CREMATION,* n. The process by which the cold meats of humanity are warmed over. [FT]

CROSS, n. An ancient religious symbol erroneously supposed to owe its significance to the most solemn event in the history of Christianity, but really antedating it by thousands of years. By many it has been believed to be identical with the crux ansata of the ancient phallic worship, but it has been traced even beyond all that we know of that, to the rites of primitive peoples. We have to-day the White Cross as a symbol of chastity, and the Red Cross as a badge of benevolent neutrality in war. Having in mind the former, the reverend Father Gassalasca Jape smites the lyre to the effect following:

    "Be good, be good!" the sisterhood
        Cry out in holy chorus,
    And, to dissuade from sin, parade
        Their various charms before us.

    But why, O why, has ne'er an eye
        Seen her of winsome manner
    And youthful grace and pretty face
        Flaunting the White Cross banner?

    Now where's the need of speech and screed
        To better our behaving?
    A simpler plan for saving man
        (But, first, is he worth saving?)

    Is, dears, when he declines to flee
        From bad thoughts that beset him,
    Ignores the Law as 't were a straw,
        And wants to sin - don't let him.

CUNNING,* n. The faculty that distinguishes a weak animal or person from a strong one. It brings its possessor much mental satisfaction and great material adversity. An Italian proverb says: "The furrier gets the skins of more foxes than asses." A different view of the matter, however, is taken in the following fable of the Rev. Father Gassalasca Jape, of the Mission San Diablo:

	A Bear accosted once a Fox,
	  And the two stopped a Rabbit
	Said Bruin: "I have found a box
	  Of honey; let us bag it!"

	The Fox said: "That is well enough
	  For you, but why should we fight?
	I like full well the pleasant stuff,
	  But do not love the bee-fight."

	Thus he, dissembling, all his glee.
	  "Nay," said the Rabbit, feigning
	Assent; "as strong a force are we
	  As ever went campaigning.

	"All warlike virtues we unite,
	  Our character completing
	Fox to manoeuvre, Bear to fight,
	  And Rabbit for retreating.

	"The prizes of the war we'll share
	  Like conquerers in story:
	Sweets to the Fox, stings to the Bear,
	  And I content with glory!"

CUNNING, n. The faculty that distinguishes a weak animal or person from a strong one. It brings its possessor much mental satisfaction and great material adversity. An Italian proverb says: "The furrier gets the skins of more foxes than asses." [FT]

CUR,* n. The lowest rank in the hierarchy of dogs. [FT]

CURIOSITY, n. An objectionable quality of the female mind. The desire to know whether or not a woman is cursed with curiosity is one of the most active and insatiable passions of the masculine soul. [FT]

DANGER, n.

    A savage beast which, when it sleeps,
        Man girds at and despises,
    But takes himself away by leaps
        And bounds when it arises.
                                    Ambat Delaso

DARING, n. One of the most conspicuous qualities of a man in security. [FT]

DEAD,* adj.

   Done with the work of breathing; done
   With all the world; the mad race run
   Through to the end; the golden goal
   Attained - and found to be a hole!
   Ignoble end to all the strife!
   To lie as ne'er we lay in life,
   With legs uncomfortably straight
   And rigid fixity of pate,
   Pierced through and through by worms that live
   To make, with needless skill, a sieve
   Out of our skin, to sift our dust.
   Vain labor! at the last they just
   Bolt us unbolted till they bu'st!

DEFENCELESS, adj. Unable to attack. [FT]

DEMISE,* n. The death of an exalted personage.

	Death is but death; we go when claimed -
	  To all alike the road is;
	But still the great man's death is named
	  "Demise" by living toadies.
	Thus sycophancy strives to level
	The royal highway to the Devil.

DERANGED,* n. A condition of mind immediately precedent to the condition of murder. [FT]

DESCENDANT,* n. Any person proceeding from an ancestor in any degree.

	Alas for the days when my baboon ancestral
	  In Japanese woods from the lithe limb was pendant,
	Instructing, kind hearted, each babooness vestal
	  How best to achieve for herself a descendant.
						Oscar Wilde

DESCENT,* n. Going lower. Popularly used to indicate that the existing generation is a peg worse than that which fathered it. Thus one Darwin justly discourses upon the superiority of the ancestral baboon in a melancholy essay, called "The Descent of Man." [FT]

DESERT,* n. an extensive and fertile tract of land producing heavy wheat and vintage crops in colonial prospectuses [FT]

DIAPHRAGM, n. A muscular partition separating disorders of the chest from disorders of the bowels [FT]

DISOBEDIENCE, n. The silver lining to the cloud of servitude. [FT]

DIVINATION, n. The art of nosing out the occult. Divination is of as many kinds as there are fruit-bearing varieties of the flowering dunce and the early fool. [FT]

DRAGOON, n. A soldier who combines dash and steadiness in so equal measure that he makes his advances on foot and his retreats on horseback. [FT]

EDIBLE, adj. Good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm. [FT]

EDITOR, n. A person who combines the judicial functions of Minos, Rhadamanthus and Aeacus, but is placable with an obolus; a severely virtuous censor, but so charitable withal that he tolerates the virtues of others and the vices of himself; who flings about him the splintering lightning and sturdy thunders of admonition till he resembles a bunch of firecrackers petulantly uttering his mind at the tail of a dog; then straightway murmurs a mild, melodious lay, soft as the cooing of a donkey intoning its prayer to the evening star. Master of mysteries and lord of law, high-pinnacled upon the throne of thought, his face suffused with the dim splendors of the Transfiguration, his legs intertwisted and his tongue a-cheek, the editor spills his will along the paper and cuts it off in lengths to suit. And at intervals from behind the veil of the temple is heard the voice of the foreman demanding three inches of wit and six lines of religious meditation, or bidding him turn off the wisdom and whack up some pathos.

    O, the Lord of Law on the Throne of Thought,
        A gilded impostor is he.
    Of shreds and patches his robes are wrought,
                His crown is brass,
                Himself an ass,
        And his power is fiddle-dee-dee.
    Prankily, crankily prating of naught,
    Silly old quilly old Monarch of Thought.
        Public opinion's camp-follower he,
        Thundering, blundering, plundering free.
                    Affected,
                        Ungracious,
                    Suspected,
                        Mendacious,
    Respected contemporaree!
                                    J.H. Bumbleshook

ELECTRICITY, n. The power that causes all natural phenomena not known to be caused by something else. It is the same thing as lightning, and its famous attempt to strike Dr. Franklin is one of the most picturesque incidents in that great and good man's career. The memory of Dr. Franklin is justly held in great reverence, particularly in France, where a waxen effigy of him was recently on exhibition, bearing the following touching account of his life and services to science:

      "Monsieur Franqulin, inventor of electricity. This illustrious 
      savant, after having made several voyages around the world, 
      died on the Sandwich Islands and was devoured by savages, of 
      whom not a single fragment was ever recovered."

EMANCIPATION, n. A bondman's change from the tyranny of another to the despotism of himself.

    He was a slave:  at word he went and came;
        His iron collar cut him to the bone.
    Then Liberty erased his owner's name,
        Tightened the rivets and inscribed his own.
                                                 G.J.

EMBALM,* v.t. To cure the human bacon. The processes of embalming have been essentially the same in all ages and countries. The following recipe from an ancient papyrus, discovered in the pocket of a mummy in a museum, gives a good general notion of the business:

	He was a slave: at word he went and came;
           His iron collar cut him to the bone.
	Then Liberty erased his owner's name,
	   Tightened the rivets and inscribed his own.
						 G.J. 

EMBALM, v.t. To cheat vegetation by locking up the gases upon which it feeds. By embalming their dead and thereby deranging the natural balance between animal and vegetable life, the Egyptians made their once fertile and populous country barren and incapable of supporting more than a meagre crew. The modern metallic burial casket is a step in the same direction, and many a dead man who ought now to be ornamenting his neighbor's lawn as a tree, or enriching his table as a bunch of radishes, is doomed to a long inutility. We shall get him after awhile if we are spared, but in the meantime the violet and rose are languishing for a nibble at his glutoeus maximus. [FT]

END, n. The position farthest removed on either hand from the Interlocutor.

    The man was perishing apace
        Who played the tambourine;
    The seal of death was on his face -
        'Twas pallid, for 'twas clean.

    "This is the end," the sick man said
        In faint and failing tones.
    A moment later he was dead,
        And Tambourine was Bones.
                                 Tinley Roquot

ENDEAR,* v.t. To procure for yourself, or bestow upon another, the ability to do a favor.

	The friendship of Crocker I tenderly prize-
	  I wear many kinds of his collars.
	He's endeared to my heart by the sacred ties
	  Of a thousand accessible dollars.
				Rare Ben. Truman 

ENEMY,* n. A designing scoundrel who has done you some service which it is inconvenient to repay. In military affairs, a body of men actuated by the basest motives and pursuing the most iniquitous aim. [FT]

ENIGMA,* n. A Morning Call editorial by which the illustrious nation-swayer of that journal bends public opinion to what is conjectured to be his will. It is written with the dried tail of a jackass, dipped in liquid moonshine, and interpreted by the light of possible events in the sweet by-and-by. [FT]

EPITAPH,* n. A monumental inscription designed to remind the deceased of what he might have been if he had had the will and opportunity. The following epitaphs were copied by a prophet from the headstones of the future:

   Here lies the remains of great Senator Vrooman,
   Whose head was as hard as the heart of a woman -
   Whose heart was as soft as the head of a hammer.
   Dame Fortune advanced him to eminence, d- her.
		
	We mourn the loss
	Of Senator Cross
	If he'd perished later
	Our grief had been greater.
	If he never had died
	We should always have cried.
	As he died and decayed
	His corruption was stayed.

  Beneath this mound Charles Crocker now reposes;
  Step lightly, strangers - also hold your noses.

The doctors they tried to hold William Stow back, but 
We played at his graveside the sham and the sackbut.

EPITAPH, n. An inscription on a tomb, showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect. Following is a touching example:

    Here lie the bones of Parson Platt,
    Wise, pious, humble and all that,
    Who showed us life as all should live it;
    Let that be said - and God forgive it!

ESQUIRE,* n. Formerly a dignity immediately below that of a knight; now a dignity immediately above that of a felon. In this country the only allowable use of the word is, in its abbreviated form, in the superscriptions of letters; but ignorant and vulgar writers attach it to the names of prominent men as a title of respect. Mr Frank Pixley, of the Argonaut, uses it thus, but with commendable discrimination - he appends it only to the names of the rich. [FT]

ETHNOLOGY,* n. The science that treats of the various tribes of Man, as robbers, thieves, swindlers, dunces, lunatics, idiots and ethnologists. [FT]

EULOGY, n. Praise of a person who has either the advantages of wealth and power, or the consideration to be dead. [FT]

EUPHEMISM,* n. A figure of speech in which the speaker or writer makes his expression a good deal softer than the facts would warrant him in doing; as, for example, in the famous triolet of the Rev. Adiposus Drowze, rector of the Church of St. Sinecure, this Diocese:

  Iscariot blundered in selling for thirty,
    And all the Jews wondered that Judas had blundered
  By asking a hundred his crime was less dirty.
  Iscariot blundered in selling for thirty.

