The Fiends Delight | Page 7

reprehensible. One evening about twilight, I was passing
that way, and saw a long gaunt miner, evidently just down from the
mountains, and whom I had seen before, standing rather unsteadily in
front of Pandora, admiring her shapely figure, but seemingly afraid to
approach her. Seeing me advance, he turned to me with a queer,
puzzled expression in his funny eyes, and said with an earnestness that
came near defeating its purpose, "Good ev'n'n t'ye, stranger." "Good
evening, sir," I replied, after having analyzed his salutation and
extracted the sense of it. Lowering his voice to what was intended for a
whisper, the miner, with a jerk of his thumb Pandoraward, continued:
"Stranger, d'ye hap'n t'know 'er?" "Certainly; that is Bridget Pandora, a
Greek maiden, in the pay of the Board of Supervisors."
He straightened himself up with a jerk that threatened the integrity of
his neck and made his teeth snap, lurched heavily to the other side,
oscillated critically for a few moments, and muttered: "Brdgtpnd--." It
was too much for him; he went down into his pocket, fumbled feebly
round, and finally drawing out a paper of purely hypothetical tobacco,
conveyed it to his mouth and bit off about two-thirds of it, which he
masticated with much apparent benefit to his understanding, offering
what was left to me. He then resumed the conversation with the easy
familiarity of one who has established a claim to respectful attention:
"Pardner, couldn't ye interdooce a fel'r's wants tknow'er?" "Impossible;
I have not the honour of her acquaintance." A look of distrust crept into
his face, and finally settled into a savage scowl about his eyes. "Sed ye
knew 'er!" he faltered, menacingly. "So I do, but I am not upon
speaking terms with her, and-in fact she declines to recognise me." The
soul of the honest miner flamed out; he laid his hand threateningly
upon his pistol, jerked himself stiff, glared a moment at me with the
look of a tiger, and hurled this question at my head as if it had been an
iron interrogation point: "W'at a' yer ben adoin' to that gurl?"
I fled, and the last I saw of the chivalrous gold-hunter, he had his arm
about Pandora's stony waist and was endeavouring to soothe her

supposed agitation by stroking her granite head. The Head of the
Family.
Our story begins with the death of our hero. The manner of it was
decapitation, the instrument a mowing machine. A young son of the
deceased, dumb with horror, seized the paternal head and ran with it to
the house.
"There!" ejaculated the young man, bowling the gory pate across the
threshold at his mother's feet, "look at that, will you?"
The old lady adjusted her spectacles, lifted the dripping head into her
lap, wiped the face of it with her apron, and gazed into its fishy eyes
with tender curiosity. "John," said she, thoughtfully, "is this yours?"
"No, ma, it ain't none o' mine."
"John," continued she, with a cold, unimpassioned earnestness, "where
did you get this thing?"
"Why, ma," returned the hopeful, "that's Pap's."
"John"--and there was just a touch of severity in her voice--"when your
mother asks you a question you should answer that particular question.
Where did you get this?"
"Out in the medder, then, if you're so derned pertikeller," retorted the
youngster, somewhat piqued; "the mowin' machine lopped it off."
The old lady rose and restored the head into the hands of the young
man. Then, straightening with some difficulty her aged back, and
assuming a matronly dignity of bearing and feature, she emitted the
rebuke following:
"My son, the gentleman whom you hold in your hand-any more pointed
allusion to whom would be painful to both of us-has punished you a
hundred times for meddling with things lying about the farm. Take that
head back and put it down where you found it, or you will make your

mother very angry." Deathbed Repentance.
An old man of seventy-five years lay dying. For a lifetime he had
turned a deaf ear to religion, and steeped his soul in every current crime.
He had robbed the orphan and plundered the widow; he had wrested
from the hard hands of honest toil the rewards of labour; had lost at the
gaming-table the wealth with which he should have endowed churches
and Sunday schools; had wasted in riotous living the substance of his
patrimony, and left his wife and children without bread. The
intoxicating bowl had been his god-his belly had absorbed his entire
attention. In carnal pleasures passed his days and nights, and to the
maddening desires of his heart he had ministered without shame and
without remorse. He was a bad, bad egg! And now this hardened
iniquitor was to meet his Maker! Feebly and hesitatingly his