Punchinello, Volume 1, No. 04, April 23, 1870 | Page 7

half a dozen will have to be provided.

* * * * *
Mind your P's and Q's.
Committees of State Legislatures are apt to use very slip-shod English
in drafting their bills. This should not be. How can they expect to Parse
a bill unless it is couched in grammatical language?
* * * * *
Taking a Senator's Measure.
Apropos of a recent debate in the Senate at Washington, a paragraph
states that "CARPENTER made SUMNER seem very small." The
carpenter who made SUMNER is not to blame for this. In the first
place, Mr. SUMNER'S Measures are very difficult to take. In the
second place, the best Cabinet-makers have failed to make Mr.
SUMNER appear very large. In the third and last place, Ebony, which
is the only wood with which Mr. SUMNER has any affinity, is a
mighty hard material to work, even when treated with the application of
a Fifteenth Amendment.
* * * * *
The Maine Question in Massachusetts.
If New-York has had but little skating during the past winter,
Massachusetts just now displays a good deal of backsliding. Her
legislators have "gone back on" their liquor-bill, which they have
modified to suit their habits, and, should it become law, the druggists of
the Bay State will be at liberty to sell Bay and every other kind of rum
in quantities to suit purchasers. Sic semper Massachusetts! the English
of which is, that Massachusetts will always keep Sick so long as liquor
is to be had for physic.
* * * * *
Trying to the Patients.

It is widely stated, though we cannot vouch for it as a fact, that the
poultices used in St. Luke's Hospital are supplied from the too
celebrated pavement of Fifth Avenue.
* * * * *
"Cometh up as a Flower."
It is stated that Père HYACINTHE is about to take a wife.
That's right--Pair, HYACINTHE.
* * * * *
THE EPISODE OF JACK HORNER.
Probably there is no choicer specimen of English literature than the
familiar stanza which we herewith reproduce:
"Little JACK HORNER sat in a corner, Eating his Christmas-pie, He
put in his thumb, and pulled out a plum, And said, 'What a good boy
am I!'"
Although comprised in merely four lines, it contains more instructive
truths and rarer beauties than some volumes whose pages can be
enumerated by the hundred. The opening line is singularly beautiful:
"Little JACK HORNER sat in a corner."
Here we hare the subject gracefully introduced without unnecessary
palaver or reference to family antecedents--the simple name given
without a long rigmarole of dazzling titles or senseless adjectives. The
Muse is neither pathetically invoked nor anathematically abused, but
the author proceeds at once to describe his hero's present situation,
which, it strangely appears, is in "a corner." The indefiniteness of the
locality--a corner--is not of the slightest moment; for it does not
concern the general reader to know in what corner little JACK was
stationed. Suffice it, as is apparent from the context, that it was not a
corner in Erie, nor in grain; but rather an angle formed by the

juxtaposition of two walls of an apartment or chamber.
Now, truly the subject of the poem must have been possessed either of
an extraordinary modicum of modesty or of a bitter misanthropy; or
possibly he had been guilty of a misdemeanor, and was cornered to
expiate the punishment justly due; yet conjecture is at once made
certainty in the second line, by which all doubts as to the reasons for
his being in a corner are immediately cleared up:
"Eating his Christmas-pie."
The occasion was indubitably the universal annual holiday, and his
object in going to the corner was manifestly to eat the pie. Perhaps the
object had an antecedent. Perhaps he stole the pie, and therefore wished
to avoid observation; or, more possibly, supreme selfishness was his
ruling passion, and he wished to eat it all by himself. As to this,
however, we are left slightly in the fog.
In the third line, we are afforded an insight into the manner in which he
partook of the Christmas delicacy:
"He put in his thumb, and pulled out a plum."
Interesting scene! Here we have at least an inkling of the hero's powers
of discrimination, and his regard for the little niceties of life. We have
also a beautiful metaphorical allusion to the postulate that "fingers were
made before forks," an assertion respecting the truth of which some
antiquarians have expressed a doubt. We are not prepared to decide as
to the propriety of leaving the substantial of life and employing sweets
and frivolities to pamper the appetite--and there are other questions that
naturally arise from the interesting circumstance noted above by the
poet, but we will not dwell