EUPHEMISM,*n. In rhetoric, a figure by which the severe asperity of truth is mitigated by the use of a softer expression than the facts would warrant - as, to call Mr. Charles Crocker ninety-nine kinds of a knave. [FT]

EVOLUTION,* n. The process by which the higher organisms are gradually developed from the lower, as Man from the Assisted Immigrant, the Office-Holder from the Ward Boss, the Thief from the Office-Holder, etc. [FT]

EXCURSION,* n. An expedition of so disagreeable a character that steamboat and railroad fares are compassionately mitigated to the miserable sufferers. [FT]

EXECUTIONER,* n. A person who does what he can to abate the ravages of senility and reduce the chances of being drowned. [FT] [FT*]

EXECUTIVE, n. An officer of the Government, whose duty it is to enforce the wishes of the legislative power until such time as the judicial department shall be pleased to pronounce them invalid and of no effect. Following is an extract from an old book entitled, The Lunarian Astonished - Pfeiffer & Co., Boston, 1803:

    LUNARIAN:  Then when your Congress has passed a law it goes  
        directly to the Supreme Court in order that it may at once be  
        known whether it is constitutional?
    TERRESTRIAN:  O no; it does not require the approval of the  
        Supreme Court until having perhaps been enforced for many  
        years somebody objects to its operation against himself - I  
        mean his client.  The President, if he approves it, begins to  
        execute it at once.
    LUNARIAN:  Ah, the executive power is a part of the legislative.   
        Do your policemen also have to approve the local ordinances  
        that they enforce?
    TERRESTRIAN:  Not yet - at least not in their character of  
        constables.  Generally speaking, though, all laws require the  
        approval of those whom they are intended to restrain.
    LUNARIAN:  I see.  The death warrant is not valid until signed by  
        the murderer.
    TERRESTRIAN:  My friend, you put it too strongly; we are not so  
        consistent.
    LUNARIAN:  But this system of maintaining an expensive judicial  
        machinery to pass upon the validity of laws only after they  
        have long been executed, and then only when brought before the  
        court by some private person - does it not cause great  
        confusion?
    TERRESTRIAN:  It does.
    LUNARIAN:  Why then should not your laws, previously to being  
        executed, be validated, not by the signature of your  
        President, but by that of the Chief Justice of the Supreme  
        Court?
    TERRESTRIAN:  There is no precedent for any such course.
    LUNARIAN:  Precedent.  What is that?
    TERRESTRIAN:  It has been defined by five hundred lawyers in three  
        volumes each.  So how can any one know?

EXILE, n. One who serves his country by residing abroad, yet is not an ambassador.
An English sea-captain being asked if he had read "The Exile of Erin," replied: "No, sir, but I should like to anchor on it." Years afterwards, when he had been hanged as a pirate after a career of unparalleled atrocities, the following memorandum was found in the ship's log that he had kept at the time of his reply:

    Aug. 3d, 1842.  Made a joke on the ex-Isle of Erin.  Coldly  
    received.  War with the whole world!

EXISTENCE, n. A transient, horrible, fantastic dream, Wherein is nothing yet all things do seem: From which we're wakened by a friendly nudge Of our bedfellow Death, and cry: "O fudge!" [FT]

EXTINCTION, n. The raw material out of which theology created the future state. [FT]

FAMILY,* n. A body of individuals living in one household, consisting of male, female, young, servants, dog, cat, dicky-bird, cockroaches, bedbugs and fleas - the "unit" of modern civilized society. [FT]

FLAG, n. A colored rag borne above troops and hoisted on forts and ships. It appears to serve the same purpose as certain signs that one sees and vacant lots in London -- "Rubbish may be shot here." [FT]

FLY,* n. A monster of the air owing allegiance to Beelzebub. The common house-fly (Musca maledicta) is the most widely distributed of the species. It is really this creature that

             with comprehensive view
            Surveys mankind from China to Peru.

FOG,* n. A substance remaining after the last analysis of San Franciscan atmosphere - the sewer gas, dust, cemetery effluvium, disease germs and other ingredients having been eliminated. Of these, however, dust is the chief; and as Mr. Edmund Yates, by combining the words "smoke" and "fog," gave to the London atmosphere the graphic name of "smog," we, in humble imitation but with inferior felicity, may confer upon our own grumous environment the title of "dog." [FT]

FOOL, n. A person who pervades the domain of intellectual speculation and diffuses himself through the channels of moral activity. He is omnific, omniform, omnipercipient, omniscience, omnipotent. He it was who invented letters, printing, the railroad, the steamboat, the telegraph, the platitude and the circle of the sciences. He created patriotism and taught the nations war - founded theology, philosophy, law, medicine and Chicago. He established monarchical and republican government. He is from everlasting to everlasting - such as creation's dawn beheld he fooleth now. In the morning of time he sang upon primitive hills, and in the noonday of existence headed the procession of being. His grandmotherly hand was warmly tucked-in the set sun of civilization, and in the twilight he prepares Man's evening meal of milk-and-morality and turns down the covers of the universal grave. And after the rest of us shall have retired for the night of eternal oblivion he will sit up to write a history of human civilization. [FT]

FORCE, n.

    "Force is but might," the teacher said -
        "That definition's just."
    The boy said naught but through instead,
    Remembering his pounded head:
        "Force is not might but must!"

FORGIVENESS,* n. A stratagem to throw an offender off his guard and catch him red-handed in his next offence. [FT]

FRATRICIDE,* n. The act of killing a jackass for meat. [FT]

FREEDMAN,* n. A person whose manacles have sunk so deeply into the flesh that they are no longer visible. [FT]

FREETHINKER,* n. A miscreant who wickedly refuses to look out of a priest's eyes, and persists in looking into them with too searching a glance. Freethinkers were formerly

		Shot,		bruned,		boiled,
		racked,		flogged,	cropped,
		drowned,	hanged,		disemboweled,
		impaled,	beheaded,	skinned.

		threatened,	pursued,	reviled,
		avoided,	silenced,	cursed,
		insulted,	robbed,		cheated,
		harassed,	derided,	slandered.

FRIEND,* n. An investigator upon the slide of whose microscope we live, move and have our being. [FT]

FRIENDSHIP,* n. A ship big enough to carry two in fair weather, but only one in foul.

    The sea was calm and the sky was blue;
    Merrily, merrily sailed we two.
        (High barometer maketh glad.)
    On the tipsy ship, with a dreadful shout,
    The tempest descended and we fell out.
        (O the walking is nasty bad!)
                                        Armit Huff Bettle

FUNERAL, n. A pageant whereby we attest our respect for the dead by enriching the undertaker, and strengthen our grief by an expenditure that deepens our groans and doubles our tears.

    The savage dies - they sacrifice a horse
    To bear to happy hunting-grounds the corse.
    Our friends expire - we make the money fly
    In hope their souls will chase it to the sky.
                                             Jex Wopley

GALLOWS, n. A stage for the performance of miracle plays, in which the leading actor is translated to heaven. In this country the gallows is chiefly remarkable for the number of persons who escape it.

    Whether on the gallows high
        Or where blood flows the reddest,
    The noblest place for man to die -
        Is where he died the deadest.
                                            Old play

GAS-METER,* n. The family liar in the basement. [FT]

GASTRIC JUICE,* n. A liquid for dissolving oxen and making men of the pulp [FT]

GENTEEL, n. Refined, after the fashion of a gent.

    Observe with care, my son, the distinction I reveal:
    A gentleman is gentle and a gent genteel.
    Heed not the definitions your "Unabridged" presents,
    For dictionary makers are generally gents.
                                                 G.J.

GENTLEMAN,* n. A rare animal sufficiently described in the lines immediately foregoing. [FT]

GENTLEWOMAN,* n. The female of the genus Gentleman. The word is obsolete, gentlewomen, for no fault of their own, being now known as "ladies."

 	The wretch who first called gentlewomen ladies,
	Being first duly hanged, arrived at Hades
	Where, welcomed by the devils to their den,
	He bowed and said: "Good morning-gentlemen."

GOLD,* n. A yellow metal greatly prized for its convenience in the various kinds of robbery known as trade. The word was formerly spelled "God" - the l was inserted to distinguish it from the name of another inferior deity. Gold is the heaviest of all the metals except platinum, and a considerable amount of it will sink a man so much more quickly and deeply than platinum will that the latter is made into lifebelts and used as a lifting power for balloons. British gold, an imaginary metal greatly used in the manufacture of American traitors to the patriotic axiom that two and two are five. [FT]

GRASS, n. All flesh.

    Two monks upon a field of battle
    Observed some lean and hungry cattle.
    Said one: "But little feed is growing
    Where Death so lately has been mowing."
    Replied the other, gravely eying
    The piles of dead about them lying:	
    "All flesh is grass - I'm quite confounded
    That cows should starve by hay surrounded."

GRAVE, n. A place in which the dead are laid to await the coming of the medical student.

    Beside a lonely grave I stood -
        With brambles 'twas encumbered;
    The winds were moaning in the wood,
        Unheard by him who slumbered,

    A rustic standing near, I said:
        "He cannot hear it blowing!"
    "'Course not," said he:  "the feller's dead -
        He can't hear nowt that's going."

    "Too true," I said; "alas, too true -
        No sound his sense can quicken!"
    "Well, mister, wot is that to you? -
        The deadster ain't a-kickin'."

    I knelt and prayed:  "O Father, smile
        On him, and mercy show him!"
    That countryman looked on the while,
        And said:  "Ye didn't know him."
                                        Pobeter Dunko

GRAVITATION, n. The tendency of all bodies to approach one another with a strength proportion to the quantity of matter they contain - the quantity of matter they contain being ascertained by the strength of their tendency to approach one another. This is a lovely and edifying illustration of how science, having made A the proof of B, makes B the proof of A. [FT]

GREAT, adj.

    "I'm great," the Lion said - "I reign
    The monarch of the wood and plain!"

    The Elephant replied: "I'm great -
    No quadruped can match my weight!"

    "I'm great - no animal has half
    So long a neck!" said the Giraffe.

    "I'm great," the Kangaroo said - "see
    My femoral muscularity!"

    The 'Possum said: "I'm great - behold,
    My tail is lithe and bald and cold!"

    An Oyster fried was understood
    To say: "I'm great because I'm good!"

    Each reckons greatness to consist
    In that in which he heads the list,

    And Vierick thinks he tops his class
    Because he is the greatest ass.
                                    Arion Spurl Doke

GUILLOTINE, n. A machine which makes a Frenchman shrug his shoulders with good reason. In his great work on Divergent Lines of Racial Evolution, the learned Professor Brayfugle argues from the prevalence of this gesture - the shrug - among Frenchmen, that they are descended from turtles and it is simply a survival of the habit of retracing the head inside the shell. It is with reluctance that I differ with so eminent an authority, but in my judgment (as more elaborately set forth and enforced in my work entitled Hereditary Emotions - lib. II, c. XI) the shrug is a poor foundation upon which to build so important a theory, for previously to the Revolution the gesture was unknown. I have not a doubt that it is directly referable to the terror inspired by the guillotine during the period of that instrument's activity. [FT] [FT*]

GUNPOWDER, n. An agency employed by civilized nations for the settlement of disputes which might become troublesome if left unadjusted. By most writers the invention of gunpowder is ascribed to the Chinese, but not upon very convincing evidence. Milton says it was invented by the devil to dispel angels with, and this opinion seems to derive some support from the scarcity of angels. Moreover, it has the hearty concurrence of the Hon. James Wilson, Secretary of Agriculture.
Secretary Wilson became interested in gunpowder through an event that occurred on the Government experimental farm in the District of Columbia. One day, several years ago, a rogue imperfectly reverent of the Secretary's profound attainments and personal character presented him with a sack of gunpowder, representing it as the sed of the Flashawful flabbergastor, a Patagonian cereal of great commercial value, admirably adapted to this climate. The good Secretary was instructed to spill it along in a furrow and afterward inhume it with soil. This he at once proceeded to do, and had made a continuous line of it all the way across a ten-acre field, when he was made to look backward by a shout from the generous donor, who at once dropped a lighted match into the furrow at the starting-point. Contact with the earth had somewhat dampened the powder, but the startled functionary saw himself pursued by a tall moving pillar of fire and smoke and fierce evolution. He stood for a moment paralyzed and speechless, then he recollected an engagement and, dropping all, absented himself thence with such surprising celerity that to the eyes of spectators along the route selected he appeared like a long, dim streak prolonging itself with inconceivable rapidity through seven villages, and audibly refusing to be comforted. "Great Scott! what is that?" cried a surveyor's chainman, shading his eyes and gazing at the fading line of agriculturist which bisected his visible horizon. "That," said the surveyor, carelessly glancing at the phenomenon and again centering his attention upon his instrument, "is the Meridian of Washington." [FT]

HANGMAN,* n. An officer who produces suspended animation.

HANGMAN, n. An officer of the law charged with duties of the highest dignity and utmost gravity, and held in hereditary disesteem by a populace having a criminal ancestry. In some of the American States his functions are now performed by an electrician, as in New Jersey, where executions by electricity have recently been ordered -- the first instance known to this lexicographer of anybody questioning the expediency of hanging Jerseymen. [FT]

HARANGUE,* n. A political Speech by an opponent.

HARANGUE, n. A speech by an opponent, who is known as an harrangue-outang. [FT]

HATCHET, n. A young axe, known among Indians as a Thomashawk.

