Orleans County Monitor

LETTER FROM NEW YORK.

[Special Correspondence of the Monitor.]

New York, Sept. 5, 1881.

As a seasonable topic, your Radix would tenderly and, perhaps, sympathetically, ask the question, whether in the late green apple and water melon, and early plumb, peach and grape season, which coincides with the reintroduction of the oyster to social intercourse, any of your readers ever felt as if O'Donovan Rossa was laying and exploding torpedoes in the region of their gizzards? Perhaps less obscurely, I might ask if your readers ever knew what Cholera Morbus was like? Well, let me give a hint which will be worth ten years' subscription to your paper to anyone who has been so afflicted, gathered and garnered by one who has suffered many things of many physicians, but got one or two good notions by the experience. Let the feminine portion of the community make broad belts of flannel to be worn well down and below the waist, well fitted to the figure, and let everybody wear them. So shall comfort supervene to many distressed. The British soldiers in India are forced to wear these things habitually, and are inspected every morning to see they wear them correctly. Soldiers cost money there.

It must be very comfortable for a hardworking man who believes himself to be highly prosperous, and conscious that he deserves prosperity, to wake up some morning and find out that he owes $100,000. Such was the experience of Mr. O'Hara, a well-known manufacturer of cloaks and suits, whose partner had squandered the money of the firm in Wall street, selfishly trying to make a little pot for himself at the risk of anybody but himself. The wretch absconded without a dollar, it is said, so that he didn't get much fun from his base treachery after all. The creditors sympathize with the deluded victim, and it is understood will give him every facility to resume business. They say he is a smart man, but it seems to me that in these times a smart man would keep himself a little better posted about his own business, even if he did implicitly trust his partner.

The indefatigable Wingate, Sanitary Engineer, and brother to the famous rifleman and lawyer, ex-editor of a sort of a lofty-toned trade paper of much pretentiousness and general flatulency, is organizing the entire population of Long Island with an association to do away with the smells of Hunter's Point, Barren Island and other choice localities for breeding of poisonous air. As membership in the association doesn't cost a cent and it gives people a chance to get square with certain high-handed transgressors whom it has been exceedingly difficult to reach, it has filled up with wonderful speed and a pressure is being brought on the Governor that will infallibly tend some day to abate the nuisances complained of.

The dirtiness of official practices has perhaps been better shown up by a small transaction lately than even by the stupendous star route or Howgate frauds. A petty swindler, one Charles Ray, suffering he says from chronic impecuniosity, conceived and carried out the idea of personating a confidential treasury officer, and his little game was to call on custom house and other officers on a self-imposed tour of inspection. He would inform these men that they had been or were going to be removed, would listen kindly to their remonstrances, and then promising to use his influence to secure their retention in the service would find out that he had lost his pocketbook, or was short of cash in some way or other, and would borrow $50 or so from his obsequious attendants. About 20 appeared against him, and if I had my way I'd bounce every one of them. Their very readiness to fall into such a snare showed that they knew their shortcomings were vulnerable enough to justify their dismissal.

This living by the wits seems to be a growing business. It is sad how the good old days of apprenticeship and faithful service seem to have been forgotten; the trade unions are clannish and between the combinations of know nothings on the one hand (a very active party still, though ostensibly no such party is known) and foreign hordes of Irish, Germans, Italians, or what not on the other, there seems to be a regular policy of exclusion abroad, an ostracism by petty bodies of everybody outside them and a poor chance for the boys, who are growing up untaught, except by a smattering of more or less useful knowledge gained in the public schools, and swelling the ranks of the hoodlums and corner loafers who recruit our prisons. When in this Great Republic-the Home of the Free, and all that sort of thing--shall we see something of that solidarity of peoples which Kossuth used to talk about?

An alleged Zulu, black as the ace of spades, now exhibiting in a circus side-show, was married the other day to the young and romantic daughter of a wealthy Italian tradesman, who says she loves her darky Othello. The pair had considerable trouble with the old folks, and when they hurriedly went to a minister, hotly pursued, the best man was married to the bride by mistake, a second ceremony being gone through with to rectify the blunder. Truly, it's a funny world. The solidarity of the alleged Zulu was assured at any rate, for the irate father relented (the Latin races are not down on niggers as a rule, or Alexander Dumas would never have got on so well as he and lots of other colored folks have in France), and came down handsomely with a dowry for the sprightly donzella and her warlike spouse.

RADIX.