Part 2

Mrs. Grey was my first school-marm, and Mr. Hill my first school-master, followed by Miss Latham, Mr. Shaw, Pettis, Osborne, Record, Hammond, Gregg and Ainsworth, all of whom I terribly tormented. Although my mother died before I was seven years old, yet I remember the trouble I gave her, and how I cried when the messenger came to the school-house, and told me of her sudden death, and how my father and aunt Lucy wept on my arrival home. My father’s third wife was my first step-mother, and although she was very kind, yet there was a melancholy vacuum in my home, and at eight years old, I sought diversion at the circus and theatre, and resolved to be a circus-rider, and ground and lofty tumbler. But a fall from my horse while standing on one leg, and serious bruises while striving to turn summersets, disgusted me with the circus, and I determined to be an actor, and carried the wardrobes of the actors to and from the theatre, for which I was admitted free. But my father heard of it, and told me not to visit the theatre again. But I went, and he gently whipped me. On the next night, brother Albert accompanied me to the theatre, and while I was wildly screaming at the Dromios, father entered the pit and seized me, amid the convulsions of the audience and actors. On arriving home, he took us down cellar, and began to rope Albert, who instantly bellowed: “O, my salt rheum! O, spare my salt rheum!” Father then grabbed me, and I cried: “O, my boils! O, spare my boils!” when he roped me in a fresh spot, and did not cease until he gave me my own chastisement and Albert’s too, and I never let Ally go with me to the theatre again, as my own licking was about as much as I could endure. But I derided father’s castigation, and the following night, I retired at nine o’clock to my bed-room, in the second story, and tied a rope to the bed-post, and, at the peril of my life, descended the house fronting the yard, and went to the theatre, and about midnight ascended the house, and hauled in the rope, and went to bed. In about a week, John Horsewell got locked out, and I invited him to ascend the rope and sleep with me, to which he readily assented. In the morning, I did not rise at my usual hour, and father came to ascertain the cause, when he heard John Horsewell snoring like thunder under my bed. He looked, and discovered John, and grabbed him by the hair, and spanked him most awfully, and while spanking poor John, I jumped from the bed, and seized my clothes, and ran down stairs, and did not stop until I got into the barn, where I dressed myself, and went to school without my breakfast. After school, I prowled around the house until father left for his place of business, and then went into the house and ate my dinner. I took an early tea and went to bed; but father soon came home, and into my bed-room and severely spanked me, and struck me several times with the very rope with which I had descended and ascended the house, muttering something about one Haman of old, while he roped me. I then exchanged a top for a fishing-line, and told my brother William, that if he would tie one end of the line to his little toe, and throw the other out of the window, so that I could pull it and arouse him from his midnight slumber, to softly unlock the door and let me in after the theatrical performance, that I would let him tie the fishing-line to my little toe on alternate nights while he went to the theatre. This plot was successful for about two weeks, when some boys on their return from night-school, came into our yard to get some water from our well. After one of the boys had enjoyed a delicious draught of water from our bucket, his keen eyes rested on the plummet at the end of the fishing-line, which he seized, and began to pull without success, when he jerked it so hard, as to snap the line, with cries of fire and murder in the second story. Himself and little comrades seized their scholastic lanterns, and scampered for their lives. One of them was caught by a faithful watchman and brought into our yard, when my father escorted them up stairs, where brother William was weltering in blood that flowed from his toe and nose, and from bruises he received while running and tumbling over chairs and tables, and other bed-room utensils, when the boy gave his last terrible jerk of the fish-line. The boy and watchman now departed, and father put salve on William’s toe, and checked the copious effusion of blood from his nose, and bathed his wounds with water and apple-jack, and put him to bed with a solitary but tremendous spank, with a promise of more when his dislocated toe was set and healed. Father then took his ambush position in the yard, and awaited my arrival from the theatre. I softly opened and closed the gate, and while feeling for the plummit, he suddenly grabbed me, and nearly scared me into the eternal world. He then led me into the barn, and illuminated the stable lantern, and took off my pants, and spanked me with the curry-comb until the blood spurted in his face, and the horse snorted and kicked him so hard that he had to arouse and send brother Albert for a surgeon to dress the fearful wound. I always blessed the humane and intelligent old horse for kicking father, and thus saving my blood and bones, and I so intensely loved the noble animal, that I stole father’s oats, and fed him until he got so fat that I dared not give him more lest his belly would explode, and the oats fall out, and my theft be discovered. After my last trouncing, I became disgusted with the theatre, and resolved to go no more to witness such nonsense. Soon afterwards, I told John Horsewell that for a dozen marbles, I would give him some of my father’s corn, that would parch as white as snow, and as round as hail,