    "O bury the hatchet, irascible Red,
    For peace is a blessing," the White Man said.
        The Savage concurred, and that weapon interred,
    With imposing rites, in the White Man's head.
                                               John Lukkus

HEAD,* n. That portion of the human body which is supposed to be responsible for all others. It is customary in some countries to remove it, and many have acquired great skill and proficiency in the art. In ancient Japan, especially, this art was carried to a high degree of perfection, as the following incident shows. The account is literally translated.

        Heavenly-Blowing-Ear-Bird was Tycoon, and he condemned to
    decapitation his great captain, Lily-Oh-Awful-Long-Augustness-
    Camphor-Boat.  Soon after the hour appointed for the execution,
    what was his Majesty's surprise when he saw calmly approaching the 
    throne the man who should by that time have been ten minutes dead!
        "Seventeen hundred and twenty-five impossible dragons!" shouted 
    the enraged monarch.  "Did I not sentence you to stand in the market-
    place and have your head struck off by the scimitar of the public 
    executioner at exactly three o'clock this afternoon; and" - here the 
    mighty Heavenly-Blowing-Ear-Bird consulted his watch=" "is it not now 
    3:10?"
        "Son of a thousand illustrious deities," answered Lily-Oh-Awful-
    Long-Augustness-Camphor-Boat., "all that you say is so true that the 
    truth is a lie to it. But your heavenly Majesty's sunny and  
    vitalizing wishes have been pestilently disregarded.  With joy I  
    ran and placed myself in the center of the market-place.  The  
    executioner appeared with his bare scimetar, ostentatiously  
    whirled it and then, touching me but lightly on the neck,  strode 
    away, hissed and pelted by the populace - with whom I was ever a  
    favorite. I came here to pray for justice upon his own treasonous 
    head."
        "Which regiment of executioners did the black-boweled
    caitiff belong to?" asked the sovereign.
        "The Ninety-eight Hundred and Thirty-seventh!" was the reply. "I  
    know the very man;  His name is Gentle-Rice-Tooth-Erratic-Great-
    Great-Youth-of-the-Thunder."
        "Let him be summoned before me," said the monarch, addressing an  
    attendant.
  	A half-hour later the culprit stood in the incandescent presence.
        "Thou son of a seven-legged hunchback without prehensile thumbs!"  
    roared Heavenly-Blowing-Ear-Bird - "why didst thou but lightly tap 
    the neck which it was thy duty, and should have been thy pleasure,
    to bisect?"
        "Lord of Cranes," replied Gentle-Rice-Tooth-Erratic-Great-Great-
    Youth-of-the-Thunder, smiling grimly, "command him to blow his nose 
    with his fingers."
        Being commanded, Lily-Oh-Awful-Long-Augustness-Camphor-Boat laid 
    hold of his proboscis with a powerful grip and trumpeted like a
    wounded elephant, the Tycoon and whole court expecting to see the 
    severed head flying violently from him.  Nothing of the kind occurred; 
    the noseblowing prospered peacefully to the end, the head remaining 
    firmly in place. All eyes were now turned on the executioner, who was 
    as a spectacle to see. He was as pale as the snow on the summit of 
    Fujiyama, his knees trembled  and his breath sakhemenl oka sumi 
    remichi fee (untranslatable). 
    	"Several thousand spike-tailed brass lions!" he cried; "I am a  
    ruined and disgraced swordsman!  I struck the villain feebly  
    because in flourishing the scimitar I had accidentally passed it  
    through my own neck!  Father of slaughter, I resign my office."
        So saying, Gentle-Rice-Tooth-Erratic-Great-Great-Youth-of-the-
    Thunder lifted his arm, grasped his topknot and, lifting off his 
    head, advanced to the throne and laid it humbly at the Tycoon's feet.

HEAD-MONEY, n.

    In ancient times there lived a king
    Whose tax-collectors could not wring
    From all his subjects gold enough
    To make the royal way less rough.
    For pleasure's highway, like the dames
    Whose premises adjoin it, claims
    Perpetual repairing.  So
    The tax-collectors in a row
    Appeared before the throne to pray
    Their master to devise some way
    To swell the revenue.  "So great,"
    Said they, "are the demands of state
    A tithe of all that we collect
    Will scarcely meet them.  Pray reflect:
    How, if one-tenth we must resign,
    Can we exist on t'other nine?"
    The monarch asked them in reply:
    "Has it occurred to you to try
    The advantage of economy?"
    "It has," the spokesman said:  "we sold
    All of our gray garrotes of gold;
    With plated-ware we now compress
    The necks of those whom we assess.
    Plain iron forceps we employ
    To mitigate the miser's joy
    Who hoards, with greed that never tires,
    That which your Majesty requires."
    Deep lines of thought were seen to plow
    Their way across the royal brow.
    "Your state is desperate, no question;
    Pray favor me with a suggestion."
    "O King of Men," the spokesman said,
    "If you'll impose upon each head
    A tax, the augmented revenue
    We'll cheerfully divide with you."
    As flashes of the sun illume
    The parted storm-cloud's sullen gloom,
    The king smiled grimly.  "I decree
    That it be so - and, not to be
    In generosity outdone,
    Declare you, each and every one,
    Exempted from the operation
    Of this new law of capitation.
    But lest the people censure me
    Because they're bound and you are free,
    'Twere well some clever scheme were laid
    By you this poll-tax to evade.
    I'll leave you now while you confer
    With my most trusted minister."
    The monarch from the throne-room walked
    And straightway in among them stalked
    A silent man, with brow concealed,
    Bare-armed - his gleaming axe revealed!
                                             G.J.

HEARSE, n. Death's baby-carriage. [FT]

HEMP, n. A plant from whose fibrous bark is made an article of neckwear which is frequently put on after public speaking in the open air and prevents the wearer from taking cold. [FT]

HIBERNATE, n. To pass the winter season in domestic seclusion. There have been many singular popular notions about the hibernation of various animals. Many believe that the bear hibernates during the whole winter and subsists by mechanically sucking its paws. It is admitted that it comes out of its retirement in the spring so lean that it had to try twice before it can cast a shadow. Three or four centuries ago, in England, no fact was better attested than that swallows passed the winter months in the mud at the bottom of their brooks, clinging together in globular masses. They have apparently been compelled to give up the custom and account of the foulness of the brooks. Sotus Ecobius discovered in Central Asia a whole nation of people who hibernate. By some investigators, the fasting of Lent is supposed to have been originally a modified form of hibernation, to which the Church gave a religious significance; but this view was strenuously opposed by that eminent authority, Bishop Kip, who did not wish any honors denied to the memory of the Founder of his family. [FT]

HISTORY, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.

    Of Roman history, great Niebuhr's shown
    'Tis nine-tenths lying.  Faith, I wish 'twere known,
    Ere we accept great Niebuhr as a guide,
    Wherein he blundered and how much he lied.
                                              Salder Bupp

HOSTILITY, n. A peculiarly sharp and specially applied sense of the earth's overpopulation. Hostility is classified as active and passive; as (respectively) the feeling of a woman for her female friends, and that which she entertains for all the rest of her sex. [FT]

HOUSE, n. A hollow edifice erected for the habitation of man, rat, mouse, beelte, cockroach, fly, mosquito, flea, bacillus and microbe. House of Correction, a place of reward for political and personal service, and for the detention of offenders and appropriations. House of God, a building with a steeple and a mortgage on it. House-dog, a pestilent beast kept on domestic premises to insult persons passing by and appal the hardy visitor. House-maid, a youngerly person of the opposing sex employed to be variously disagreeable and ingeniously unclean in the station in which it has pleased God to place her. [FT]

HUMANITARIAN,* n. A person who believes the Saviour was human and himself is divine. In Californian journalism, the word means to an Eastern man who favours Chinese immigration, but Humaniac would seem to be the better name. [FT]

ICONOCLAST, n. A breaker of idols, the worshipers whereof are imperfectly gratified by the performance, and most strenuously protest that he unbuildeth but doth not reedify, that he pulleth down but pileth not up. For the poor things would have other idols in place of those he thwacketh upon the mazzard and dispelleth. But the iconoclast saith: "Ye shall have none at all, for ye need them not; and if the rebuilder fooleth round hereabout, behold I will depress the head of him and sit thereon till he squawk it." [FT]

IMMORTALITY, n.

    A toy which people cry for,
    And on their knees apply for,
    Dispute, contend and lie for,
        And if allowed
        Would be right proud
    Eternally to die for.
                                     G.J.

IMPALE, v.t. In popular usage to pierce with any weapon which remains fixed in the wound. This, however, is inaccurate; to imaple is, properly, to put to death by thrusting an upright sharp stake into the body, the victim being left in a sitting position. This was a common mode of punishment among many of the nations of antiquity, and is still in high favor in China and other parts of Asia. Down to the beginning of the fifteenth century it was widely employed in "churching" heretics and schismatics. Wolecraft calls it the "stoole of repentynge," and among the common people it was jocularly known as "riding the one legged horse." Ludwig Salzmann informs us that in Thibet impalement is considered the most appropriate punishment for crimes against religion; and although in China it is sometimes awarded for secular offences, it is most frequently adjudged in cases of sacrilege. To the person in actual experience of impalement it must be a matter of minor importance by what kind of civil or religious dissent he was made acquainted with its discomforts; but doubtless he would feel a certain satisfaction if able to contemplate himself in the character of a weather-cock on the spire of the True Church. [FT]

INFALLIBLE,* adj. Not liable to error; dead-sure - as Frank Pixley, when speaking ex cathartica. [FT]

IN'ARDS, n. The stomach, heart, soul and other bowels. Many eminent investigators do not class the soul as an in'ard, but that acute observer and renowned authority, Dr. Gunsaulus, is persuaded that the mysterious organ known as the spleen is nothing less than our important part. To the contrary, Professor Garrett P. Servis holds that man's soul is that prolongation of his spinal marrow which forms the pith of his no tail; and for demonstration of his faith points confidently to the fact that no tailed animals have no souls. Concerning these two theories, it is best to suspend judgment by believing both. [FT]

INSECTIVORA, n.

	"See," cries the chorus of admiring preachers,
    	"How Providence provides for all His creatures!"
    	"His care," the gnat said, "even the insects follows:
    	For us He has provided wrens and swallows."
                                                      Sempen Railey

INTEMPERANCE,* n. A monster which, attacking all, overcomes the weaklings and results in the survival of the fightest. [FT]

INTENTION, n. The mind's sense of the prevalence of one set of influences over another set; an effect whose cause is the imminence, immediate or remote, of the performance of an involuntary act. [FT]

INTERIM,* n. A period of time, considered with reference to two dates or events which it falls between as, "Byron died in the first half of the nineteenthc century, Hugo in the second half. In the interim Adair Welcker arose." A famous decree of Charles V of Germany, designed to reconcile the Catholic and Protestant churches and make Frank Pixley impossible. [FT]

INTIMACY, n. A relation into which fools are providentially drawn for their mutual destruction.

    Two Seidlitz powders, one in blue
    And one in white, together drew
    And having each a pleasant sense
    Of t'other powder's excellence,
    Forsook their jackets for the snug
    Enjoyment of a common mug.
    So close their intimacy grew
    One paper would have held the two.
    To confidences straight they fell,
    Less anxious each to hear than tell;
    Then each remorsefully confessed
    To all the virtues he possessed,
    Acknowledging he had them in
    So high degree it was a sin.
    The more they said, the more they felt
    Their spirits with emotion melt,
    Till tears of sentiment expressed
    Their feelings.  Then they effervesced!
    So Nature executes her feats
    Of wrath on friends and sympathetes
    The good old rule who don't apply,
    That you are you and I am I.

INVASION,* n. The patriot's most approved method of attesting his love of his country. [FT]

INVENTOR, n. A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization. [FT]

JUTE,* n. A plant grown in India, the fruit of which supplies a nutritious diet to the directors of our state prison. [FT]

KEEP, v.t.

   
    He willed away his whole estate,
        And then in death he fell asleep,
    Murmuring:  "Well, at any rate,
        My name unblemished I shall keep."
    But when upon the tomb 'twas wrought
    Whose was it? -- for the dead keep naught.
                                          Durang Gophel Arn

KILL, v. t. To create a vacancy without nominating a successor. [FT]

KING, n. A male person commonly known in America as a "crowned head," although he never wears a crown and has usually no head to speak of.

    A king, in times long, long gone by,
        Said to his lazy jester:
    "If I were you and you were I
    My moments merrily would fly -
        Nor care nor grief to pester."

