CONTENTS

Volume I.—No. 3.]—— SATURDAY, MAY 8, 1858.—— [Price 2 Cents.

STEPHEN H. BRANCH’S
ALLIGATOR.

c2

Truth Whips Fiction.

Love and Sin.—Fatality of the Metropolis.—Domestic Vices.—Virgins Beware.—Parsons Profess too much, and Practice too little.—“We must be Cruel to be Kind.”—A Terrible Example.—Let Sacred Teachers Warn their precarious Daughters to Avoid the Snares of Music and Fiction.

In the shades of twilight, amid the perfume of the sunny zones, sat a pale and attenuated student from the northern climes, musing of his native vales and hills, and the sweet idol of his heart, whose latest thoughts he had just perused. He had consumed too much midnight oil at college, and his health was gone, and he sought the towering bluffs of Natchez for restoration, where he was a sophomoric pastor. The figs, and flowers, and balmy breezes restored his health, and he returned to his native latitudes, and married one of Eve’s most fascinating posterity. He preached

In dale and vill,
And shore and hill,

and came to the metropolis, and cast a gauntlet to Dr. Wainwright on bishops and crinoline, which made owls screech, and worms squirm, and frogs sing, and alligators grimly grin, and snakes and toads hiss and belch sepulchrals. Wainwright boldly seized the gauntlet shaft, and the sacred pugilists closed like panthers, and the people hissed, and laughed, and applauded, as the battle raged, and Bennett filled the air with his most comic darts, which made the Herald sell like Slievegammon news. We had worms and boils, and salt rheum, and ate Graham-bread and mush, and slept with Horace Greeley in Barclay street, till our bones did rattle, and we could not laugh beyond a whisper, and

Our shanks were so thin,
That negroes did grin,
And, as we passed by,
Dogs and cats did cry.

“Long time in even scale the battle hung,” until Potts and Wainwright retired from the field as conquerors, in the estimation of themselves and enthusiastic friends. The sun and moon and romantic stars performed their wonted evolutions, and Potts and Wainwright had their salaries increased, and rose to Bishoprics and the giddy alpines of the godly avenues, and we went to the setting sun, and almost beyond the world. On our return from the bleak, and shady, and snowy slopes of the Rocky Mountains, in 1849, we dwelt with Mrs. Mitchell, at the corner of Houston and McDougal streets, whose family consisted of her daughter, two nieces, a sister, and Otto Dressel, a teacher of piano music, whose style was soft, pensive, sacred, and bewitching. We had boarded with Mrs. Mitchell, in Broadway, eight years previous, and in 1841, while going up the dark alley that led to Jackson’s pawnbroker’s shop in Reade street, we met Mrs. Mitchell coming down the lane, who sneezed while we coughed, when we both passed on with crimson cheeks and sly glances of each other. Otto Dressel’s sleeping apartment at Mrs. Mitchell’s in Houston street, in 1849, was next to ours; and many a summer eve, while reclining on our couch, has Otto borne us into the unconscious realms of Morpheus, with his soothing and entrancing music. The pale and rosy and dark-eyed offspring of the mother and departed sister, were ever at his door, and perhaps too often within, or on the music side of his portal. We often heard the thrilling echo of kisses, and the sudden tap of his piano, to drown the reverberation emblems of a lover or libertine. And we often warned the mother and sister of the fatal intimacy between the music serpent, and the pretty virgins of their blood. But they smiled, and said: “O, fy;” and we let the music-teacher have his way, and he kissed and hugged the lovely maidens to his heart’s content. The eldest girl was Julia Mitchell, who drew near one evening while we were seated on the sofa, (with no light save the milky rays of an autumnal moon,) when she said: “Stephen, can you keep a secret?” “Yes.” “Then listen: Otto Dressel, you perceive, is morose and reserved, and dignified at our table, but he is a thorough scamp, and so loquacious when alone in the presence of pretty girls, that his tongue rattles like a rattlesnake; and his music, in the society of spotless virgins, is so alluring, as to enrapture, and bewitch, and deprive them of self-control and consciousness. Almost every evening, the beautiful, and musical, and intellectual daughter of the Rev. Doctor George Potts archly and slyly drops gilded notes on our steps, when Otto, who is watching her arrival from his bedroom window, runs down stairs with the velocity of a deer, and clutches the pale and lovely missives, and bounds up stairs like a bloodhound. Otto is her music-teacher, and he tells me that he reads with her, at her father’s and elsewhere, all the latest English, French and German works of fiction, which fill her impulsive genius with the profoundest romance and fatality. It is about the period of her appearance, and I desire you to take a position at the window, and behold how prettily, and gracefully, and archly, she leaves her mysterious note for her adored Otto.” We sat near the window, screened by the lattice and gauzy curtains, and presently we behold her in the distance; and, after gazing at Otto’s window, she discovers him on the watch, and rapidly crosses the street, and, after leering cautiously around, she softly places the letter on the steps, and hastily departs, when down comes Otto, like a vulture for its prey, or like Putnam down the rocky