And would pop as high As the pretty sky.

John assented, and we went up stairs to the attic, where father kept his corn. John brought his father’s rainy hat, so that he could get much corn, and while I was filling it, I heard footsteps on the lower stairs that closely resembled father’s. John’s hat was about half full, and when I put it on his head, it sunk so far as to require both his hands to keep it above his eyes. We met father on the garret stairs, when John boldly looked up into his face, (with corn pouring down over both ears,) and gravely exclaimed: “Mr. Branch, I aint got no corn.” Father uplifted the hat, and down went about two quarts of horse corn on poor John’s head. I crawled between father’s legs, and was at the bottom of two pairs of stairs in about two strides, and away I flew to the woods, about two miles distant, and did not return for two days, fearing that father would murder me for stealing corn so soon after my rope and fishing-line, and theatrical operations. When I next saw John, he complained of a sore back and legs, and declared that father grabbed and wrenched a handful of his posterior pants clean off, and tore hair enough from his skull to render it slightly bald. I trembled at this intelligence, but I got cold and hungry, and went home to take my licking, but my step-mother was ill, and she ardently plead my cause, and father forgave me.

(_To be continued._)

Stephen H. Branch’s Farewell to his Country.

[From the New York Daily Times, of 1856.]

Although I have traveled all over the globe, and have no desire to rove again, yet I am constrained to forever leave my beloved country. You may not mourn over my departure, but I leave you with painful emotions and apprehensions. I would linger, and toil, and die among you, but your fanaticism drives me to foreign skies. The noble deeds of my father and his sires are inscribed on the civil and military archives of Rhode Island, whose virtues I would imitate and consecrate to the glory of my whole country; but your reckless tendency towards disunion, with all its horrors, forces me to abjure my native land, and the hallowed tomb erected by my lamented father for the eternal repose of his immediate posterity. Go on, then, ye fanatics and devils of all sections, to your hearts’ content, in your apostacy to the living and departed patriots of your distracted and divided country. Stop not until your wives and children run wild through streets and fields of blood, and this whole land is a pile of bleeding and burning ruins. Go on ye incarnate fiends in your bloody enterprise, until the mounds of your fathers are divested of their fragrant verdure, and are trampled by foreign marauders, who wildly gloat over your impending suicide. An irresistible horde of demagogues and vampires, and fanatics and lunatics, are at the throats of the American patriots, and threaten them with strangulation and utter annihilation. Go on, then, ye demons of hell, and tear to fragments the glorious Constitution that was created by Washington, Greene, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Warren, Franklin, Adams, Lafayette and Kosciusko, and nobly defended by Jackson, Perry, Taylor, Webster, Clay, Calhoun, Harrison, Grogan, Decatur, (and the living Scott), whose sighs and tears, and expiring energies, were consecrated to its eternal duration. Go on, then, ye slimy vultures, in your ruthless desecration of their graves, until despotic soldiers line our streets and frontiers, and stab the patriots who breathe the enchanting word of liberty. Go on, I say, in your inhuman sacrilege, but I will fly to Switzerland, in whose deep mountain glades I will strive to efface that I was born and reared among the gang of consummate fools and knaves who now level their rifles at the race of noble birds that have graced the American skies for nearly a hundred years. Go on, then, ye dastard traitors, in your bloody demolition, but I will go and live and die in the land of WILLIAM TELL, whose fair posterity evince a purer fidelity to their remotest ancestors, than those pernicious monsters whose infernal madness will soon surrender the bones of WASHINGTON and JACKSON to the despots of Europe, whose shafts they foiled, until they went down, with tottering footsteps, into their immortal graves. Farewell, then, ye crazy parricides—farewell, ye BURRS and ARNOLDS—and when you have consigned your deluded countrymen to all the horrors of anarchy and eternal despotism, think of the humble admonitions of one who, rather than behold the downfall of his beautiful and glorious country, sought peace, and succor, and a mausoleum in the mountains of Switzerland, once traversed by WILLIAM TELL and his gallant archers, who created a love of liberty that has survived the flight of centuries, and which can never be subdued by foes without, nor fools within, her borders. In my voluntary exile, I will implore God to visit you with His displeasure, through the withering curses of your children, and their posterity to the remotest age, for destroying the liberties of their country, which you should bequeathe to them as they came to you from your illustrious fathers, whose sacred and silent ashes you dare not visit and contemplate at this fearful crisis, amid the pure and tranquil solitudes of the patriotic dead lest the memory of their heroic deeds and sacrifice should remind you of your hellish treason, and paralyze your hearts, and smite your worthless bodies to the dust, and consign your pallid livers to undying torture. Although these admonitions are inscribed in tones of burning scorn, yet they emanate from a bosom that glows with love for my bewildered countrymen. And my last request is, that every patriotic father will gather his little flock around him at evening shades, and read this parting admonition in a clear and feeling voice, and then kneel before the God of nations, and implore Him to preserve their liberties, with a blessing on the humble author of this production, in his unhappy seclusion in a distant land. I would write more, but gushing tears blind my vision, and swell my heart with dying emotions.

