University of Virginia Library

AN EARLY DELICACY.

A SALLOW-FACED man, dressed in faded and insufficient garments, with a knotted, sandy beard, skipped lightly into a Danbury dry-goods store yesterday afternoon. He had hugged up close to him in one arm a glass jar with a bit of dingy muslin over it. He wanted to see the proprietor; and a clerk obligingly pointed out that gentleman to him, who was then engaged in the herculean task of selling a lady a half-yard of linen. The stranger stalked up to him.

"Be you the boss, mister?" he asked with a seductive smile.

"Yes, sir. Any thing I can do for you?"

"Yes," said the stranger, carefully depositing the jar on the counter, and with an air as if the counter had been erected with this object specially in view. "I've got a prime article of horse-radish here that I want to sell you."

"I don't want to buy any," said the merchant, with a tinge of pettishness in his tone.

"It's a prime article, I can tell ye."

"I don't want it."

"But you ain't looked at it, you ain't tried it," argued the vender.

"I tell you I don't want it."

"You can have it for fifty cents, although it's worth seventy-five. I'll dump it right out in a paper; or I'll leave the jar, and you kin bring it back to-morrow,"

"I don't want it, I say; take it away," demanded the merchant, flushing slightly in the face.

"Don't you git in a hurry, boss," persuasively urged the proprietor of the condiment. "You don't git such horse-radish as this every day, I kin inform ye. I growed the roots that came from myself, by jickey! I growed 'em back of a barn; an' I took as much care of their cultivation as if they had been my own flesh and blood. Why, I've got up in the dead of night, with a lantern, an' went out back of that barn an' tucked them up, as it were. An' I said to my ole woman, sez I, 'Ole woman, them roots will go to make glad

the heart of a merchant-prince,' sez I; an' here they be, grated up an' ready for the table. What do you say?"

"I say, as I said before, that I don't want your stuff, and I want you to take it away from here at once," said the merchant, who had now become very red in the face.

"Stuff!" ejaculated the man with a start, while his eyes watered, and his under-lip trembled. "Stuff! You call that stuff,—that which grew right behind my own barn, an' which has had a lantern above it in the dead of night,—grated up by my own hands, an' with a pint of the best cider-vinegar in the country dancing through its veins?—you call it stuff, do you? an' you stand right here, an' in the broad light of day declare that none of that horse-radish will fresco your cold meat, an' set up before your children like a thing of beauty? All right" [He gathered the jar up in his arm again.] "You can't have this horse-radish now. You needn't whimper for it. Not a word from you," he added, with as much earnestness as if the merchant had dropped on his knees, and was agonizingly begging for a hopeless favor. "You ain't got money enough in your hull store to buy a grain of it. You shouldn't git as much as a smell of it if you was to git right down on your snoot, an' howl till you were cracked open. Gosh dum me!" he suddenly shouted, "I'll go out on the

boundless prairie, an' eat every bit of it myself, if it burns a hole clean through me as big as a tunnel, an' sets the prairie afire, an' devastates the land."

And with this terrific threat he strode gloomily away in search of a prairie.

THERE is one thing on which a husband and wife never can and never will agree; and that is on what constitutes a well-beaten carpet. When the article is clean, it's a man's impression that it should be removed, and he be allowed to wash up, and quietly retire. But a woman's appetite for carpet-beating is never appeased while a man has a whole muscle in his body; and, if he waited until she voluntarily gave the signal to stop, he might beat away until he dropped down dead. It is directly owing to his superior strength of mind that the civilized world is not a widow this day.