I closed the lecture at last with one
despairing shriek--with one wild burst of humor, and hurled a joke of
supernatural atrocity full at him!
Then I sat down bewildered and exhausted.
The president of the society came up and bathed my head with cold water,
and said: "What made you carry on so toward the last?"
I said: "I was trying to make that confounded old fool laugh, in the
second row."
And he said: "Well, you were wasting your time, because he is deaf and
dumb, and as blind as a badger!"
Now, was that any way for that old man's nephew to impose on a stranger
and orphan like me? I ask you as a man and brother, if that was any way
for him to do?
THE OFFICE BORE--[Written about 1869]
He arrives just as regularly as the clock strikes nine in the morning.
And so he even beats the editor sometimes, and the porter must leave his
work and climb two or three pairs of stairs to unlock the "Sanctum" door
and let him in. He lights one of the office pipes--not reflecting,
perhaps, that the editor may be one of those "stuck-up" people who would
as soon have a stranger defile his tooth-brush as his pipe-stem. Then he
begins to loll--for a person who can consent to loaf his useless life
away in ignominious indolence has not the energy to sit up straight.
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