    "The reason, Sire, that you would thrive,"
        The fool said - "if you'll hear it -
    Is that of all the fools alive
    Who own you for their sovereign, I've
        The most forgiving spirit."
                                          Oogum Bem

LAND, n. A part of the earth's surface, considered as property. The theory that land is property subject to private ownership and control is the foundation of modern society, and is eminently worthy of the superstructure. Carried to its logical conclusion, it means that some have the right to prevent others from living; for the right to own implies the right exclusively to occupy; and in fact laws of trespass are enacted wherever property in land is recognized. It follows that if the whole area of terra firma is owned by A, B and C, there will be no place for D, E, F and G to be born, or, born as trespassers, to exist.

    A life on the ocean wave,
        A home on the rolling deep,
    For the spark the nature gave
        I have there the right to keep.

    They give me the cat-o'-nine
        Whenever I go ashore.
    Then ho! for the flashing brine -
        I'm a natural commodore!
                                           Dodle

LAOCOON, n. A famous piece of antique scripture representing a priest of that name and his two sons in the folds of two enormous serpents. The skill and diligence with which the old man and lads support the serpents and keep them up to their work have been justly regarded as one of the noblest artistic illustrations of the mastery of human intelligence over brute inertia. [FT]

LAP, n. One of the most important organs of the female system - an admirable provision of nature for the repose of infancy, but chiefly useful in rural festivities to support plates of cold chicken and heads of adult males. The male of our species has a rudimentary lap, imperfectly developed and in no way contributing to the animal's substantial welfare. [FT]

LAUGHTER, n. An interior convulsion, producing a distortion of the features and accompanied by inarticulate noises. It is infectious and, though intermittent, incurable. Liability to attacks of laughter is one of the characteristics distinguishing man from the animals - these being not only inaccessible to the provocation of his example, but impregnable to the microbes having original jurisdiction in bestowal of the disease. Whether laughter could be imparted to animals by inoculation from the human patient is a question that has not been answered by experimentation. Dr. Meir Witchell holds that the infection character of laughter is due to the instantaneous fermentation of sputa diffused in a spray. From this peculiarity he names the disorder Convulsio spargens. [FT]

LAW, n.

    Once Law was sitting on the bench,
        And Mercy knelt a-weeping.
    "Clear out!" he cried, "disordered wench!
        Nor come before me creeping.
    Upon your knees if you appear,
    'Tis plain your have no standing here."

    Then Justice came.  His Honor cried:
        "Your status? - devil seize you!"
    "Amica curiae," she replied -
        "Friend of the court, so please you."
    "Begone!" he shouted - "there's the door -
    I never saw your face before!"
                                         G.J.

LIFE, v. t. A spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay. We live in daily apprehension of its loss; yet when lost it is not missed. The question, "Is life worth living?" has been much discussed; particularly by those who think it is not, many of whom have written at great length in support of their view and by careful observance of the laws of health enjoyed for long terms of years the honors of successful controversy.

    "Life's not worth living, and that's the truth,"
    Carelessly caroled the golden youth.
    In manhood still he maintained that view
    And held it more strongly the older he grew.
    When kicked by a jackass at eighty-three,
    "Go fetch me a surgeon at once!" cried he.
                                           Han Soper

LINEN, n. "A kind of cloth the making of which, when made of hemp, entails a great waste of hemp." Calcraft the Hangman. [FT]

LITIGATION, n. A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage. [FT]

LIVER, n. A large red organ thoughtfully provided by nature to be bilious with. The sentiments and emotions which every literary anatomist now knows to haunt the heart were anciently believed to infest the liver; and even Gascoygne, speaking of the emotional side of human nature, calls it "our hepaticall parte." It was at one time considered the seat of life; hence its name - liver, the thing we live with. The liver is heaven's best gift to the goose; without it that bird would be unable to supply us with the Strasbourg pâum;té. [FT]

LONGEVITY, n. Uncommon extension of the fear of death. [FT]

LORD, n. In American society, an English tourist above the state of a costermonger, as, lord 'Aberdasher, Lord Hartisan and so forth. The traveling Briton of lesser degree is addressed as "Sir," as, Sir 'Arry Donkiboi, or 'Amstead 'Eath. The word "Lord" is sometimes used, also, as a title of the Supreme Being; but this is thought to be rather flattery than true reverence.

    Miss Sallie Ann Splurge, of her own accord,
    Wedded a wandering English lord -
    Wedded and took him to dwell with her "paw,"
    A parent who throve by the practice of Draw.
    Lord Cadde I don't hesitate to declare
    Unworthy the father-in-legal care
    Of that elderly sport, notwithstanding the truth
    That Cadde had renounced all the follies of youth;
    For, sad to relate, he'd arrived at the stage
    Of existence that's marked by the vices of age.
    Among them, cupidity caused him to urge
    Repeated demands on the pocket of Splurge,
    Till, wrecked in his fortune, that gentleman saw
    Inadequate aid in the practice of Draw,
    And took, as a means of augmenting his pelf,
    To the business of being a lord himself.
    His neat-fitting garments he wilfully shed
    And sacked himself strangely in checks instead;
    Denuded his chin, but retained at each ear
    A whisker that looked like a blasted career.
    He painted his neck an incarnadine hue
    Each morning and varnished it all that he knew.
    The moony monocular set in his eye
    Appeared to be scanning the Sweet Bye-and-Bye.
    His head was enroofed with a billycock hat,
    And his low-necked shoes were aduncous and flat.
    In speech he eschewed his American ways,
    Denying his nose to the use of his A's
    And dulling their edge till the delicate sense
    Of a babe at their temper could take no offence.
    His H's - 'twas most inexpressibly sweet,
    The patter they made as they fell at his feet!
    Re-outfitted thus, Mr. Splurge without fear
    Began as Lord Splurge his recouping career.
    Alas, the Divinity shaping his end
    Entertained other views and decided to send
    His lordship in horror, despair and dismay
    From the land of the nobleman's natural prey.
    For, smit with his Old World ways, Lady Cadde
    Fell - suffering Caesar! - in love with her dad!
                                                    G.J.

MACROBIAN, n. One forgotten of the gods and living to a great age. History is abundantly supplied with examples, from Methuselah to Old Parr, but some notable instances of longevity are less well known. A Calabrian peasant named Coloni, born in 1753, lived so long that he had what he considered a glimpse of the dawn of universal peace. Scanavius relates that he knew an archbishop who was so old that he could remember a time when he did not deserve hanging. In 1566 a linen draper of Bristol, England, declared that he had lived five hundred years, and that in all that time he had never told a lie. There are instances of longevity (macrobiosis) in our own country. Senator Chauncey Depew is old enough to know better. The editor of The American, a newspaper in New York City, has a memory that goes back to the time when he was a rascal, but not to the fact. The President of the United States was born so long ago that many of the friends of his youth have risen to high political and military preferment without the assistance of personal merit. The verses following were written by a macrobian:

  When I was young the world was fair
        And amiable and sunny.
    A brightness was in all the air,
        In all the waters, honey.
        The jokes were fine and funny,
    The statesmen honest in their views,
        And in their lives, as well,
    And when you heard a bit of news
        'Twas true enough to tell.
    Men were not ranting, shouting, reeking,
    Nor women "generally speaking."

    The Summer then was long indeed:
        It lasted one whole season!
    The sparkling Winter gave no heed
        When ordered by Unreason
        To bring the early peas on.
    Now, where the dickens is the sense
        In calling that a year
    Which does no more than just commence
        Before the end is near?
    When I was young the year extended
    From month to month until it ended.

    I know not why the world has changed
        To something dark and dreary,
    And everything is now arranged
        To make a fellow weary.
        The Weather Man -- I fear he
    Has much to do with it, for, sure,
        The air is not the same:
    It chokes you when it is impure,
        When pure it makes you lame.
    With windows closed you are asthmatic;
    Open, neuralgic or sciatic.

    Well, I suppose this new regime
        Of dun degeneration
    Seems eviler than it would seem
        To a better observation,
        And has for compensation
    Some blessings in a deep disguise
        Which mortal sight has failed
    To pierce, although to angels' eyes
        They're visible unveiled.
    If Age is such a boon, good land!
    He's costumed by a master hand!
                                      Venable Strigg

MAGNET, n. Something acted upon by magnetism.

MAGNETISM, n. Something acting upon a magnet.
The two definitions immediately foregoing are condensed from the works of one thousand eminent scientists, who have illuminated the subject with a great white light, to the inexpressible advancement of human knowledge. [FT]

MAGPIE, n. A bird whose thievish disposition suggested to someone that it might be taught to talk. [FT]

MAIDEN, n. A young person of the unfair sex addicted to clewless conduct and views that madden to crime. The genus has a wide geographical distribution, being found wherever sought and deplored wherever found. The maiden is not altogether unpleasing to the eye, nor (without her piano and her views) insupportable to the ear, though in respect to comeliness distinctly inferior to the rainbow, and, with regard to the part of her that is audible, bleating out of the field by the canary - which, also, is more portable.

    A lovelorn maiden she sat and sang -
        This quaint, sweet song sang she;
    "It's O for a youth with a football bang
        And a muscle fair to see!
                The Captain he
                Of a team to be!
    On the gridiron he shall shine,
    A monarch by right divine,
        And never to roast on it - me!"
                                      Opoline Jones

MALE, n. A member of the unconsidered, or negligible sex. The male of the human race is commonly known (to the female) as Mere Man. The genus has two varieties: good providers and bad providers. [FT]

MALTHUSIASM,* n. An animated acceptance of the doctrines of the human race. [FT]

MAMMALIA, n.pl. A family of vertebrate animals whose females in a state of nature suckle their young, but when civilized and enlightened put them out to nurse, or use the bottle. [FT]

MARCH,* n. A tide in the affairs of any army swayed by the attraction of loot. [FT]

MARTYR, n. One who moves along the line of least reluctance to a desired death. [FT]

MAUSOLEUM, n. The final and funniest folly of the rich. [FT]

MEDAL, n. A small metal disk given as a reward for virtues, attainments or services more or less authentic. It is related of Bismark, who had been awarded a medal for gallantly rescuing a drowning person, that, being asked the meaning of the medal, he replied: "I save lives sometimes." And sometimes he didn't. [FT]

MEERSCHAUM, n. (Literally, seafoam, and by many erroneously supposed to be made of it.) A fine white clay, which for convenience in coloring it brown is made into tobacco pipes and smoked by the workmen engaged in that industry. The purpose of coloring it has not been disclosed by the manufacturers.

    There was a youth (you've heard before,
        This woeful tale, may be),
    Who bought a meerschaum pipe and swore
        That color it would he!

    He shut himself from the world away,
        Nor any soul he saw.
    He smoke by night, he smoked by day,
        As hard as he could draw.

    His dog died moaning in the wrath
        Of winds that blew aloof;
    The weeds were in the gravel path,
        The owl was on the roof.

    "He's gone afar, he'll come no more,"
        The neighbors sadly say.
    And so they batter in the door
        To take his goods away.

    Dead, pipe in mouth, the youngster lay,
        Nut-brown in face and limb.
    "That pipe's a lovely white," they say,
        "But it has colored him!"

    The moral there's small need to sing -
        'Tis plain as day to you:
    Don't play your game on any thing
        That is a gamester too.
                                  Martin Bulstrode

MINSTREL, adj. Formerly a poet, singer or musician; now a nigger with a color less than skin deep and a humor more than flesh and blood can bear. [FT]

MOLECULE, n. The ultimate, indivisible unit of matter. It is distinguished from the corpuscle, also the ultimate, indivisible unit of matter, by a closer resemblance to the atom, also the ultimate, indivisible unit of matter. Three great scientific theories of the structure of the universe are the molecular, the corpuscular and the atomic. A fourth affirms, with Haeckel, the condensation of precipitation of matter from ether - whose existence is proved by the condensation of precipitation. The present trend of scientific thought is toward the theory of ions. The ion differs from the molecule, the corpuscle and the atom in that it is an ion. A fifth theory is held by idiots, but it is doubtful if they know any more about the matter than the others. [FT]

MONAD, n. The ultimate, indivisible unit of matter. (See MOLECULE.) According to Leibnitz, as nearly as he seems willing to be understood, the monad has body without bulk, and mind without manifestation - Leibnitz knows him by the innate power of considering. He has founded upon him a theory of the universe, which the creature bears without resentment, for the monad is a gentleman. Small as he is, the monad contains all the powers and possibilities needful to his evolution into a German philosopher of the first class - altogether a very capable little fellow. He is not to be confounded with the microbe, or bacillus; by its inability to discern him, a good microscope shows him to be of an entirely distinct species. [FT] [FT*]

MONKEY, n. An arboreal animal which makes itself at home in genealogical trees. [FT]

MONOGENIST,* n. One who worships at the shrine of his ancestral cell. [FT]

MONOSYLLABIC, adj. Composed of words of one syllable, for literary babes who never tire of testifying their delight in the vapid compound by appropriate googoogling. The words are commonly Saxon -- that is to say, words of a barbarous people destitute of ideas and incapable of any but the most elementary sentiments and emotions.

