Curious Republic of Gondour | Page 9

passage of arms? Nothing but a New
York jury and the insanity plea could save them from hanging, from the
amiable Bois- Guilbert and the pleasant Front-de-Boeuf clear down to
the nameless ruffians that entered the riot with unpictured shields and
did their first murder and acquired their first claim to respect that day.
The doings of the so-called "chivalry" of the Middle Ages were absurd
enough, even when they were brutally and bloodily in earnest, and
when their surroundings of castles and donjons, savage landscapes and
half-savage peoples, were in keeping; but those doings gravely
reproduced with tinsel decorations and mock pageantry, by bucolic
gentlemen with broomstick lances, and with muffin-rings to represent
the foe, and all in the midst of the refinement and dignity of a
carefully-developed modern civilisation, is absurdity gone crazy.
Now, for next exhibition, let us have a fine representation of one of
those chivalrous wholesale butcheries and burnings of Jewish women
and children, which the crusading heroes of romance used to indulge in
in their European homes, just before starting to the Holy Land, to seize
and take to their protection the Sepulchre and defend it from
"pollution."

CURIOUS RELIC FOR SALE
"For sale, for the benefit of the Fund for the Relief of the Widows and
Orphans of Deceased Firemen, a Curious Ancient Bedouin Pipe,
procured at the city of Endor in Palestine, and believed to have once
belonged to the justly-renowned Witch of Endor. Parties desiring to
examine this singular relic with a view to purchasing, can do so by
calling upon Daniel S.. 119 and 121 William street, New York"

As per advertisement in the "Herald." A curious old relic indeed, as I
had a good personal right to know. In a single instant of time, a long
drawn panorama of sights and scenes in the Holy Land flashed through
my memory--town and grove, desert, camp, and caravan clattering after
each other and disappearing, leaping me with a little of the surprised
and dizzy feeling which I have experienced at sundry times when a
long express train has overtaken me at some quiet curve and gone
whizzing, car by car, around the corner and out of sight. In that prolific
instant I saw again all the country from the Sea of Galilee and Nazareth
clear to Jerusalem, and thence over the hills of Judea and through the
Vale of Sharon to Joppa, down by the ocean. Leaving out unimportant
stretches of country and details of incident, I saw and experienced the
following- described matters and things. Immediately three years fell
away from my age, and a vanished time was restored to me September,
1867. It was a flaming Oriental day--this one that had come up out of
the past and brought along its actors, its stage-properties, and scenic
effects--and our party had just ridden through the squalid hive of
human vermin which still holds the ancient Biblical name of Endor; I
was bringing up the rear on my grave four-dollar steed, who was about
beginning to compose himself for his usual noon nap. My! only fifteen
minutes before how the black, mangy, nine-tenths naked, ten-tenths
filthy, ignorant, bigoted, besotted, hungry, lazy, malignant, screeching,
crowding, struggling, wailing, begging, cursing, hateful spawn of the
original Witch had swarmed out of the caves in the rocks and the holes
and crevices in the earth, and blocked our horses' way, besieged us,
threw themselves in the animals' path, clung to their manes,
saddle-furniture, and tails, asking, beseeching, demanding "bucksheesh!
bucksheesh! BUCKSHEESH!" We had rained small copper Turkish
coins among them, as fugitives fling coats and hats to pursuing wolves,
and then had spurred our way through as they stopped to scramble for
the largess. I was fervently thankful when we had gotten well up on the
desolate hillside and outstripped them and left them jawing and
gesticulating in the rear. What a tempest had seemingly gone roaring
and crashing by me and left its dull thunders pulsing in my ears!
I was in the rear, as I was saying. Our pack-mules and Arabs were far
ahead, and Dan, Jack, Moult, Davis, Denny, Church, and Birch (these

names will do as well as any to represent the boys) were following
close after them. As my horse nodded to rest, I heard a sort of panting
behind me, and turned and saw that a tawny youth from the village had
overtaken me --a true remnant and representative of his ancestress the
Witch--a galvanised scurvy, wrought into the human shape and
garnished with ophthalmia and leprous scars--an airy creature with an
invisible shirt- front that reached below the pit of his stomach, and no
other clothing to speak of except a tobacco-pouch, an
ammunition-pocket, and a venerable gun, which was long enough to
club any game with that came