Violets and Other Tales

								



Quick the answer came from heaven;
Muckintosh, the famous thinker,
Muckintosh, the great and mighty,
Felt a trembling, felt a quaking,
Saw the earth about him open,
Saw the iron from the mountains
Form a quaint and queer machine,
Saw the lead from out the lead mines
Roll into small lettered forms,
Saw the fibres from the flax-plant,
Spread into great sheets of paper,
Saw the ink galls from the green trees
Crushed upon the leaden forms;
Muckintosh, the famous thinker,
Muckintosh, the great and mighty,
Felt a trembling, felt a quaking,
Saw the earth about him open,
Saw the flame and sulphur smoking,
Came the printer's little devil,
Far from distant lands the printer,
Man of unions, man of cuss-words,
From the depths of sooty blackness;
Came the towel of the printer;
Many things that Muckintosh saw,--
Galleys, type, and leads and rules,
Presses, press-men, quoins and spaces,
Quads and caps and lower cases.


But to Muckintosh bewildered,
All this passed as in a dream,
Till within his nervous hand,
Hand with joy and fear a-quaking,
Muckintosh, the great and mighty,
Muckintosh, the famous thinker,
Held the first of our newspapers.

A CARNIVAL JANGLE.

There is a merry jangle of bells in the air, an all-pervading sense of
jester's noise, and the flaunting vividness of royal colors; the streets
swarm with humanity,--humanity in all shapes, manners, forms,--laughing,
pushing, jostling, crowding, a mass of men and women and children, as
varied and as assorted in their several individual peculiarities as ever
a crowd that gathered in one locality since the days of Babel.
It is Carnival in New Orleans; a brilliant Tuesday in February, when the
very air effervesces an ozone intensely exhilarating--of a nature half
spring, half winter--to make one long to cut capers. The buildings are a
blazing mass of royal purple and golden yellow, and national flags,
bunting and decorations that laugh in the glint of the Midas sun. The
streets a crush of jesters and maskers, Jim Crows and clowns, ballet
girls and Mephistos, Indians and monkeys; of wild and sudden flashes of
music, of glittering pageants and comic ones, of befeathered and belled
horses. A madding dream of color and melody and fantasy gone wild in an
effervescent bubble of beauty that shifts and changes and passes
kaleidoscope-like before the bewildered eye.
A bevy of bright-eyed girls and boys of that uncertainty of age that
hovers between childhood and maturity, were moving down Canal Street
when there was a sudden jostle with another crowd meeting them. For a
minute there was a deafening clamor of laughter, cracking of whips,
which all maskers carry, jingle and clatter of carnival bells, and the
masked and unmasked extricated themselves and moved from each other's
paths. But in the confusion a tall Prince of Darkness had whispered to
one of the girls in the unmasked crowd: "You'd better come with us, Flo,