Certainly he did not expect me to read the report. He knows that I, as a man of at least ordinary intelligence, would endure torture first. I cannot think that he hoped to purchase my vote by such a cheap expedient. Congressmen do, I believe, still cherish the theory that the present of a patent-office report to a const.i.tuent secures for the donor the fealty of the recipient; but it is a delusion.

Such a gift fills the soul of an unoffending man with gloomy and murderous thoughts. Every one feels at times as if he would like to butcher some of his fellow-men; and my appet.i.te for slaughter only becomes keen when I meet a Congressman who has sent me a patent-office report. Neither can I accept the suggestion that my representative was deceived by the supposition that I would be grateful for such an intimation that an eminent man, even amid the oppressive cares of State, has not forgotten so humble a worm as I. He knows me well; and although I am aware that there is in Washington a prevalent theory that a wild thrill of exultation agitates the heart of a const.i.tuent when he receives a public doc.u.ment or a flatulent oration from a lawmaker, my Congressman is better informed. He would not insult me in such a manner.

I can only account for his conduct upon the theory that he misdirected the volume, which he intended for some one else, or upon the supposition that he has heard me speak of the necessity for the occasional bombardment of Cooley's dog at night, and he conceived that he would be helping a good cause by supplying me with a new and formidable missile.

I have never attacked a dog with a patent-office report, but I can imagine that the animal might readily be slain with such a weapon. A projectile should have ponderosity; and a patent-office report has more of that quality to the cubic inch than any other object with which I am familiar. Still, I do not care to tax the treasury of the United States for material with which to a.s.sail Cooley's dog. I would rather endure the nocturnal ululations, and have the money applied to the liquidation of the national debt.

It is, however, apparent that Congressmen will never surrender the patent-office report; and if this is admitted, it seems to me that the man who succeeds in infusing into those volumes such an amount of interest that people will be induced to read them will have a right to be regarded as a great public benefactor. I suppose no human being ever did read one of them. It is tolerably certain that any man who would deliberately undertake to peruse one from beginning to end would be regarded as a person who ought not to be at large. His friends would be justified in placing him in an asylum. I think I can suggest a method by which a reform can be effected. It is to take the material that comes to hand each year and to work it up into a continuous story, which may be filled in with tragedy and sentiment and humor.

For instance, if a man came prowling around the patent-office with an improvement in hayrakes, I should name that man Alphonso and start him off in the story as the abandoned villain; Alphonso lying in wait, as it were, behind a dark corner, for the purpose of scooping his rival with that improved hay-rake. And then the hero would be a man, suppose we say, who desired an extension of a patent on accordeons. I should call such a person Lucullus, and plant him, with a working model of the accordeon, under the window of the boarding-house where the heroine, Amelia, who would be a woman who had applied for a patent on a new kind of red flannel frills, lay sleeping under the soothing influence of the tunes squeezed from the accordeon of Lucullus.

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In the midst of the serenade, let us suppose, in comes a man who has just got out some extraordinary kind of a fowling-piece about which he wants to interview the head of the department. I should make this being Amelia's father and call him Smith, because that name is full of poetry and sweetness and wild, unearthly music. Then, while Lucullus was mashing out delicious strains, I might make Alphonso rush on Smith with his hay-rake, thinking he was Lucullus, and in the fight which would perhaps ensue Smith might blow out Alphonso's brains somehow on the spot by a single discharge, we might a.s.sume, of Smith's extraordinary fowling-piece, while Lucullus could be arrested upon the suit of the composer who had a copyright on the tune with which he solaced Amelia.

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If any ingenious undertaker should haunt the patent-office at this crisis of the story with a species of metallic coffin, I might lay Alphonso away comfortably in one of them and have a funeral, or I might add a thrill of interest to the narrative by resuscitating him with vegetable pills, in case any benefactor of the race should call to secure his rights as the sole manufacturer of such articles. In the mean time, Lucullus, languishing in jail, could very readily burst his fetters and regain his liberty, provided some man of inventive talent called on the commissioner to take out searches, say, on some kind of a revertible crowbar.

Then the interest of the story would be sustained, and a few more machines of various kinds could be worked in, if, for instance, I should cause this escaped convict of mine to ascertain that the musical composer had won the heart of Amelia, in the absence of her lover, by offering to bring her flannel frills into market, and to allow her a royalty, we will a.s.sume, of ten cents a frill. When Lucullus hears of this, I should induce him to try to obtain the influence of Amelia's parents in his behalf by propitiating old Mr. Smith with the latest variety of bunion plaster for which a patent was wanted, while Mrs.

Smith could be appeased either with a gingham umbrella with an improvement of six or seven extra ribs, or else a lot of galvanized gum rings, if any inventor brought such things around, for her grandchildren.

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Then, for the sake of breaking the monotony of these intrigues, we could have a little more of the revivified Alphonso. I could very readily fill the heart of that reanimated corpse with baffled rage, and cause him to sell to old Smith one of McBride's improved hydraulic rams. Smith could be depicted as an infatuated being who placed that ram down in the meadow and caused it to force water up to his house. And Alphonso, of course, with malignant hatred in his soul, would meddle with the machine, and fumble around until he spoiled it, so that Smith could not stop it, and it would continue to pump until the Smiths had a cascade flowing from their attic window. Mrs. Smith, in her despair, might impale herself on a variety of reversible toasting-fork, and die mingling the inventor's name with maledictions and groans, while Smith, in the anguish of his soul, could live in the barn, from whence he could use an ingenious kind of breech-loading gun--patent applied for--to perforate artists who came around to sketch the falls.

In the mean time, Lucullus might come to the rescue with a suction pump and save the Smith mansion, only to find that Amelia had flown with the composer, and had gone to sea in a ship with a patent copper bottom, and a kind of a binnacle for which an extension had been granted by Congress on the 26th of February. It would then be well, perhaps, to have that copper-bottomed ship attacked by pirates, and after a b.l.o.o.d.y hand-to-hand contest, in which the composer could sink the pirate craft with the model of a gunpowder pile-driver which he has in the cabin, the enraged corsairs should swarm upon the deck of the other ship for the purpose of putting the whole party to the sword. And, of course, at this painful crisis it would be singularly happy to cause it to turn out that the chief pirate is our old friend Alphonso, who had sold out his interest in his hay-rake, discontinued his speculations in hydraulic rams and become a rover upon the seas.

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The composer, it would seem, would then be in a particularly tight place; and if the commissioner of patents had any romance in his soul, he would permit me to cause that pirate to toss the musician overboard.