Affectionately, STEPHEN H. BRANCH.

New York, May 30, 1856.

[From the New York Times, of 1855.]

Stephen H. Branch on Worms,—The Vermicular Theory of Greatness.—Subdued Sea-Serpents—Alligators Outdone—Look out for a Rise in the price of Vermifuges.

To the Editor of the New York Daily Times:

Some men donate or construct public and private institutions for the public applause while living, while others write the sunny side of their lives from motives of fame and accumulation. I shall leave both sides of my career for the historian after I have departed for the spirit land.

Since my return from Europe, with the Brandon Register, with little Georgy Matsell recorded therein, (as having been baptised and received into the Church in 1811, which corresponds with his own oath before the Police Committee, that he was born in 1811—stick a pin here,)—I have been violently assailed by journals in the Matsell interest, published on the Five Points, who attack me for sins committed while I had a superabundance of mischievous worms in youth and early manhood, and while I was scattering wild oats rather profusely over my father’s field.

No man lives who would not gladly efface every oat he sowed during the fervors and exhilerations of boyhood and early manhood. But the deliberate perjury of full-grown manhood can only be effaced through long years of retired and tearful contrition. By unceasing supplication, the wilderness may ultimately hide from scorn the cool and premeditated perjurer; but no man exists who would not blot from the living and eternal records whole rows of wild oat hillocks; and no infant who has not premature teeth, to bite and snarl at their nurses, and to scream and raise Beelzebub all night—and no boy who does not have a profusion of worms, and a nature literally suffused with sharp vinegar and aqua-fortis, with two or three little devils in his stomach—no infant or boy without these hateful qualities ever make much stir in the world. And if, in the morning of life, we do not reflect Vesuvius in our eyes, and belch lava and brimstone from our mouths, we seldom effect much in the great scuffle of life, and go down to our graves with Miss Nancy inscribed at the head and tail of our grassy mounds.

Man, like a horse, must have mettle, and plenty of it, with an immense bottom, or he cannot expect to contend with the fiery steeds of the turf and the forum. And, above all, a man must have a crop or two of worms at 40. All men have more worms in their bellies than they are aware of, (or their physicians, either,) and some have quarts.