    The man who writes in Saxon
    Is the man to use an ax on
                              Judibras

MONUMENT, n. A structure intended to commemorate something which either needs no commemoration or cannot be commemorated.

    The bones of Agammemnon are a show,
    And ruined is his royal monument,

MORTALITY, n. The part of immortality that we know about [FT]

MOTION,* n. A property, condition or state of matter. The existence and possibility of motion is denied by many philosophers, who point out that a thing cannot move where it is and cannot move where it is not. Others, with Galileo, say: "And yet it moves." It is not the province of this lexicographer to decide.

   "How charming is divine Philosophy!" Milton

MOTIVE, n. A mental wolf in moral wool. [FT]

MULATTO, n. A child of two races, ashamed of both. [FT]

MUMMY, n. An ancient Egyptian, formerly in universal use among modern civilized nations as medicine, and now engaged in supplying art with an excellent pigment. He is handy, too, in museums in gratifying the vulgar curiosity that serves to distinguish man from the lower animals.

    By means of the Mummy, mankind, it is said,
    Attests to the gods its respect for the dead.
    We plunder his tomb, be he sinner or saint,
    Distil him for physic and grind him for paint,
    Exhibit for money his poor, shrunken frame,
    And with levity flock to the scene of the shame.
    O, tell me, ye gods, for the use of my rhyme:
    For respecting the dead what's the limit of time?
                                                 Scopas Brune

MUSTANG, n. An indocile horse of the western plains. In English society, the American wife of an English nobleman. [FT]

MYTHOLOGY, n. The body of a primitive people's beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later. [FT]

NEGRO, n. The pièce de résistance in the American political problem. Representing him by the letter n, the Republicans begin to build their equation thus: "Let n = the white man." This, however, appears to give an unsatisfactory solution. [FT]

NEWTONIAN, adj. Pertaining to a philosophy of the universe invented by Newton, who discovered that an apple will fall to the ground, but was unable to say why. His successors and disciples have advanced so far as to be able to say when. [FT]

NOBLEMAN, n. Nature's provision for wealthy American minds ambitious to incur social distinction and suffer high life. [FT]

OBSESSED, p. p. Vexed by an evil spirit, like the Gadarene swine and other critics. Obsession was once more common than it is now. Arasthus tells of a peasant who was occupied by a different devil for every day in the week, and on Sundays by two. They were frequently seen, always walking in his shadow, when he had one, but were finally driven away by the village notary, a holy man; but they took the peasant with them, for he vanished utterly. A devil thrown out of a woman by the Archbishop of Rheims ran through the trees, pursued by a hundred persons, until the open country was reached, where by a leap higher than a church spire he escaped into a bird. A chaplain in Cromwell's army exorcised a soldier's obsessing devil by throwing the soldier into the water, when the devil came to the surface. The soldier, unfortunately, did not. [FT]

OCEAN, n. A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man - who has no gills. [FT]

OFFENSIVE, adj. Generating disagreeable emotions or sensations, as the advance of an army against its enemy.

     "Were the enemy's tactics offensive?" the king asked.  
     "I should say so!" replied the unsuccessful general. "The 
     blackguard wouldn't come out of his works!"

OBSTINATE,* adj. Inaccessible to the truth as it is manifest in the splendor and stress of our advocacy. The popular type and exponent of obstinacy is the mule, a most intelligent animal. [FT]

OLYMPIAN, adj. Relating to a mountain in Thessaly, once inhabited by gods, now a repository of yellowing newspapers, beer bottles and mutilated sardine cans, attesting the presence of the tourist and his appetite.

    His name the smirking tourist scrawls
    Upon Minerva's temple walls,
    Where thundered once Olympian Zeus,
    And marks his appetite's abuse.
                                       Averil Joop

OPTIMIST, n. A proponent of the doctrine that black is white. A pessimist applied to God for relief. "Ah, you wish me to restore your hope and cheerfulness," said God. "No," replied the petitioner, "I wish you to create something that would justify them." "The world is all created," said God, "but you have overlooked something -- the mortality of the optimist." [FT]

ORTHODOX, n. An ox wearing the popular religious joke. [FT]

OVEREAT, v. To dine.

    Hail, Gastronome, Apostle of Excess,
    Well skilled to overeat without distress!
    Thy great invention, the unfatal feast,
    Shows Man's superiority to Beast.
                                         John Boop

PARRICIDE,* n. a fillial coup de grâce whereby one is released from the fingering torments of paternity [FT]

PATRIOT, n. One to whom the interests of a part seem superior to those of the whole. The dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors. [FT]

PATRIOTISM, n. Combustible rubbish read to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name.
In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first. [FT]

PEACE, n. In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.

    O, what's the loud uproar assailing
        Mine ears without cease?
    'Tis the voice of the hopeful, all-hailing
        The horrors of peace.

    Ah, Peace Universal; they woo it -
        Would marry it, too.
    If only they knew how to do it
        'Twere easy to do.

    They're working by night and by day
        On their problem, like moles.
    Have mercy, O Heaven, I pray,
        On their meddlesome souls!
                                Ro Amil

PEDESTRIAN, n. The variable (and audible) part of the roadway for an automobile [FT]

PEDIGREE, n. The known part of the route from an arboreal ancestor with a swim bladder to an urban descendant with a cigarette. [FT]

PHILISTINE, n. One whose mind is the creature of its environment, following the fashion in thought, feeling and sentiment. He is sometimes learned, frequently prosperous, commonly clean and always solemn. [FT]

PHILOSOPHY, n. A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing. [FT]

PHONOGRAPH, n. An irritating toy that restores life to dead noises. [FT]

PHOTOGRAPH, n. A picture painted by the sun without instruction in art. It is a little better than the work of an Apache, but not quite so good as that of a Cheyenne. [FT]

PICKANINNY, n. The young of the Procyanthropos, or Americanus dominans. It is small, black and charged with political fatalities. [FT]

PIETY, n. Reverence for the Supreme Being, based upon His supposed resemblance to man.

    The pig is taught by sermons and epistles
    To think the God of Swine has snout and bristles.
                                                    Judibras

PIG, n. An animal (Porcus omnivorus) closely allied to the human race by the splendor and vivacity of its appetite, which, however, is inferior in scope, for it sticks at pig. [FT]

PIGMY, n. One of a tribe of very small men found by ancient travelers in many parts of the world, but by modern in Central Africa only. The Pigmies are so called to distinguish them from the bulkier Caucasians - who are Hogmies. [FT]

PILGRIM, n. A traveler that is taken seriously. A Pilgrim Father was one who, leaving Europe in 1620 because not permitted to sing psalms through his nose, followed it to Massachusetts, where he could personate God according to the dictates of his conscience. [FT]

PLUTOCRACY,* n. A republican form of government deriving its powers from the conceit of the governed - in thinking they govern. [FT]

POOR,* adj. Persons who are unable to pay their taxes. For example Vanderbilt. [FT]

POTABLE, n. Suitable for drinking. Water is said to be potable; indeed, some declare it our natural beverage, although even they find it palatable only when suffering from the recurrent disorder known as thirst, for which it is a medicine. Upon nothing has so great and diligent ingenuity been brought to bear in all ages and in all countries, except the most uncivilized, as upon the invention of substitutes for water. To hold that this general aversion to that liquid has no basis in the preservative instinct of the race is to be unscientific - and without science we are as the snakes and toads. [FT]

PRE-ADAMITE, n. One of an experimental and apparently unsatisfactory race of antedated Creation and lived under conditions not easily conceived. Melsius believed them to have inhabited "the Void" and to have been something intermediate between fishes and birds. Little its known of them beyond the fact that they supplied Cain with a wife and theologians with a controversy. [FT]

PREFERENCE, n. A sentiment, or frame of mind, induced by the erroneous belief that one thing is better than another.
An ancient philosopher, expounding his conviction that life is no better than death, was asked by a disciple why, then, he did not die. "Because," he replied, "death is no better than life."
It is longer. [FT]

PREJUDICE, n. A vagrant opinion without visible means of support. [FT]

PRESS,* n. A mighty magnifying machine which, by the aid of "we" and printer's ink, changes the squeak of a mouse into the roar of an editorial lion, on whose utterances the nation (presumably) hags with bated breath. [FT]

PRIMOGENITURE,* n. A peculiar law, which gives all the grub to the chicken which first gets out of the shell. [FT]

PRINT, n. Feathers, in which many sickly ideas strut about and crow, that had better never have been hatched. [FT]

PRIVATE, n. A military gentleman with a field-marshal's baton in his knapsack and an impediment in his hope. [FT]

PROBABLE,* adj. That, when we get to heaven, we shall find some men have grabbed all the best locations, as "desert land." [FT]

PRODUCE,* n. Punkins and hog-fat and things, that queer people are always "raising" in some outlandish place,outside the city. [FT]

PROJECTILE,* n. A bootjack or a kiss, according to whether you're aiming at a cat or a pretty girl.

PROJECTILE, n. The final arbiter in international disputes. Formerly these disputes were settled by physical contact of the disputants, with such simple arguments as the rudimentary logic of the times could supply - the sword, the spear, and so forth. With the growth of prudence in military affairs the projectile came more and more into favor, and is now held in high esteem by the most courageous. Its capital defect is that it requires personal attendance at the point of propulsion. [FT]

PROSPECTOR,* n. A man who sows a crop which others reap. [FT]

PROVINCIAL,* adj. Peculiar. [FT]

PURGATORY,* n. An uncomfortable sort of calaboose, where souls are locked up until some of their relatives bail them out. [FT]

QUEER,* adj. The reason young men prefer other fellows' sisters to their own. [FT]

QUILL, n. An implement of torture yielded by a goose and commonly wielded by an ass. This use of the quill is now obsolete, but its modern equivalent, the steel pen, is wielded by the same everlasting Presence. [FT]

QUIVER,* n. A portable sheath in which the ancient statesman and the aboriginal lawyer carried their lighter arguments.

    He extracted from his quiver,
        Did the controversial Roman,
    An argument well fitted
    To the question as submitted,
    Then addressed it to the liver,
        Of the unpersuaded foeman.
                                      Oglum P. Boomp

RADIUM, n. A mineral that gives off heat and stimulates the organ that a scientist is a fool with. [FT]

RAILROAD,* n. The "Power behind the throne."

RAILROAD, n. The chief of many mechanical devices enabling us to get away from where we are to wher we are no better off. For this purpose the railroad is held in highest favor by the optimist, for it permits him to make the transit with great expedition. [FT]

RANCH,* n. An undressed farm. [FT]

RATTLESNAKE, n. Our prostrate brother, Homo ventrambulans. [FT]

RAZOR, n. An instrument used by the Caucasian to enhance his beauty, by the Mongolian to make a guy of himself, and by the Afro-American to affirm his worth. [FT]

REAR, n. In American military matters, that exposed part of the army that is nearest to Congress. [FT]

RECREATION,* n. Stoning Chinamen.

RECREATION, n. A particular kind of dejection to relieve a general fatigue. [FT]

RECRUIT, n. A person distinguishable from a civilian by his uniform and from a soldier by his gait.

    Fresh from the farm or factory or street,
    His marching, in pursuit or in retreat,
        Were an impressive martial spectacle
    Except for two impediments - his feet.
                                        Thompson Johnson

REDRESS, n. Reparation without satisfaction.
Among the Anglo-Saxon a subject conceiving himself wronged by the king was permitted, on proving his injury, to beat a brazen image of the royal offender with a switch that was afterward applied to his own naked back. The latter rite was performed by the public hangman, and it assured moderation in the plaintiff's choice of a switch. [FT]

RED-SKIN, n. A North American Indian, whose skin is not red - at least not on the outside. [FT]

REDUNDANT, n. Superfluous; needless; de trop.

