CONTENTS

Volume I.—No. 5.]—— SATURDAY, MAY 22, 1858.—— [Price 2 Cents.

STEPHEN H. BRANCH’S
ALLIGATOR.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1857, by
STEPHEN H. BRANCH,
In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the United
States for the Southern District of New York.

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Life of Stephen H Branch.

very silly, as ointment will soon cure it.” He said: “I knew a man who applied ointment five years, and his itch got worse every year.” This was a bomb that quickened my pulsation. I then said: “Perhaps you have got the salt rheum, and I advise you to consult Dr. Plympton immediately.” He said: “I’ll go now, and I want you to go with me.” As Plympton was the Superintendent of my itch, I did not know what response to make. But as he might be absent, or if at home, determined to remain without while Terry went in, I at length said: “Well, I will go with you,” and over we went to the Doctor’s, who, to my great joy, was not in. I then told Terry that I must go to my room, and get my lessons, but that he mast remain until Dr. Plympton returned, and he said he would. Terry rushed into my room in about an hour, a shade paler than a ghost, and exclaimed:—“Branch! the Doctor says that I must have caught the itch from you, as it is precisely like yours.” If a cannon ball had entered the window, it could not have thrilled my frame like the disclosures of Plympton, which I regarded as safe with him as myself. But the old cat was out, and I had to face her sharp claws. So I told poor Terry the whole story, and that if he had not locked the door, and forced me to sleep with him, he would not have caught the itch. He mildly chided me for not disclosing that I had the itch, as, if I had, he certainly would have unlocked the door with much pleasure, and let me out. But he forgave me, and asked me to room with him, so that we could apply the itch ointment together, before the same fire, and talk the matter over, and compare symptoms, and sympathize with each other, and eat and sleep together with impunity, and read distinguished itch authors, and go to Dr. Plympton’s together, until we got cured. I told Terry that if we did all that, we would so thoroughly inocculate each other with the itch, that all the doctors of the globe could not wrench it from our blood, and that we would transmit the itch to our posterity for ten thousand years, and then it would not be entirely out of the system. Terry looked amazed, and said he felt faint, and called for gin and water, and stared like an

Egyptian Daddy,
Or Tiemann Granny,
Or Peter Mummy,
Or Edward Sonny,
Some five thousand years old,
Whose wills were never sold,
Nor their offices for gold,
As we oft have been told;
Who loved their constituents
Far better than stimulants,
Or their sons and brothers,
And a good many others.
O, fiddle-de-dee,
Ye Coopers three,
You’ll not cheat me,
No, sirs-ree,
While I’m free,

As you’ll see!☞

And Terry said he hoped I would excuse him, as he felt nervous, and would like to go to bed, and I bade him good night, and went to see Plympton, and assured him that if he told the students I had the itch, it would mortify my feelings, and spread, and terrify all Cambridge, and I might be mobbed, and he most solemnly vowed that he would make no further disclosures. And I returned to the College, and saturated my body with ointment, and retired, and sweat, and scratched all night, and did not close my weary eyes until the Cambridge rooster crowed.

(To be continued to our last loan.)

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Let the Firemen Stand to their Guns!

And Never Surrender their Glorious Volunteer System to the Corrupt Politicians, and with it their Widows’ and Orphans’ Fund.

We wrote and published the following document in the New York Herald one year before we opened our batteries against George W. Matsell’s alienage. But it is more appropriate now than in 1854, as the enthusiastic champions of a Paid Fire Department are inclosing and about to overwhelm the adversaries of that fatal system, like the allied armies the great Napoleon at Waterloo. Although we had written the Annual and Special Fire Reports of Alfred Carson in 1851, ‘2, and ‘3, yet we wrote and published this document without his consultation, as he was in Troy, New York, when it appeared in the Herald; but when he read it in the cars between Albany and New York, he was delighted with it, as he informed us on his arrival in this city. The Firemen will perceive that it was written soon after the destruction of Jenning’s Clothing Store in Broadway, and the loss of human life; and that we hurl back the ungenerous charges of almost the universal press of New York, that the firemen were a gang of thieves, because some cheap and scorched and wet clothing was placed over the chilly and mangled and dying firemen by their weeping comrades on that mournful occasion, and found on their dead bodies in the City Hospital.

But read, Firemen, read, and unite to a man against all who would destroy the Volunteer Fire System of New York, which is the best ever devised since the forests and Indians yielded to civilization and freedom.

From the New York Herald of May 14, 1854.

Firemen of New York:—The columns of almost every public journal are closed against you. The hand of almost every editor is uplifted to strike you down. The scurvy politicians, to a man, are against you, and the insurance corporations are spending their money freely to distract and subvert your organization, for the first time since the Indians transmitted their fire department to the pale faces. And why this unhallowed alliance of the press, politicians, and insurance corporations, for your demolition? I will tell