_ Is it a _comic_ piece she's doing, do you know? Don't
think so, I can see somebody smiling. Sounds rather like SHAKSPEARE,
or DICKENS, or one of those fellahs ... Didn't catch what you said. No
Quite impossible to hear oneself speak, _isn't_ it?
_Miss F.B._
And ever louder the demons yelled for their pale-faced prey--but I
scorned death's pangs,
For I deemed it a doom that was half delight to die by the hand of
LOBELIA BANGS!
Then she whispered low in her dulcet tones, like the crooning coo of
a cushat dove!
(_At the top of her voice_). "Forgive me, CLEM, but I could not bear
any squaw to torture my own true love!"
And she raised the revolver--"crack-crack-crack!"
[_To the infinite chagrin of the Unsophisticated Guest, who
is intensely anxious to hear how Miss BANGS and her lover
escaped from so unpleasant a dilemma--the remaining cracks
of her revolver, together with the two next stanzas, are
drowned in a fresh torrent of small-talk--after which he
hears Miss F.B. conclude with repressed emotion_:
But the ochre on Blue-nosed Owl was blurred, as his braves concluded
their brief harangues;
And he dropped a tear on the early bier of our Prairie belle, LOBELIA
BANGS!
[_Which of course leaves him in a state of hopeless
mystification.
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