nor rent advertising space thereon for four dollars a year to patent medicine proprietors or gents' furnishers.

There will be no war with England. The Anglomaniacs can continue to turn up their "twousahs when it is raining in Lunnon " without being apprehended by excited patriots and shot as spies. Our dream of glory has gone glimmering. Instead of coaxing immortality out of the cannon's bung with a corkscrew, we will shuck our regimentals with a sigh and plunge once more into the lowly cotton-patch.

A Gainesville preacher named Hill, who is gadding about delivering alleged humorous lectures, recently declined to attend the funeral of a child that had died of scarlet fever, but poked "consolation " to the bereaved parents through the front fence. Of course he believes that there's a better land beyond the grave; but he is taking precious good care not to go to it so long as he can help it.

The ICONOCLAST always gives credit where credit is due. The Cleveland administration may have bankrupted the treasury, increased our bonded indebtedness and played the devil with business; but, praise God! it has saved the nation several dollars by sitting down on the free-seed fake, helped Venezuela out of the hole, and prevented Alkali Pete of New Mexico being contaminated by Dan Stuart's feather-pillow pugilists.

Col. R. G. Ingersoll says that liberty is his religion. That sounds well; but it is arrant nonsense just the same. Liberty is negative while religion is positive; the first is passive, the latter is active. He might as well say that permission to plant constitutes a valuable crop, that free

dom to marry is equivalent to a female boss and fifteen bairns. Col. Ingersoll is a great man, but would be greater could he trade some of his empty eloquence for fruitful ideas.

One day the Bostonese assembled in Faneuil Hall and threatened to come down here and lick Texas until she resembled a skinned maverick unless we accorded better treatment to the "colored brother," and the next Boston's leading hotel flatly refused accommodations to a colored bishop. Evidently Boston's plea for nigger equality is not intended for home consumption. The Hub should absorb more beef and fewer beans. She offends the atmosphere.

Gladstone has declined an offer of a dollar a word to "write an article on any subject" for the Metropolitan Magazine. Grand Old Man! At last the aristocracy of brains has administered a withering rebuke to the impudence of boodle. The magazines have long been “tufthunting" rather than seeking literary talent. They have bought "celebrities" in blocks-of-five, paying big prices for anything that bore their names, even though written by their valets. Gladstone was too great a man to lend himself to the pitiful trick of the magazine trade—to suffer himself to be utilized as an "ad." The Metropolitan might secure an article from Blind Tom on The Origin of the Human Intellect," or from Jack the Ripper on “The Ethics of Civilization "; but Mr. Gladstone is not for sale —not even at a dollar a word, with privilege of selecting his own subject.

66

AMELIE'S NEW MARRIAGE.

Ir is currently reported that Amelie Rives Chanler, the she-male exponent of "passion " has remarried. The news is not surprising. A woman who writes the sensuous rot in which Amelie revels could not long exist without the daily companionship of some biped in breeches. Amelie is to be pitied rather than reproached. Her writings convict her of chronic nymphomania. Instead of being damned, a woman thus afflicted should be sent to a doctor. Mr. Chanler is a hard-headed business man and courteous gentleman, who supposed that he was simply getting married, when he was really entering into a government contract. Circumstances over which he had no control seem to have compelled him to cancel it. Unlike the Roman sentinel of Herculanæum, he was unwilling to brave the resistless tide of molten lava and perish at his post. A man with a properly constructed head demands something more in a wife than mere animalism. Anacreontics are well enough for dessert, but a poor excuse for a steady diet. He wants love that is not lechery and companionship that is not all concupiscence. He demands a worship that is not all drule and social intercourse that is not nine parts. slobber. To Mr. Chanler life was real, life was earnest; to Amelie it was one long sensuous dream; and so they separated. Amelie's second mash is "Prince" Troubetzkoi, whom she seems to have met shortly before applying for a divorce from her matter-of-fact husband, who insisted upon snatching a few brief moments from "love's burnings and raptures" to attend to business. I have not the pleasure of the "Prince's " acquaintance-he doesn't move in my set; but I am pleased to learn that he is "more than six

feet tall, of powerful physique, and in the prime of life." He is evidently the very man for the amorous Amelie. The bridegroom appears to be a Russ or Polander, who is something of a dabster in art and dilettante in letters. Having been reared on train-oil and tallow candles, he should have a strong stomach, and make America's great female decadent an acceptable husband. Amelie's favorite subject is love; but she has demonstrated by her own life that she knows absolutely nothing about it. She is simply the exponent of the grossest animalism. A woman who has two husbands in a twelvemonth is a stranger to that sentiment which makes a war-horse linger at the dead soldier's side and the faithful dog starve himself upon his master's grave. The woman who will pass from the bed of one lord to that of another within the year, is privileged to sing of Passion; but when she prattles of Love she casts a shadow upon the sun.

***

A TEXAS SINGER.

A GREAT many curious things come drifting in to the ICONOCLAST through the mails. Sometimes it is a letter of a dozen closely written pages, apropos of nothing; sometimes a dollar bill or a dun, and occasionally "a little bunch of roses 99 tied with a blue ribbon. When a man is not prepared to send his subscription, he forwards his moral support. Among the recent arrivals is a musical composition by Thos. Bowers, Jr., of Houston, entitled "Nobody Wants to Play With Me." On the front elevation is a picture of a female whose name I disremember. She was probably intended for a beauty, but God's hand slipped. If she is the party filing the complaint I must commend the taste of the public. I wouldn't play with her on compulsion-not unless the moon was behind a

cloud. Mr. Bowers is a Texas journalist who has been dallying with the muses while the rest of us were wielding the Archimedean lever and preaching unadulterated Democracy. I don't know why Tom sent his music to me. Perhaps he thought I would try to play it on the accordeon and get killed; yet I always treated him right. It may be good music for aught I know. I am not much of an expert on hymnology. I used to keep time with an ax on hickory logs to the rhythmic pulsing of

"Yankee doodle keep it up,

Yankee doodle dandy."

I kept it up, but it was a sheer case of have to. And I wasn't much of a dandy, either. I once manipulated a bass drum in an amateur band that was eventually suppressed by the police; still I do not set myself up as a connoisseur in secular melody. I frankly confess that what I don't know about music would make a very large book. Mr. Bowers may be the he-Sappho of his time, the sweet singer of the century for aught I know to the contrary. The fact that the popular soubrettes are making a great hit with his songs is strong circumstantial evidence in his favor. Somebody who realizes how close a popular singer gets to the pericardiac envelope of the public, has said, "Let me write a people's songs, and I care not who makes their laws.' I wish Mr. Bowers success. May he prove a second Orpheus or Amphion, and turn the world topsy-turvy with his melodious tra-la-la-loo.

***

ROGER LAWSON'S BOMBSHELL. HON. ROGER LAWSON FULTON, for many years mayor of Galveston, and occasionally "mentioned" for the governorship, keeps close tab on the Texas politicians—“ one