truth-loving Americans, as I am thereby enabled not only to make
it uncomfortable for frauds and fakes, but to hold an occasional
bypedal puppy up by the subsequent end that Scorn may sight him
and stick her cold and clammy finger so far through his miserable
carcass that Goliah might hang his helmet on the protruding
point. Sometime ago I found America's meanest man in
Massachusetts: I have just discovered the most contemptible of
all God's creatures in Kansas City. Some may suppose that the
first discovery excludes the last; but such forget that there is
the same difference between cussedness and contemptibility that
exists between the leopard and the louse, between a Cuban
hurricane and the crapulous eructations of a chronic hoodlum. I
want the world to take an attentive look at one Walter S.
Halliwell, to make a labored perscrutation of this priorient
social pewee, this arbiter eligantarium of corn-fed aristocracy,
this Beau Brummel of the border, for though Argus had a compound
microscope glued to his every eye he might never look upon the
like again. He resembles a pigmy statue of Priapus carved out of
a guano bed with a muck rake and smells like a maison d'joie
after an Orange Society celebration of the Battle of the Boyne.
Mr. Halliwell evidently has an idea rumbling round in his
otherwise tenantless attic room that he's a Brahmin of the
Brahmins, an aristocrat dead right, a goo-goo for your Klondyke
galways, a Lady Vere de Vere in plug hat and "pants." He's the
Ward McAllister of Kay-See, the model of the chappies, and traces
his haughty lineage back in an unbroken line to the primordial
anthropoid swinging by his prehensile tail to a limb of the Ash
tree Ygdrasyl and playfully scratching the back of the hungry
behemoth with the jawbone of an erstwhile ichthyosaurian. Walter
S. Halliwell was born when quite young, where or why deponent