The Sedalia weekly bazoo. [volume] (Sedalia, Mo.) 187?-1904, 1893-01-10
MEMORIES OF A SUICIDE.
Shutting Of This Mortal Coil
and Revising The Earth
BY the Pale GIimpses
Of the Moon.

;
lay Just claim Ia the unique and
ghostly distinction of having COM
mitted suicide and of still being active
members of the business world.
Only in the vague visions of poets
or the fantastic fancies OF
dreamers and sonambulists have
such pictures been presented for the
pastime, admiration or awe Of man.
kind.
The immortal Dante visited with
Virgil the gruesome regions of the I'M
seen. Swedenborg, the founder of a
great religious sect, claimed to have
made a journey to the heavenly
realms, and returned again.
Joe Smith, the greatest impostor of
modern times and of America, and
whose outlandish doctrines resulted in
entrapping thousands Of long-haired
men and briefbrained women, de
clared that he had held communion
with celestial guests and had received
from them, substantially at least, a
pair of golden plates, upon which
were written laws singular and di-
vine.
Joseph, it will he remembered, re-
sided for time in the great state
where the Tammany tiger will not
cease from troubling and where Baby
Ruth reigns, a veritable princess in
peerless beauty and popular favor.
But, for a man to become so weary
of the world as to shuttle off this NOR
tai coil and, Hamlet-like revisit these
scenes of sorrow and tribu!ation by
the pale glimpses of the moon, is some
thing so surprisingly strange and I'M
probable as to he beyond the compre-
hension or credulity Of the average
Sedalian.
Such an experience, however. re-
Gently befell a member of the BAzOo
staff. not only according to his own
statement of the fact, but likewise in
accordance with the assertion of sew
eral Missouri journals. whose veracity
has lever been qu, stoned except on
certain peculiar occasions III presiden-
tial campaigns.
The subject of this rambling fantasy
had grown weary of life. The burdens
of care and disappointment bore too
heavily upon him. True, he had
never been married and therefore had
neverexperienced the baleful influence
of a mother-in-law He had not been
a candidate for any office on the Bill
Warner ticket and gone down, an in
glorious victim of the recent great
American landslide. He had never
put his money up on the wrong horse
or voted for Mrs. Lease.
He had never accumulated cool
million and then sighed himself into
INSANITY for several millions more.
He had never imagined himself a
bigger man than Cleveland, nor a
crazier creature than George Francis
Train.
None of these calamities had fallen
to his lot. He simply and slowly, on
general principles, sickened of life,
pinned for repose and nepenthe in some
happier realm, and rushed fran
ticaily to the icy rivers brink
from which he plunged head
long and unheedingly into the
Hereafter.
The desolate monarch of western
waters received him to its sandy
bosom and then laid him ruthlessly
upon its rocky bed. fit food for the
MYRIAD fishes that disported about
him in shining shoals and glittering
glee. :.
But soon the sand seemed to sift
away and the suicide rose into regions
whose glory and poetical Pictur-
esqueness eclipsed the dreams of Dante
or the fabrications of Munchausen.
He looked down from those battle
ments of beauty and glory, whence he
had risen in rapid flight. He heard
the distant echo of the funeral bells
tolIing his untimely and disgraceful
end. He saw throngs of friends and
curiosity-seekers assembling about his
coffin-for the body had been recOv-
cred and the coroner had earned an
other fee. He beheld the undertaken
and the sexton and the good minister
at their appropriate posts of duty on
this sad occasion. But his spirit was
happy and soon in trance of beati-
tude, he was with a set of choice
spirits. The whole Missouri newspa-
ner gang we're there bv his side and
singing hallelujahs. They were also
betimes busy taxing in subscriptions
from the thronging band of angels,
and now and then could be seen de-
linauent subscriber hurled from the
happy host, more in sorrow than in
anger.
Pictures innumerable and portraits