The Humors of Falconbridge. Falconbridge

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      "Halloo, Bill!" says old Firelock, the gunsmith, as Bill was going by his shop; "got a bag in your calabash, or got the tooth-ache?"

      Bill looked daggers at old Firelock, and by a nod of his head intimated the cause of his distress.

      "O, that all? Come in; I'll stop it in a minute and a half; sit down, I'll fix it – I've cured hundreds," says Firelock.

      "What are you – O-h-h, dear! what are you going to do?" says Bill, eyeing the wire, and lamp in which Firelock was heating the wire.

      "Burn out the marrow of the tooth – 'twill never trouble you again – I've cured hundreds that way! Don't be afeared – you won't feel it but a moment. Sit still, keep cool!" says Firelock.

      "Cool?" with a hot wire in his tooth! But Bill, being already intensely crucified, and assured of Firelock's skill, took his head out of the mush-plaster, opened his jaws, and Firelock, admonishing him to "keep cool," crowded the hot, sizzling wire on to the tin foil jammed into the hollow by Wangbanger, and gave it a twist clear through the melted tin to the exposed nerve. Bill jumped, bit off the wire, burnt his tongue, and knocked Firelock nearly through the partition of his shop; and so frightened Monsieur Savon, the little barber next door, that he rushed out into the street, crying —

      "Mon Dieu! mon Dieu! Ze zundair strike my shop!"

      Bill was stone dead – Firelock crippled. The apothecary over the way came in, picked up poor Bill, applied some camphor to his nose, and brought him back to life, and – the pangs of tooth-ache!

      "Kreasote!" says Squills, the 'pothecary. "I'll ease your pain, Mr. Whiffletree, in a second!"

      Poor Bill gave up – the kreasote added a fresh invoice to his misery – burnt his already lacerated and roasted tongue – and he yelled right out.

      "Death and glory! O-h-h-h-h, murder! You've pizened me!"

      "Put a hot brick to that young man's face," said a stranger; "'twill take out the pain and swelling in three minutes!"

      Bill revived; he seemed pleased at the stranger's suggestion; the Brick was applied; but Bill's cheek being now half raw with the various messes, it made him yell when the brick touched him!

      He cleared for home, went to bed, and the excessive pain, finally, with laudanum, kreasote, fire, and hot bricks, put him to sleep.

      He awoke at midnight, in a frightful state of misery; walked the floor until daylight; was tempted two or three times to jump out the window or crawl up the chimney!

      Until noon next day he suffered, trying in vain, every ten minutes, some "known cure," oils, acids, steam, poultices, and the ten thousand applications usually tried to cure a raging tooth.

      Desperation made Bill revengeful. He got a club and went after Dr. Wangbanger, who had set all the village in a rage of tooth-ache. Ten or a dozen of his victims were at his door, awaiting ferociously their turns to be revenged.

      But the bird had flown; the teuth-doctor had sloped; yet a good Samaritan came to poor Bill, and whispering in his ear, Bill started for Monsieur Savon's barber-shop, took a seat, shut his eyes, and said his prayers. The little Frenchman took a keen knife and pair of pincers, and Bill giving one awful yell, the tooth was out, and his pains and perils at an end!

      A-a-a-in't they Thick?

      During the "great excitement" in Boston, relative to the fugitive slave "fizzle," a good-natured country gentleman, by the name of Abner Phipps; an humble artisan in the fashioning of buckets, wash-tubs and wooden-ware generally, from one of the remote towns of the good old Bay State, paid his annual visit to the metropolis of Yankee land. In the multifarious operations of his shop and business, Abner had but little time, and as little inclination, to keep the run of latest news, as set forth glaringly, every day, under the caption of Telegraphic Dispatches, in the papers; hence, it requires but a slight extension of the imagination to apprise you, "dear reader," that our friend Phipps was but meagerly "posted up" in what was going on in this great country, half of his time. I must do friend Phipps the favor to say, that he was not ignorant of the fact that "Old Hickory" fout well down to New Orleans, and that "Old Zack" flaxed the Mexicans clean out of their boots in Mexico; likewise that Millerism was a humbug, and money was pretty generally considered a cash article all over the universal world.

      But what did Phipps know or care about the Fugitive Slave bill? Not a red cent's worth, no more than he did of the equitation of the earth, the Wilmot proviso, or Barnum's woolly horse – not a red. He came to Boston annually to see how things were a workin'; pleasure, not business. The very first morning of his arrival in town, the hue and cry of "slave hunters," was raised – Shadrack, the fugitive, was arrested at his vocation – table servant at Taft's eating establishment, Corn Hill, where Abner Phipps accidentally had stuck his boots under the mahogany, for the purpose of recuperating his somewhat exhausted inner-man. Abner saw the arrest, he was quietly discussing his tapioca, and if thinking at all, was merely calculating what the profits were, upon a two-and-sixpence dinner, at a Boston restaurateur. He saw there was a muss between the black waiter and two red-nosed white men, but as he did not know what it was all about, he didn't care; it was none of his business; and being a part of his religion, not to meddle with that that did not concern him, he continued his tapioca to the bottom of his plate, then forked over the equivalent and stepped out.

      As Phipps turned into Court square, it occurred, slightly, that the niggers had got to be rather thick in Boston, to what they used to be; and bending his footsteps down Brattle street, once or twice it occurred to him that the niggers had got to be thick – darn'd thick, for they passed and repassed him – walked before him and behind him, and in fact all around him.

      "Yes," says Phipps, "the niggers are thick, thundering thick – never saw 'em so thick in my life. Ain't they thick?" he soliloquized, and as he continued his stroll in the purlieus of "slightly soiled" garments, vulgarly known as second-hand shops, mostly proprietorized by very dignified and respectable col'ud pussons, it again struck Phipps quite forcibly that the niggers were a getting thick.

      "Godfree! but ain't they thick! I hope to be stabbed with a gridiron," said Phipps, "if there ain't more niggers– look at 'em – more niggers than would patch and grade the infernal regions eleven miles! Guess I've enough niggers for a spell," continued Phipps, "so I'll just pop in here, and see how this feller sells his notions." And so Abner, having reached Dock square, saunters into a gun, pistol, bowie, jack-knife, dog-collar, shot-bag, and notion-shop in general. Unlucky step.

      The stiff-dickied, frizzle-headed, polished and perfumed shop-keeper was on hand, and particularly predisposed to sell the stranger something. Just then a nigger passed the door, and looked in very sharply at Phipps, and presently two more passed, then a fourth and fifth, all looking more or less pointedly at the manufacturer of wooden doin's, and white-pine fixin's.

      "That's a neat collar," says the shop-keeper, as Phipps, sort of miscellaneously, placed his hand upon a brass-band, red-lined dog-collar.

      "Collar! don't call that a collar, do you?"

      "I do, sir, a beautiful collar, sir."

      "What for, solgers?" asks Phipps.

      "Soldiers, no, dogs," says the shop-keeper, puckering his mouth as though he had sampled a lemon.

      "O!" says Phipps, suddenly realizing the fact. "I ain't got no dogs; bad stock; don't pay; tax 'em up where I live; wouldn't pay tax for forty dogs." More niggers passed, repassed, and looked СКАЧАТЬ