    The Sultan said:  "There's evidence abundant
    To prove this unbelieving dog redundant."
    To whom the Grand Vizier, with mien impressive,
    Replied:  "His head, at least, appears excessive."
                                        Habeeb Suleiman

    Mr. Debs is a redundant citizen.
 	                             Theodore Roosevelt

REFORM, n. A thing that mostly satisfies reformers opposed to reformation. [FT]

RELIGION,* n. A goodly tree, in which all the foul birds of the air have made their nests.

RELIGION, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.

    "What is your religion my son?" inquired the Archbishop of Rheims.
    "Pardon, monseigneur," replied Rochebriant; "I am ashamed of it."
    "Then why do you not become an atheist?"
    "Impossible!  I should be ashamed of atheism."
    "In that case, monsieur, you should join the Protestants."

REMOVABLE,* n. An official who hasn't influence at headquarters. [FT]

REPARTEE, n. Prudent insult in retort. Practiced by gentlemen with a constitutional aversion to violence, but a strong disposition to offend. In a war of words, the tactics of the North American Indian. [FT]

REPTILE,* n. A thing who lives on a woman's shame. [FT]

REQUIEM, n. A mass for the dead which the minor poets assure us the winds sing o'er the graves of their favorites. Sometimes, by way of providing a varied entertainment, they sing a dirge. [FT]

RESERVATION,* n. A place where wicked Indians are taught the Christian virtues. [FT]

RESPIRATOR, n. An apparatus fitted over the nose and mouth of an inhabitant of London, whereby to filter the visible universe in its passage to the lungs. [FT]

REVOLVER,* n. An argument used by temporay maniacs. [FT]

RICHES,* n.

   A gift from Heaven signifying, "This is my beloved son, in 
 whom I am well pleased." John D. Rockefeller
   The reward of toil and virtue. J.P.Morgan
   The savings of many in the hands of one. Eugene Debs

R.I.P., n. A careless abbreviation of requiescat in pace, attesting to indolent goodwill to the dead. According to the learned Dr. Drigge, however, the letters originally meant nothing more than reductus in pulvis. [FT]

ROBBER,* n. Vulgar name for one who is successful in obtaining the property of others.

ROBBER, A candid man of affairs.

    It is related of Voltaire that one night he and some traveling  
    companion lodged at a wayside inn.  The surroundings were 
    suggestive, and after supper they agreed to tell robber stories 
    in turn. "Once there was a Farmer-General of the Revenues."  
    Saying nothing more, he was encouraged to continue.  "That," he 
    said, "is the story."

ROMANCE,* n. An article for which there is no demand as it is not quoted in the market.

ROMANCE, n. Fiction that owes no allegiance to the God of Things as They Are. In the novel the writer's thought is tethered to probability, as a domestic horse to the hitching-post, but in romance it ranges at will over the entire region of the imagination - free, lawless, immune to bit and rein. Your novelist is a poor creature, as Carlyle might say - a mere reporter. He may invent his characters and plot, but he must not imagine anything taking place that might not occur, albeit his entire narrative is candidly a lie. Why he imposes this hard condition on himself, and "drags at each remove a lengthening chain" of his own forging he can explain in ten thick volumes without illuminating by so much as a candle's ray the black profound of his own ignorance of the matter. There are great novels, for great writers have "laid waste their powers" to write them, but it remains true that far and away the most fascinating fiction that we have is "The Thousand and One Nights." [FT]

ROPE, n. An obsolescent appliance for reminding assassins that they too are mortal. It is put about the neck and remains in place one's whole life long. It has been largely superseded by a more complex electrical device worn upon another part of the person; and this is rapidly giving place to an apparatus known as the preachment. [FT]

ROUNDHEAD, n. A member of the Parliamentarian party in the English civil war -- so called from his habit of wearing his hair short, whereas his enemy, the Cavalier, wore his long. There were other points of difference between them, but the fashion in hair was the fundamental cause of quarrel. The Cavaliers were royalists because the king, an indolent fellow, found it more convenient to let his hair grow than to wash his neck. This the Roundheads, who were mostly barbers and soap-boilers, deemed an injury to trade, and the royal neck was therefore the object of their particular indignation. Descendants of the belligerents now wear their hair all alike, but the fires of animosity enkindled in that ancient strife smoulder to this day beneath the snows of British civility. [FT]

RURAL,* adj. Mud, hogs, and badly cooked food. [FT]

SACHEM,* n. A big Indian of the Tammany tribe who makes Presidents. (See John Kelly.) [FT]

SALAMANDER, n. Originally a reptile inhabiting fire; later, an anthropomorphous immortal, but still a pyrophile. Salamanders are now believed to be extinct, the last one of which we have an account having been seen in Carcassonne by the Abbe Belloc, who exorcised it with a bucket of holy water [FT]

SANDLOTTER, n. A vertebrate mammal holding the political views of Denis Kearney, a notorious demagogue of San Francisco, whose audiences gathered in the open spaces (sandlots) of the town. True to the traditions of his species, this leader of the proletariat was finally bought off by his law-and-order enemies, living prosperously silent and dying impenitently rich. But before his treason he imposed upon California a constitution that was a confection of sin in a diction of solecisms. The similarity between the words "sandlotter" and "sansculotte" is problematically significant, but indubitably suggestive. [FT]

SATIRE, n. An obsolete kind of literary composition in which the vices and follies of the author's enemies were expounded with imperfect tenderness. In this country satire never had more than a sickly and uncertain existence, for the soul of it is wit, wherein we are dolefully deficient, the humor that we mistake for it, like all humor, being tolerant and sympathetic. Moreover, although Americans are "endowed by their Creator" with abundant vice and folly, it is not generally known that these are reprehensible qualities, wherefore the satirist is popularly regarded as a soul-spirited knave, and his ever victim's outcry for codefendants evokes a national assent.

    Hail Satire! be thy praises ever sung
    In the dead language of a mummy's tongue,
    For thou thyself art dead, and damned as well -
    Thy spirit (usefully employed) in Hell.
    Had it been such as consecrates the Bible
    Thou hadst not perished by the law of libel.
                                               Barney Stims

SCIMITAR, n. A curved sword of exceeding keenness, in the conduct of which certain Orientals attain a surprising proficiency, as the incident here related will serve to show. The account is translated from the Japanese by Shusi Itama, a famous writer of the thirteenth century.

    When the great Gichi-Kuktai was Mikado he condemned to  
    decapitation Jijiji Ri, a high officer of the Court.  Soon after  
    the hour appointed for performance of the rite what was his  
    Majesty's surprise to see calmly approaching the throne the man  
    who should have been at that time ten minutes dead!
    "Seventeen hundred impossible dragons!" shouted the enraged  
    monarch.  "Did I not sentence you to stand in the market-place and  
    have your head struck off by the public executioner at three  
    o'clock?  And is it not now 3:10?"
    "Son of a thousand illustrious deities," answered the  
    condemned minister, "all that you say is so true that the truth is  
    a lie in comparison.  But your heavenly Majesty's sunny and  
    vitalizing wishes have been pestilently disregarded.  With joy I  
    ran and placed my unworthy body in the market-place.  The  
    executioner appeared with his bare scimetar, ostentatiously  
    whirled it in air, and then, tapping me lightly upon the neck,  
    strode away, pelted by the populace, with whom I was ever a  
    favorite.  I am come to pray for justice upon his own dishonorable  
    and treasonous head."
    "To what regiment of executioners does the black-boweled
    caitiff belong?" asked the Mikado.
    "To the gallant Ninety-eight Hundred and Thirty-seventh - I  
    know the man.  His name is Sakko-Samshi."
    "Let him be brought before me," said the Mikado to an  
    attendant, and a half-hour later the culprit stood in the  
    Presence.
    "Thou bastard son of a three-legged hunchback without thumbs!"  
    roared the sovereign - "why didst thou but lightly tap the neck  
    that it should have been thy pleasure to sever?"
    "Lord of Cranes of Cherry Blooms," replied the executioner,  
    unmoved, "command him to blow his nose with his fingers."
    Being commanded, Jijiji Ri laid hold of his nose and trumpeted  
    like an elephant, all expecting to see the severed head flung  
    violently from him.  Nothing occurred:  the performance prospered  
    peacefully to the close, without incident.
    All eyes were now turned on the executioner, who had grown as  
    white as the snows on the summit of Fujiama.  His legs trembled  
    and his breath came in gasps of terror.
    "Several kinds of spike-tailed brass lions!" he cried; "I am a  
    ruined and disgraced swordsman!  I struck the villain feebly  
    because in flourishing the scimetar I had accidentally passed it  
    through my own neck!  Father of the Moon, I resign my office."
    So saying, he gasped his top-knot, lifted off his head, and  
    advancing to the throne laid it humbly at the Mikado's feet.

SEAL, n. A mark impressed upon certain kinds of documents to attest their authenticity and authority. Sometimes it is stamped upon wax, and attached to the paper, sometimes into the paper itself. Sealing, in this sense, is a survival of an ancient custom of inscribing important papers with cabalistic words or signs to give them a magical efficacy independent of the authority that they represent. In the British museum are preserved many ancient papers, mostly of a sacerdotal character, validated by necromantic pentagrams and other devices, frequently initial letters of words to conjure with; and in many instances these are attached in the same way that seals are appended now. As nearly every reasonless and apparently meaningless custom, rite or observance of modern times had origin in some remote utility, it is pleasing to note an example of ancient nonsense evolving in the process of ages into something really useful. Our word "sincere" is derived from sine cero, without wax, but the learned are not in agreement as to whether this refers to the absence of the cabalistic signs, or to that of the wax with which letters were formerly closed from public scrutiny. Either view of the matter will serve one in immediate need of an hypothesis. The initials L.S., commonly appended to signatures of legal documents, mean locum sigillis, the place of the seal, although the seal is no longer used - an admirable example of conservatism distinguishing Man from the beasts that perish. The words locum sigillis are humbly suggested as a suitable motto for the Pribyloff Islands whenever they shall take their place as a sovereign State of the American Union. [FT]

SENTIMENT,* n. A sickly half-brother of Thought [FT]

SEVERALTY, n. Separateness, as, lands in severalty, i.e., lands held individually, not in joint ownership. Certain tribes of Indians are believed now to be sufficiently civilized to have in severalty the lands that they have hitherto held as tribal organizations, and could not sell to the Whites for waxen beads and potato whiskey.

    Lo! the poor Indian whose unsuited mind
    Saw death before, hell and the grave behind;
    Whom thrifty settler ne'er besought to stay --
    His small belongings their appointed prey;
    Whom Dispossession, with alluring wile,
    Persuaded elsewhere every little while!
    His fire unquenched and his undying worm
    By "land in severalty" (charming term!)
    Are cooled and killed, respectively, at last,
    And he to his new holding anchored fast!

SHADY,* adj. The transactions of the R. R. Commissioners.

	A-Shady business, sir. Brown

SHAFT,* n. A cylindrical emptiness, which swallows much and vomits little. (See VIRGINIA CITY.) [FT]

SHERIFF, n. In America the chief executive office of a country, whose most characteristic duties, in some of the Western and Southern States, are the catching and hanging of rogues.

    John Elmer Pettibone Cajee
    (I write of him with little glee)
    Was just as bad as he could be.

    'Twas frequently remarked:  "I swon!
    The sun has never looked upon
    So bad a man as Neighbor John."

    A sinner through and through, he had
    This added fault:  it made him mad
    To know another man was bad.

    In such a case he thought it right
    To rise at any hour of night
    And quench that wicked person's light.

    Despite the town's entreaties, he
    Would hale him to the nearest tree
    And leave him swinging wide and free.

    Or sometimes, if the humor came,
    A luckless wight's reluctant frame
    Was given to the cheerful flame.

    While it was turning nice and brown,
    All unconcerned John met the frown
    Of that austere and righteous town.

    "How sad," his neighbors said, "that he
    So scornful of the law should be -
    An anar c, h, i, s, t."

    (That is the way that they preferred
    To utter the abhorrent word,
    So strong the aversion that it stirred.)

    "Resolved," they said, continuing,
    "That Badman John must cease this thing
    Of having his unlawful fling.