But they must not keep the old crop too long. Worms must come and go with the seasons, or they will produce incarcerated wind, which often produces apoplexy and paralysis. Nervous dyspepsia also arises from an old crop of worms and a pent-up atmosphere. 1 got rid of eleven worms, ten inches long, about two years since, and I have been losing my energy and courage ever since. I caught the rascals thus: While in a bath-room one day, I saw something very mysterious. I applied a lighted cigar to its head or tail, (for it was sharp at both ends,) and I observed a slight movement. I touched it at the other end, and it moved in an opposite direction. I then struck a match, which I applied to its middle, when, lo! it was a worm, and alive and kicking. It died in about two minutes by Shrewsbury clock. I began immediately to take worm seed, and the following day I discovered five worms, one of which was tied in a perfect knot. The last worm I discovered was very small, which satisfied me that it was the last of his race. I think I always had whole generations of worms up to this last little scamp, and I kept him to transmit to my posterity. For, when coming home from school one day, I pulled on a worm until I could pull no longer, and got another boy to pull him entirely out. And when I beheld the monster on the ground, I ran home for my life, and before I got home, a thunder storm arose and terrified me almost to death.

Worms, doubtless, are the source of impulse. And impulsive persons have more or less worms, and never less than a pint. And very impulsive persons have not less than a quart. Matsell is nearly as fat as Daniel Lambert, and has about two gallons of colossal worms. And these miserable worms conquer us when living and dead. They have been my masters all my days. They have produced the dark spots in my history, over which I have dropped many a tear, and over which I shall weep until I get down into my extremely narrow and tranquil and undying abode.

Worms produce the evil in the history of all men, and yet they are prolific of infinite good. When they violently dart from extremity to extremity, and come up and look over the tongue, and dart back to the sweet bowels’ depths, and squirm most horribly for their regular food, a man swells with unconquerable fear, and can face the cannon’s mouth, and the devil himself, and people call him a courageous patriot,—when worms achieved every battle that was ever won. Napoleon had a most ungodly quantity of worms, and in their constant pecking at his liver, they finally produced a cancer of which he died. Worms did not start Patrick Henry’s eloquence until he was forty years old. Jackson, too, had worms, that made his eye flash like a rifle and his voice drown the cannon. Jackson’s worms, in early life, elicited a passion for horse-racing and cock-fighting, and caused such expressions as “by the Eternal.” But as soon as the worms left him he lost his nerve, and joined the Presbyterians. The worms of Julius Cæsar, at the verge of the Rubicon, were asleep over a hearty meal, but during his protracted contemplation of its passage, they suddenly awoke, and over he went with gigantic strides, and established Brandon, in the eastern counties of England, where little Georgy Matsell was born. Worms incarcerated Lafayette and Louis Napoleon, and worms made Eve tempt Adam, and Cain kill Abel, and are the source of the rise and fall of empires, and of all the good and evil that exist. And Shakspeare’s worms got hungry one day, and he went out on a poaching excursion, and thereby lost his honor, and had to fly from the dear scenes of his youth. But a fresh crop of worms, and their subsequent generations, directed a pen that will entwine his memory around and within the body, flesh, blood, bones and marrow of the solitary being who beholds the orbs of night and day forever close their brilliant eyes on a numerous, funny, and mysterious race of worms that have so long defaced, and polluted and crawled through earth, sea and air, leaving their nauseous slime behind.

Respectfully, STEPHEN H. BRANCH.

Advertisements—One Dollar a line.

ROGERS, BOOKSELLER, STATIONER, AND NEWS VENDER, Broadway, near Twelfth street.

Books, all the new ones cheap, at Rogers. Magazines, soon as out, cheap at Rogers. Stationary, London made, cheap at Rogers. English Papers, imported by Rogers. American Papers, all sold by Rogers. Books to Read, at one cent a day, at Rogers.

EXCELSIOR PRINT, 211 CENTRE-ST. N. Y.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

—Obvious print and punctuation errors were corrected.

—A Table of Contents was not in the original work; one has been produced and added by Transcriber.