by a simple presto,. change! New York was suddenly stricken. with a drought,, and, as a natural sequence, grew hot in the collar. The side doors of all the saloons were hermetically sealed. Spies were employed to peep at keyholes and smell about alleys for surreptitious booze. The people protested against being transformed into seraphs by due process of law, but the professional godly were pitiless. The rich spent Sunday at their clubs and got genteelly drunk and down just to show that some things could be done as well as others. The poor took gallon jugs home on Saturday night and employed their Sunday leisure by getting bilin'. Rows increased and murders multiplied. The Christian Sabbath was transformed into a Bacchic orgy, a Saturnalian revel. All of which proves to men of sense that it doesn't pay to crowd the mourners. But the garoos and the googoos fairly chortled in their joy. Teddy Roosevelt, the man with the gall, and Doc Parkhurst, the party of ye tireless jaw, patted themselves on the back and exclaimed with little Jack Horner, "What a good boy am I!" They spelled reform with a cap R and sawed industriously at the limb on which they sat. But the floods came and the rains descended and beat upon the house of the he-Meddlesome Matties, and it was not. Gotham was compelled to choose between the googoos and the Tammany toughs, and it elected to endure the less of two evils. The googoos are gone; the cat came back. New York will no longer spit cotton because it loves Christ. It will join St. Paul in the absorption of a Sunday mint julep for the stomach's sake. The reform movement proved a Waterbury. By the time it was wound up the machinery broke. And Parkhurst is talking, of course. He has transformed his whiskers into an æolian harp and is singing of what the googoos are going to do next time. The doctor doesn't yet realize that he is dead-that he has been hit by a brick house. But nobody is listening to him. The people understand that he is what S. O. Young of Galveston would call "a ass." And they are eminently correct. *** EPICTETUS AND REBECCA. NEARLY every day the "Apostle" receives letters from people who want to know if Rebecca Merlindy Johnson and Epictetus Paregoric Hill are "sure-enough people.” The idea has somehow got abroad that Rebecca is but another Dulcinea del Toboso, and that Epictetus is a second edition of the mythical Mrs. Harris-that "there ain't no such person." By carefully husbanding the stamps inclosed for reply to earnest inquirers, the "Apostle" has been enabled to acquire a frilled shirt, open front and back, and which he can get into without doing violence to his carefully cultivated Roscoe Conkling curl. Epictetus Paregoric and Rebecca Merlindy are not the creatures of a Quixotic imagination. They are really alike and have a local habitation and a name. And I may add, en passant, that they both wear pants. Epictetus Paregoric is a rolled-gold blonde who yearns to be an editor and mold public opinion, even as a pickaninny shapes mud pies. He think he is afflicted with the divine afflatus. He is quite sure he is a 44-caliber genius, with chock-bore, automatic loader and latest improved breeching. When his afflatus begins to afflate he rushes into the gilded sanctum of the Houston Post and uncorks himself. He has to or bust. An effervescing barrel of sauer-kraut is nothing to the explosive power of genius struggling for expression. Mute inglorious Miltons and village Hampdens are all humbug. A poet with a Paradise Lost inside of him would have let it escape; otherwise it would swing around like a steam hay-fork and break his heart. When the spirit moves Epictetus to turn loose a political editorial he couldn't suppress it even for a day with an equine astringent. Epictetus is no trifler in journalism, no dilettante with the stylus. He realizes that the fate of nations depend on the rhythmic rise and fall of his jawbone as he dictates political leaders and economic dissertations to his private amanuensis, the beauteous Rebecca Merlindy. He is fully cognizant of the awful responsibility resting upon him, but he does not flinch. Atlas upholding the world were not a more remarkable example of sublime patience and selfsacrifice. Since the death of Daniel Webster, Epictetus Paregoric is our recognized fount of wisdom. From his Jovinian brow new Minervas spring and go a-chortling through the world. Epictetus Paregoric tells the sun when to rise and where to set. Bismarck cannot have a birthday party nor Spain a cabinet crisis without his express permission. God could not be everywhere, so he made the editor of the Houston Post and gave him a strawberry halo. Rebecca Merlindy is a dizzy, dark-eyed brunette who used to play the accordeon and sing "Comrades at John Bell's maison du plaisir, but has reformed and got her before-and-after-taking portrait in the goldcure pamphlets. Just at present she is studying for the legitimate stage and will soon make her début as Claude Melnotte to Mrs. James Brown-Potter's Pauline. It being a male part, she wears pants constantly to accustom herself to he-toggery, and is practicing chewing plug tobacco and expectorating through her teeth. Rebecca has attached herself to the school of realism. When she plays Claude Melnotte Gov. Culberson, with his keen eyes for crinoline, will suspect her sex. Already she can sit crosslegged and cuss. She has even officiated as gubernatorial aide-de-camp and worn her fiery Bucephalus clothespin fashion. Every morning she visits a barber-shop and frequent shaving is actually developing a beard. Rebecca has resolved to sacrifice beauty to art, to elevate the stage or break a leg in the attempt. And to think that the world should persist in regarding Rebecca Merlindy as a myth— that there be people who consider the journalistic Ajax of all Harris County as a freak of the imagination! *** THE COMMON COURTESAN. A GLIMPSE OF GEHENNA. I PUBLISHED an article in the February number of the ICONOCLAST entitled "Woman's Wickedness," which gave many supersensitive people a shock from which they have not yet recovered. I have no particular objection to killing that class of cattle, for I believe the good God would be glad to get the rickety breed exterminated; but I would not ambuscade even a canting hypocrite or sheepkilling dog, so I here put up a sign warning the whole pestiferous crew of Pharisees to dive no deeper here, under pain of death, and heaven alone knows what hereafter. I am going to indulge in some plain talk, and those who wear their modesty on their sleeve will please betake themselves to a milder diet-one of Sam Jones' æsthetic sermons or the quack doctor ads. in the daily papers, for instance. In my former article I discussed how courtesans are made; here I propose to consider how they can be reclaimed. Next to learning how to do a thing is learning how not to do it. The world has had a vast and varied experience with the negative side of the question and seems to have settled it to its satisfaction that the only way to lift a woman out of hell is to bar the door of egress and shoot fireballs at her through the gratings; that the only way to persuade her to leave off her sinning is to inform her that, though she repent in sackcloth and ashes, she will never be forgiven; that the only method of elevating the fallen woman is to get after her with scorpion whips when she breaks away from the brothel and scourge her back again! This system of moral therapeutics is not without its advantages; if it seldom cures, it at least kills quicker than any other that could be devised, thus abbreviating the misery of the patient. It were as idle to expect to eliminate Prostitution as to extirpate Poverty and Greed. Just so long as Lust runs riot in the veins of Adam's sons, women will be degraded and debauched. Just so long as Want and Wretchedness stalk like grisly phantoms through the earth women will be found who will brazenly barter their souls for gold or for bread. There are women who are wantons by nature; whom no wealth, education or moral surroundings can withhold from evil. "But virtue, as it never will be mov'd, Though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven, And prey on garbage." It were idle to talk of " reforming women who never possessed the faintest conception of modesty; in whom the brutish nature dominates the divine; but these form a very inconsiderable portion of that vast array upon whose brows blazes the scarlet brand of the courtesan. A vast majority of these unfortunates feel their degradation as no male malefactor ever felt his disgrace; would, were it |