    "Now, by these sacred relics" - here
    Each man had out a souvenir
    Got at a lynching yesteryear -

    "By these we swear he shall forsake
    His ways, nor cause our hearts to ache
    By sins of rope and torch and stake.

    "We'll tie his red right hand until
    He'll have small freedom to fulfil
    The mandates of his lawless will."

    So, in convention then and there,
    They named him Sheriff.  The affair
    Was opened, it is said, with prayer.
                                    J. Milton Sloluck

SMITHEREEN, n. A fragment, a decomponent part, a remain. The word is used variously, but in the following verse on a noted female reformer who opposed bicycle-riding by women because it "led them to the devil" it is seen at its best:

    The wheels go round without a sound -
        The maidens hold high revel;
    In sinful mood, insanely gay,
    True spinsters spin adown the way
        From duty to the devil!
    They laugh, they sing, and - ting-a-ling!
        Their bells go all the morning;
    Their lanterns bright bestar the night
        Pedestrians a-warning.
    With lifted hands Miss Charlotte stands,
        Good-Lording and O-mying,
    Her rheumatism forgotten quite,
        Her fat with anger frying.
    She blocks the path that leads to wrath,
        Jack Satan's power defying.
    The wheels go round without a sound
        The lights burn red and blue and green.
    What's this that's found upon the ground?
        Poor Charlotte Smith's a smithareen!
                                          John William Yope

SOUL, n. A spiritual entity concerning which there hath been brave disputation. Plato held that those souls which in a previous state of existence (antedating Athens) had obtained the clearest glimpses of eternal truth entered into the bodies of persons who became philosophers. Plato himself was a philosopher. The souls that had least contemplated divine truth animated the bodies of usurpers and despots. Dionysius I, who had threatened to decapitate the broad- browed philosopher, was a usurper and a despot. Plato, doubtless, was not the first to construct a system of philosophy that could be quoted against his enemies; certainly he was not the last.
"Concerning the nature of the soul," saith the renowned author of Diversiones Sanctorum, "there hath been hardly more argument than that of its place in the body. Mine own belief is that the soul hath her seat in the abdomen - in which faith we may discern and interpret a truth hitherto unintelligible, namely that the glutton is of all men most devout. He is said in the Scripture to 'make a god of his belly' - why, then, should he not be pious, having ever his Deity with him to freshen his faith? Who so well as he can know the might and majesty that he shrines? Truly and soberly, the soul and the stomach are one Divine Entity; and such was the belief of Promasius, who nevertheless erred in denying it immortality. He had observed that its visible and material substance failed and decayed with the rest of the body after death, but of its immaterial essence he knew nothing. This is what we call the Appetite, and it survives the wreck and reek of mortality, to be rewarded or punished in another world, according to what it hath demanded in the flesh. The Appetite whose coarse clamoring was for the unwholesome viands of the general market and the public refectory shall be cast into eternal famine, whilst that which firmly through civilly insisted on ortolans, caviare, terrapin, anchovies, pâum;tés de foie gras and all such Christian comestibles shall flesh its spiritual tooth in the souls of them forever and ever, and wreak its divine thirst upon the immortal parts of the rarest and richest wines ever quaffed here below. Such is my religious faith, though I grieve to confess that neither His Holiness the Pope nor His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury (whom I equally and profoundly revere) will assent to its dissemination." [FT]

STORY, n. A narrative, commonly untrue. The truth of the stories here following has, however, not been successfully impeached.

    One evening Mr. Rudolph Block, of New York, found himself seated  
at dinner alongside Mr. Percival Pollard, the distinguished critic.
    "Mr. Pollard," said he, "my book, The Biography of a Dead Cow,  
is published anonymously, but you can hardly be ignorant of its  
authorship.  Yet in reviewing it you speak of it as the work of the  
Idiot of the Century.  Do you think that fair criticism?"
    "I am very sorry, sir," replied the critic, amiably, "but it did  
not occur to me that you really might not wish the public to know who  
wrote it."

    Mr. W.C. Morrow, who used to live in San Jose, California, was  
addicted to writing ghost stories which made the reader feel as if a  
stream of lizards, fresh from the ice, were streaking it up his back  
and hiding in his hair.  San Jose was at that time believed to be  
haunted by the visible spirit of a noted bandit named Vasquez, who had  
been hanged there.  The town was not very well lighted, and it is  
putting it mildly to say that San Jose was reluctant to be out o'  
nights.  One particularly dark night two gentlemen were abroad in the  
loneliest spot within the city limits, talking loudly to keep up their  
courage, when they came upon Mr. J.J. Owen, a well-known journalist.
    "Why, Owen," said one, "what brings you here on such a night as  
this?  You told me that this is one of Vasquez' favorite haunts!  And  
you are a believer.  Aren't you afraid to be out?"
    "My dear fellow," the journalist replied with a drear autumnal  
cadence in his speech, like the moan of a leaf-laden wind, "I am  
afraid to be in.  I have one of Will Morrow's stories in my pocket and  
I don't dare to go where there is light enough to read it."

    Rear-Admiral Schley and Representative Charles F. Joy were  
standing near the Peace Monument, in Washington, discussing the  
question, Is success a failure?  Mr. Joy suddenly broke off in the  
middle of an eloquent sentence, exclaiming:  "Hello!  I've heard that  
band before.  Santlemann's, I think."
  "I don't hear any band," said Schley.
    "Come to think, I don't either," said Joy; "but I see General  
Miles coming down the avenue, and that pageant always affects me in  
the same way as a brass band.  One has to scrutinize one's impressions  
pretty closely, or one will mistake their origin."
    While the Admiral was digesting this hasty meal of philosophy  
General Miles passed in review, a spectacle of impressive dignity.   
When the tail of the seeming procession had passed and the two  
observers had recovered from the transient blindness caused by its  
effulgence -
    "He seems to be enjoying himself," said the Admiral.
    "There is nothing," assented Joy, thoughtfully, "that he enjoys  
one-half so well."

    The illustrious statesman, Champ Clark, once lived about a mile  
from the village of Jebigue, in Missouri.  One day he rode into town  
on a favorite mule, and, hitching the beast on the sunny side of a  
street, in front of a saloon, he went inside in his character of  
teetotaler, to apprise the barkeeper that wine is a mocker.  It was a  
dreadfully hot day.  Pretty soon a neighbor came in and seeing Clark,  
said:
    "Champ, it is not right to leave that mule out there in the sun.   
He'll roast, sure! - he was smoking as I passed him."
    "O, he's all right," said Clark, lightly; "he's an inveterate  
smoker."
    The neighbor took a lemonade, but shook his head and repeated that  
it was not right.
    He was a conspirator.  There had been a fire the night before:  a  
stable just around the corner had burned and a number of horses had  
put on their immortality, among them a young colt, which was roasted  
to a rich nut-brown.  Some of the boys had turned Mr. Clark's mule  
loose and substituted the mortal part of the colt.  Presently another  
man entered the saloon.
    "For mercy's sake!" he said, taking it with sugar, "do remove that  
mule, barkeeper:  it smells."
    "Yes," interposed Clark, "that animal has the best nose in  
Missouri.  But if he doesn't mind, you shouldn't."
    In the course of human events Mr. Clark went out, and there,  
apparently, lay the incinerated and shrunken remains of his charger.  
The boys idd not have any fun out of Mr. Clarke, who looked at the  
body and, with the non-committal expression to which he owes so much  
of his political preferment, went away.  But walking home late that  
night he saw his mule standing silent and solemn by the wayside in the  
misty moonlight.  Mentioning the name of Helen Blazes with uncommon  
emphasis, Mr. Clark took the back track as hard as ever he could hook  
it, and passed the night in town.

    General H.H. Wotherspoon, president of the Army War College, has a  
pet rib-nosed baboon, an animal of uncommon intelligence but  
imperfectly beautiful.  Returning to his apartment one evening, the  
General was surprised and pained to find Adam (for so the creature is  
named, the general being a Darwinian) sitting up for him and wearing  
his master's best uniform coat, epaulettes and all.
    "You confounded remote ancestor!" thundered the great strategist,  
"what do you mean by being out of bed after naps? - and with my coat  
on!"
    Adam rose and with a reproachful look got down on all fours in the  
manner of his kind and, scuffling across the room to a table, returned  
with a visiting-card:  General Barry had called and, judging by an  
empty champagne bottle and several cigar-stumps, had been hospitably  
entertained while waiting.  The general apologized to his faithful  
progenitor and retired.  The next day he met General Barry, who said:
    "Spoon, old man, when leaving you last evening I forgot to ask you  
about those excellent cigars.  Where did you get them?"
    General Wotherspoon did not deign to reply, but walked away.
    "Pardon me, please," said Barry, moving after him; "I was joking  
of course.  Why, I knew it was not you before I had been in the room  
fifteen minutes."

SYCHOPHANT, n. One who approaches Greatness on his belly so that he may not be commanded to turn and be kicked. He is sometimes an editor.

    As the lean leech, its victim found, is pleased
    To fix itself upon a part diseased
    Till, its black hide distended with bad blood,
    It drops to die of surfeit in the mud,
    So the base sycophant with joy descries
    His neighbor's weak spot and his mouth applies,
    Gorges and prospers like the leech, although,
    Unlike that reptile, he will not let go.
    Gelasma, if it paid you to devote
    Your talent to the service of a goat,
    Showing by forceful logic that its beard
    Is more than Aaron's fit to be revered;
    If to the task of honoring its smell
    Profit had prompted you, and love as well,
    The world would benefit at last by you
    And wealthy malefactors weep anew -
    Your favor for a moment's space denied
    And to the nobler object turned aside.
    Is't not enough that thrifty millionaires
    Who loot in freight and spoliate in fares,
    Or, cursed with consciences that bid them fly
    To safer villainies of darker dye,
    Forswearing robbery and fain, instead,
    To steal (they call it "cornering") our bread
    May see you groveling their boots to lick
    And begging for the favor of a kick?
    Still must you follow to the bitter end
    Your sycophantic disposition's trend,
    And in your eagerness to please the rich
    Hunt hungry sinners to their final ditch?
    In Morgan's praise you smite the sounding wire,
    And sing hosannas to great Havemeyher!
    What's Satan done that him you should eschew?
    He too is reeking rich - deducting you.

SYLPH, n. An immaterial but visible being that inhabited the air when the air was an element and before it was fatally polluted with factory smoke, sewer gas and similar products of civilization. Sylphs were allied to gnomes, nymphs and salamanders, which dwelt, respectively, in earth, water and fire, all now insalubrious. Sylphs, like fowls of the air, were male and female, to no purpose, apparently, for if they had progeny they must have nested in accessible places, none of the chicks having ever been seen. [FT]

TAIL, n. The part of an animal's spine that has transcended its natural limitations to set up an independent existence in a world of its own. Excepting in its foetal state, Man is without a tail, a privation of which he attests an hereditary and uneasy consciousness by the coat-skirt of the male and the train of the female, and by a marked tendency to ornament that part of his attire where the tail should be, and indubitably once was. This tendency is most observable in the female of the species, in whom the ancestral sense is strong and persistent. The tailed men described by Lord Monboddo are now generally regarded as a product of an imagination unusually susceptible to influences generated in the golden age of our pithecan past. [FT]

TELEPHONE, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance. [FT]

TELESCOPE, n. A device having a relation to the eye similar to that of the telephone to the ear, enabling distant objects to plague us with a multitude of needless details. Luckily it is unprovided with a bell summoning us to the sacrifice. [FT]

TOMB, n. The House of Indifference. Tombs are now by common consent invested with a certain sanctity, but when they have been long tenanted it is considered no sin to break them open and rifle them, the famous Egyptologist, Dr. Huggyns, explaining that a tomb may be innocently "glened" as soon as its occupant is done "smellynge," the soul being then all exhaled. This reasonable view is now generally accepted by archaeologists, whereby the noble science of Curiosity has been greatly dignified. [FT]

TORTOISE, n. A creature thoughtfully created to supply occasion for the following lines by the illustrious Ambat Delaso:

                          TO MY PET TORTOISE

    My friend, you are not graceful - not at all;
    Your gait's between a stagger and a sprawl.


    Nor are you beautiful:  your head's a snake's
    To look at, and I do not doubt it aches.

    As to your feet, they'd make an angel weep.
    'Tis true you take them in whene'er you sleep.

