Editorial Wild Oats | Page 6

smarties recognized a treasure in Nicodemus right away--a
butt to play jokes on. It was easy to see that he was inconceivably green
and confiding. George Jones had the glory of perpetrating the first joke
on him; he gave him a cigar with a fire-cracker in it and winked to the
crowd to come; the thing exploded presently and swept away the bulk
of Nicodemus's eyebrows and eyelashes. He simply said:
"I consider them kind of seeg'yars dangersome"--and seemed to suspect
nothing. The next evening Nicodemus waylaid George and poured a
bucket of ice-water over him.
One day, while Nicodemus was in swimming, Tom McElroy "tied" his
clothes. Nicodemus made a bonfire of Tom's by way of retaliation.
A third joke was played upon Nicodemus a day or two later--he walked
up the middle aisle of the village church, Sunday night, with a staring
hand-bill pinned between his shoulders. The joker spent the remainder
of the night, after church, in the cellar of a deserted house, and
Nicodemus sat on the cellar door till towards breakfast-time to make
sure that the prisoner remembered that if any noise was made some
rough treatment would be the consequence. The cellar had two feet of
stagnant water in it, and was bottomed with six inches of soft mud.
But I wander from the point. It was the subject of skeletons that
brought this boy back to my recollection. Before a very long time had
elapsed, the village smarties began to feel an uncomfortable
consciousness of not having made a very shining success out of their
attempts on the simpleton from "old Shelby." Experimenters grew
scarce and chary. Now the young doctor came to the rescue. There was
delight and applause when he proposed to scare Nicodemus to death,
and explained how he was going to do it. He had a noble new
skeleton--the skeleton of the late and only local celebrity, Jimmy Finn,
the village drunkard--a grisly piece of property which he had bought of
Jimmy Finn himself, at auction, for fifty dollars, under great
competition, when Jimmy lay very sick in the tanyard a fortnight before

his death. The fifty dollars had gone promptly for whiskey and had
considerably hurried up the change of ownership in the skeleton. The
doctor would put Jimmy Finn's skeleton in Nicodemus's bed!
This was done--about half-past ten in the evening. About Nicodemus's
usual bedtime--midnight--the village jokers came creeping stealthily
through the jimpson weeds and sunflowers towards the lonely frame
den. They reached the window and peeped in. There sat the long-legged
pauper, on his bed, in a very short shirt, and nothing more; he was
dangling his legs contentedly back and forth, and wheezing the music
of "Camptown Races" out of a paper-overlaid comb which he was
pressing against his mouth; by him lay a new jews-harp, a new top, a
solid india-rubber ball, a handful of painted marbles, five pounds of
"store" candy, and a well-knawed slab of gingerbread as big and as
thick as a volume of sheet music. He had sold the skeleton to a
travelling quack for three dollars and was enjoying the result!
[Illustration: "WHEEZING THE MUSIC OF 'CAMPTOWN RACES'"]

Mr. Bloke's Item
Our esteemed friend, Mr. John William Bloke, of Virginia City, walked
into the office where we are sub-editor at a late hour last night, with an
expression of profound and heartfelt suffering upon his countenance,
and, sighing heavily, laid the following item reverently upon the desk,
and walked slowly out again. He paused a moment at the door, and
seemed struggling to command his feelings sufficiently to enable him
to speak, and then, nodding his head towards his manuscript, ejaculated
in a broken voice, "Friend of mine--oh! how sad!" and burst into tears.
We were so moved at his distress that we did not think to call him back
and endeavor to comfort him until he was gone, and it was too late. The
paper had already gone to press, but knowing that our friend would
consider the publication of this item important, and cherishing the hope
that to print it would afford a melancholy satisfaction to his sorrowing
heart, we stopped the press at once and inserted it in our columns:

DISTRESSING ACCIDENT.--Last evening, about six o'clock, as Mr.
William Schuyler, an old and respectable citizen of South Park, was
leaving his residence to go down-town, as has been his usual custom
for many years with the exception only of a short interval in the spring
of 1850, during which he was confined to his bed by injuries received
in attempting to stop a runaway horse by thoughtlessly placing himself
directly in its wake and throwing up his hands and shouting, which, if
he had done so even a single moment sooner, must inevitably have
frightened the animal