Punchinello, Volume 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870

Excerpt

BALKS IN A BRUSH.

FLORA, having no relations in the world that she knew of, had, ever since her seventh new bonnet, known no other home than Macassar Female College, in the Alms-House, and regarded Miss CAROWTHERS as her mother-in-lore. Her memory of her own mother was of a lady-like person who had swiftly waisted away in the effort to be always taken for her own daughter, and was, one day, brought down-stairs, by her husband, in two pieces, from tight lacing. The sad separation (taking place just before a party of pleasure), had driven FLORA'S father into a frenzy of grief for his better halves; which was augmented to brain fever by Mr. SCHENCK, who, having given a Boreal policy to deceased, felt it his duty to talk gloomily about wives who sometimes died apart after receiving unmerited cuts from their husbands, and to suggest a compromise of ten per cent, upon the amount of the policy, as a much more cheerful settlement than a coroner's inquest. FLORA'S betrothal had grown out of the soothing of Mr. POTTS'S last year of mental disorder by Mr. DROOD, an old partner in the grocery business, who, too, was a widower from his wife's use of arsenic and lead for her complexion. The two bereaved friends, after comparing tears and looking mournfully at each other's tongues, had talked themselves to death over the fluctuations in sugar; willing their respective children to marry in future for the sake of keeping up the controversy.

From the FLOWERPOT'S first arrival at the Alms-House, her new things, engagement to be married, and stock of chocolate caramels, had won the deepest affections of her teachers and schoolmates; and, on the morning after the sectional dispute between EDWIN and MONTGOMERY, when one of the young ladies had heard of it as a profound secret, no pains were spared by the whole tender-hearted school to make her believe that neither of the young men was entirely given up yet by the consulting physicians. It was whispered, indeed, that a knife or two might have passed, and two or three guns been exchanged; but she was not to be at all worried, for persons had been known to get well with the tops of their heads off.

At an early hour, however, Miss PENDRAGON had paid a visit to her brother, in Gospeler's Gulch; and, coming back with the intelligence, that, while he had been stabbed to the heart, it was chiefly by cruel insinuations and an umbrella, was enabled to assure Miss CAROWTHERS, in confidence, that nothing eligible for publication in the New York Sun had really occurred. Thus, when the legal conqueror of Breachy Mr. BLODGETT entered that principal recitation-room of the Macassar, formally known as the Cackleorium, she had no difficulty in explaining away the panic.

She said that "Unfounded Rumor, Ladies, is, we all know, a descriptive phrase applied by the Associated Press to all important foreign news procured a week or two in advance of its own similar European advices, by the Press Association[A]. We perceive then, Ladies, (Miss JENKINS will be good enough to stop scratching her nose while I am talking,) that Unfounded Rumor sometimes means—hem!—

  'The Associated Press
  In bitter distress.'

In Bumsteadville, however, it has a signification more like what we should give it in relation to a statement that Senator SUMNER had delivered a Latin quotation without a speech selected for it....