    No, you're not pretty, but you have, I own,
    A certain firmness - mostly you're backbone.

    Firmness and strength (you have a giant's thews)
    Are virtues that the great know how to use -

    I wish that they did not; yet, on the whole,
    You lack - excuse my mentioning it - Soul.

    So, to be candid, unreserved and true,
    I'd rather you were I than I were you.

    Perhaps, however, in a time to be,
    When Man's extinct, a better world may see

    Your progeny in power and control,
    Due to the genesis and growth of Soul.

    So I salute you as a reptile grand
    Predestined to regenerate the land.

    Father of Possibilities, O deign
    To accept the homage of a dying reign!

    In the far region of the unforeknown
    I dream a tortoise upon every throne.

    I see an Emperor his head withdraw
    Into his carapace for fear of Law;

    A King who carries something else than fat,
    Howe'er acceptably he carries that;

    A President not strenuously bent
    On punishment of audible dissent -

    Who never shot (it were a vain attack)
    An armed or unarmed tortoise in the back;

    Subject and citizens that feel no need
    To make the March of Mind a wild stampede;

    All progress slow, contemplative, sedate,
    And "Take your time" the word, in Church and State.

    O Tortoise, 'tis a happy, happy dream,
    My glorious testudinous regime!

    I wish in Eden you'd brought this about
    By slouching in and chasing Adam out.

TREE, n. A tall vegetable intended by nature to serve as a penal apparatus, though through a miscarriage of justice most trees bear only a negligible fruit, or none at all. When naturally fruited, the tree is a beneficent agency of civilization and an important factor in public morals. In the stern West and the sensitive South its fruit (white and black respectively) though not eaten, is agreeable to the public taste and, though not exported, profitable to the general welfare. That the legitimate relation of the tree to justice was no discovery of Judge Lynch (who, indeed, conceded it no primacy over the lamp-post and the bridge-girder) is made plain by the following passage from Morryster, who antedated him by two centuries:

        While in yt londe I was carried to see ye Ghogo tree, whereof  
    I had hearde moch talk; but sayynge yt I saw naught remarkabyll in  
    it, ye hed manne of ye villayge where it grewe made answer as  
    followeth:
        "Ye tree is not nowe in fruite, but in his seasonne you shall  
    see dependynge fr. his braunches all soch as have affroynted ye  
    King his Majesty."
        And I was furder tolde yt ye worde "Ghogo" sygnifyeth in yr  
    tong ye same as "rapscal" in our owne.
                                              Trauvells in ye Easte

TRIAL, n. A formal inquiry designed to prove and put upon record the blameless characters of judges, advocates and jurors. In order to effect this purpose it is necessary to supply a contrast in the person of one who is called the defendant, the prisoner, or the accused. If the contrast is made sufficiently clear this person is made to undergo such an affliction as will give the virtuous gentlemen a comfortable sense of their immunity, added to that of their worth. In our day the accused is usually a human being, or a socialist, but in mediaeval times, animals, fishes, reptiles and insects were brought to trial. A beast that had taken human life, or practiced sorcery, was duly arrested, tried and, if condemned, put to death by the public executioner. Insects ravaging grain fields, orchards or vineyards were cited to appeal by counsel before a civil tribunal, and after testimony, argument and condemnation, if they continued in contumaciam the matter was taken to a high ecclesiastical court, where they were solemnly excommunicated and anathematized. In a street of Toledo, some pigs that had wickedly run between the viceroy's legs, upsetting him, were arrested on a warrant, tried and punished. In Naples and ass was condemned to be burned at the stake, but the sentence appears not to have been executed. D'Addosio relates from the court records many trials of pigs, bulls, horses, cocks, dogs, goats, etc., greatly, it is believed, to the betterment of their conduct and morals. In 1451 a suit was brought against the leeches infesting some ponds about Berne, and the Bishop of Lausanne, instructed by the faculty of Heidelberg University, directed that some of "the aquatic worms" be brought before the local magistracy. This was done and the leeches, both present and absent, were ordered to leave the places that they had infested within three days on pain of incurring "the malediction of God." In the voluminous records of this cause célèbre nothing is found to show whether the offenders braved the punishment, or departed forthwith out of that inhospitable jurisdiction. [FT]

TROGLODYTE, n. Specifically, a cave-dweller of the paleolithic period, after the Tree and before the Flat. A famous community of troglodytes dwelt with David in the Cave of Adullam. The colony consisted of "every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented" -- in brief, all the Socialists of Judah. [FT]

TRUCE, n. Friendship. [FT]

TZETZE (or TSETSE) FLY, n. An African insect (Glossina morsitans) whose bite is commonly regarded as nature's most efficacious remedy for insomnia, though some patients prefer that of the American novelist (Mendax interminabilis). [FT]

URBANITY, n. The kind of civility that urban observers ascribe to dwellers in all cities but New York. Its commonest expression is heard in the words, "I beg your pardon," and it is not consistent with disregard of the rights of others.

    The owner of a powder mill
    Was musing on a distant hill -
        Something his mind foreboded -
    When from the cloudless sky there fell
    A deviled human kidney! Well,
        The man's mill had exploded.
    His hat he lifted from his head;
    "I beg your pardon, sir," he said;
        "I didn't know 'twas loaded."
                                     Swatkin

VALOR, n. A soldierly compound of vanity, duty and the gambler's hope.

    "Why have you halted?" roared the commander of a division and  
	Chickamauga, who had ordered a charge; "move forward, sir, at once."
    "General," said the commander of the delinquent brigade, "I am  
    persuaded that any further display of valor by my troops will bring  
    them into collision with the enemy."

VANITY, n. The tribute of a fool to the worth of the nearest ass.

    They say that hens do cackle loudest when
        There's nothing vital in the eggs they've laid;
        And there are hens, professing to have made
    A study of mankind, who say that men
    Whose business 'tis to drive the tongue or pen
        Make the most clamorous fanfaronade
        O'er their most worthless work; and I'm afraid
    They're not entirely different from the hen.
    Lo! the drum-major in his coat of gold,
        His blazing breeches and high-towering cap -
    Imperiously pompous, grandly bold,
        Grim, resolute, an awe-inspiring chap!
    Who'd think this gorgeous creature's only virtue
    Is that in battle he will never hurt you?
                                              Hannibal Hunsiker

WAR, n. A by-product of the arts of peace. The most menacing political condition is a period of international amity. The student of history who has not been taught to expect the unexpected may justly boast himself inaccessible to the light. "In time of peace prepare for war" has a deeper meaning than is commonly discerned; it means, not merely that all things earthly have an end - that change is the one immutable and eternal law - but that the soil of peace is thickly sown with the seeds of war and singularly suited to their germination and growth. It was when Kubla Khan had decreed his "stately pleasure dome" - when, that is to say, there were peace and fat feasting in Xanadu - that he

                        heard from afar
       Ancestral voices prophesying war.

WASHINGTONIAN, n. A Potomac tribesman who exchanged the privilege of governing himself for the advantage of good government. In justice to him it should be said that he did not want to.

    They took away his vote and gave instead
    The right, when he had earned, to eat his bread.
    In vain - he clamors for his "boss," pour soul,
    To come again and part him from his roll.
                                                Offenbach Stutz

WEATHER, n. The climate of the hour. A permanent topic of conversation among persons whom it does not interest, but who have inherited the tendency to chatter about it from naked arboreal ancestors whom it keenly concerned. The setting up official weather bureaus and their maintenance in mendacity prove that even governments are accessible to suasion by the rude forefathers of the jungle.

    Once I dipt into the future far as human eye could see,
    And I saw the Chief Forecaster, dead as any one can be -
    Dead and damned and shut in Hades as a liar from his birth,
    With a record of unreason seldom paralleled on earth.
    While I looked he reared him solemnly, that incadescent youth,
    From the coals that he'd preferred to the advantages of truth.
    He cast his eyes about him and above him; then he wrote
    On a slab of thin asbestos what I venture here to quote -
    For I read it in the rose-light of the everlasting glow:
    "Cloudy; variable winds, with local showers; cooler; snow."
                                                      Halcyon Jones

WEREWOLF, n. A wolf that was once, or is sometimes, a man. All werewolves are of evil disposition, having assumed a bestial form to gratify a beastial appetite, but some, transformed by sorcery, are as humane and is consistent with an acquired taste for human flesh.
Some Bavarian peasants having caught a wolf one evening, tied it to a post by the tail and went to bed. The next morning nothing was there! Greatly perplexed, they consulted the local priest, who told them that their captive was undoubtedly a werewolf and had resumed its human for during the night. "The next time that you take a wolf," the good man said, "see that you chain it by the leg, and in the morning you will find a Lutheran." [FT]

WHANGDEPOOTENAWAH, n. In the Ojibwa tongue, disaster; an unexpected affliction that strikes hard.

    Should you ask me whence this laughter,
    Whence this audible big-smiling,
    With its labial extension,
    With its maxillar distortion
    And its diaphragmic rhythmus
    Like the billowing of an ocean,
    Like the shaking of a carpet,
    I should answer, I should tell you:
    From the great deeps of the spirit,
    From the unplummeted abysmus
    Of the soul this laughter welleth
    As the fountain, the gug-guggle, 
    Like the river from the canon,
    To entoken and give warning
    That my present mood is sunny.
    Should you ask me further question -
    Why the great deeps of the spirit,
    Why the unplummeted abysmus
    Of the soule extrudes this laughter,
    This all audible big-smiling,
    I should answer, I should tell you
    With a white heart, tumpitumpy,
    With a true tongue, honest Injun:
    William Bryan, he has Caught It,
    Caught the Whangdepootenawah!

    Is't the sandhill crane, the shankank,
    Standing in the marsh, the kneedeep,
    Standing silent in the kneedeep
    With his wing-tips crossed behind him
    And his neck close-reefed before him,
    With his bill, his william, buried
    In the down upon his bosom,
    With his head retracted inly,
    While his shoulders overlook it?
    Does the sandhill crane, the shankank,
    Shiver grayly in the north wind,
    Wishing he had died when little,
    As the sparrow, the chipchip, does?
    No 'tis not the Shankank standing,
    Standing in the gray and dismal
    Marsh, the gray and dismal kneedeep.
    No, 'tis peerless William Bryan
    Realizing that he's Caught It,
    Caught the Whangdepootenawah!

WHITE,* adj. and n. Black. [FT]

WORMS'-MEAT, n. The finished product of which we are the raw material. The contents of the Taj Mahal, the Tombeau Napoleon and the Granitarium. Worms'-meat is usually outlasted by the structure that houses it, but "this too must pass away." Probably the silliest work in which a human being can engage is construction of a tomb for himself. The solemn purpose cannot dignify, but only accentuates by contrast the foreknown futility.

    Ambitious fool! so mad to be a show!
    How profitless the labor you bestow
        Upon a dwelling whose magnificence
    The tenant neither can admire nor know.

    Build deep, build high, build massive as you can,
    The wanton grass-roots will defeat the plan
        By shouldering asunder all the stones
    In what to you would be a moment's span.

    Time to the dead so all unreckoned flies
    That when your marble is all dust, arise,
        If wakened, stretch your limbs and yawn -
    You'll think you scarcely can have closed your eyes.

    What though of all man's works your tomb alone
    Should stand till Time himself be overthrown?
        Would it advantage you to dwell therein
    Forever as a stain upon a stone?
                                             Joel Huck

ZANZIBARI, n. An inhabitant of the Sultanate of Zanzibar, off the eastern coast of Africa. The Zanzibaris, a warlike people, are best known in this country through a threatening diplomatic incident that occurred a few years ago. The American consul at the capital occupied a dwelling that faced the sea, with a sandy beach between. Greatly to the scandal of this official's family, and against repeated remonstrances of the official himself, the people of the city persisted in using the beach for bathing. One day a woman came down to the edge of the water and was stooping to remove her attire (a pair of sandals) when the consul, incensed beyond restraint, fired a charge of bird-shot into the most conspicuous part of her person. Unfortunately for the existing entente cordiale between two great nations, she was the Sultana. [FT]

ZIGZAG, v. t. To move forward uncertainly, from side to side, as one carrying the white man's burden. (From zed, z, and jag, an Icelandic word of unknown meaning.)

    He zedjagged so uncomen wyde
    Thet non coude pas on eyder syde;
    So, to com saufly thruh, I been
    Constreynet for to doodge betwene.
                             Munwele