Baltimore Evening Sun (13 June 1912): 6.

The morning papers, with their traditional squeamishness, avoided all mention of certain revolting details of the Boardman butchery. While the professor was flat on the mat, so my spies tell me, he was thrice stabbed with split infinitives, and as he tried to struggle to his feet one of the learned commissioners walloped him over the head with a pleonasm. And the Hon. Eugene O’Dunne, coming gallantly to his rescue, was taken in the chest by a salvo of double negatives and went down and out.

A man who lately served on a coroner’s jury tells me that a Central District policeman, in giving evidence before the jury, pronounced the word “cafe” as if it were spelled “calf.” Alas, for the ignorance of the gendarmie! The right way to pronounce that word, in the American language, is “kaif”—and any man who doesn’t know it is certainly unfit to serve on the police force. This pronunciation is now taught in the public schools and is used universally by intelligent bartenders. The variant forms—“kaff,” “kaffy,” “caw-fay” and “kaf-fee”—are now archaic and in disrepute. In all debates in the City Council “kaif” is generally used. So far as I know, indeed, the only dissenting voice to that of the Hon A. C. Binswanger, who employs “kaf-fay.” But that is mere superstition.

The æolian melody of the caressing Hot Towel:

Mayor Preston’s candidacy * * * has been highly indorsed by some of the leading statesmen of the nation.

A can of bear’s grease for the name and address of each and every such statesman. And, to avoid unseemly disputes, let a statesman be defined as any politician who has been sober more than six days since 1890 and has influence enough to get his old mother a job as charwoman in the City Hall.

Now that Professor Boardman has idle time on his hands, why not let him revise and embellish the super-Mahon’s speech of auto-nomination?

Two excellent cigars, imported from Havana, await the call of the Hon. William Larkins, whose renovation of Booth street, early in April, exposed the bed of that romantic morass for the first time in 28 years. So delighted are the adjacent blackamoors that they now gather into a posse every evening at 7 o’clock and sing “The Lion of Judah.”

Doc Carroll’s cannon is still pointed at Jim Trippe, but so far the humane doctor has refrained from yanking the lanyard. But have a care, Jim! Have a care!

All honor to the Hon. Edward Gross, of the Eighteenth ward, for his resolution requiring the immoral United Railways Company to permit smoking on its pay-as-you-enter cars. When the company presumed to prohibit smoking it invaded, without the slightest warrant in law, a right exercised continuously for 66 years. One must go to the lives of Caligula and the Borgias for an example of worse tyranny. The Hon. Mr. Gross, by boldly standing up for the thousands thus wronged and outraged, will put an end, I hope, to the gratuitous and illegal law-making of the guy little reichstag of the Continental Building.

But his plan goes only half way. That is to say. It rescues smokers during the summer months, when the car windows are open, but leaves them to the company’s cruelties in winter. Why not authorize smoking on the front platform? There is room there for eight or ten passengers, and their smoke would not come into the car, for the exit-door is far to the right side. Would they jostle the motorman and so make him run over children? Not at all. A protective rail might be put around him, and even without it, ten smokers might stand there without touching him. The business of operating the brake, now that air is used, requires no elbow room. The simple turning of a lever does the work.

Beside, passengers are allowed to stand on the front platforms of cars in nearly every other large city in Christendom, and no charge that the custom is dangerous is ever heard. Even in Baltimore the thing is permitted on certain lines—specifically on those lines which have platform seats—for example, the Wilkens avenue line. Why not extend it to all lines? Smokers don’t ask for seats. All they demand is common decency of treatment—and if the Hon. Mr. Gross sticks to his guns they will get it.

Contributions to the fund for bribing the Hon. William H. Anderson to throw up his job and come over to the side of liquor:

Previously acknowledged...................$1,000
Cash.................................................... 1
——————
Total.....................................$1,001

Why so slow, good friends? Where is Ed Hirsch’s $1,000? Where is Harry’s? Where to the mite of St. Luke’s Brotherhood?

Revised and complete list of the “leading Southern statesmen” who are actively supporting the Right Hon. the super-Mahon in his titanic struggle:

The Hon. James H. Preston. The Hon. J. Harry Preston. The Hon. James Harry Preston. The Hon. J. H. Preston. The Hon. Jim Preston. The Hon. Kid Lincoln. The Hon. Andrew Jackson fils. The Hon. Young Cleveland. The Hon. the super-Mahon. The Hon. Mahoni Amicus. The Hon. Jefferson Minor. The Hon. Ego-Ego. The Hon. Bob Lee (ex-officio).

The fact that the Hon. Henry Joesting, Jr., offered a resolution dismissing Professor Boardman before that gentleman had been found guilty was, after all, a mere error in tenses, and in consequence not abhorrent to the genius of the Old-Fashioned School Board.

Partial list of the lost, strayed or stolen:

The Clean City Crusade. The Greater Baltimore Committee. The Vice Crusade. The League for Medical Freedom, Maryland Branch. The Maryland Antivivisection Society. The Mayor’s Advisory Cabinet.

From the lexicon of the Hon. the super-Mahon:

Fair, adj. (as applied to a newspaper), subservient, assiduous, groveling, bootlicking, eager, docile, tame, cheap, lavish with the bay rum, liberal with the salve, careless of talcum.

Item for the scrapbook of public school teachers:

Every knock is a boost—if you knock Van Sickle!

Col. Jacobus Hook is now giving away Preston buttons with tax receipts.—Adv.

Jobs deferred maketh the Preston man sick.