Pine Bluff daily graphic., 1896-10-04
Egypt vs. Arkansaw.
From Brann's Iconoclast.


 had the irremediable misfortune to incur the enemity of that journal istic Jehovah known as the Carbon dale (Ill.l Herald. Arkansas has ever been State familiar with sorrow and acquainted with grief; but never until now did her cup of misery slop over, her burden then become too grievons to be borne. Pelion is piled on Ossa, horrors on horrors head accumulate, one mis- fortune doth gall his fellows kibe SO fast they follow. At last the awful climax has come. The almighty Herald man hath quite overwhelmed Arkansas with his Balaamic curse, thereby pressing upon her shrinking head u sorrows crown of sorrow for giving the frozen face to the party of Markhanna and his politi- cal puppet. He rears up on his sub sequent legs, lashes himself with his caudal appendage, wildly waves his ears and walls forth that "the mis- erable valler-bellied State of Arkan- sas went Democratic, and expresses surprise that honest money has any friends at all i'll that narrow contracted. Godforsaken State. It's inhabitants, he says, "are lot of peak.nosed renegaaes N ho are by word in the rest of the United States. The Herald man then pro- ceeds to yank victory from the fanged jaws of defeat by declaring that the honest men of the North in- variably vote right opposite to the 'peak-nosed renegades7 of Racken- sack aforesaid-that the action of the latter tinsures big increase in the honest money vote all over the North" 1t were great pity to confine the odor of so rare an exotic to the circulation of d plate-fake country newspaper. Such colossal genius should have room In which to bprgeon and bloom, hence take great pleasure in presenting him to the patrons of the Iconoclast. Ladies aud gentlemen, this is the editor of the CurbondaIe Herald. who will favor you with correct imitation of Il man about to tear d cat-please don't go near the cage.
 sFverv limo 4bn,, b,fr,y |, ,,,a,, ;,, r1,. ,s.e they dump a wagon load of manure in the grave so that he will rise on resurrection day. It's inhabitants are composed of misef- able old women and lean, lank-bellied yahoos. Their principal occupation is drink ing whisky and hanging niggers. They are too internally lazy to eat a full neal and consequently have hungry look. Nobody ever saw d fat man in Arkansas. They are too shiftless too fling. too worthless to even get fat Some of them come north and take on little fesh but on their heath they are like Gassius-they have a lean and hungry look. They all have noses like pelicans and eyes deep-sunk, yaller watery and sickly, which are set in their heads so close together that they can look through a key-hole with both eyes at once. They are constantly looking around for some one 10 beat. They are restless and uneasy, a condition they have acquired by lying awake at nights and listening to the notes of the bul-frog and the hum of the "muskeeters." Relgiously they are divided into two casses-the heathens and the greater heathens, The heathen get drunk every Sunday on mean whisky and raise the devil generally with sacred things when not too drunk The worse than heathens hang and burn niggers for pastime aad when they get down to business assassinate white men, 4 real good Arkansas father dicks his boys half to death if he catches him in clean shirt on Sunday, but commends him if he has made success ful raid on his neighbours chicken coop.
 That's pretty good roast" but l doubt its originality. It reminds me very much of razzle-dazzle which a Missouri paper once gave Egypt" alias Southern Illinois, oi which Carbondale is the geographic al center. And the portrait it drew of that section of the great Sucker l State tallies exactly with popular opinion. Southern Illinois has been known for generations as Egypt not because it's soil is fecund as the Nilus valley, or nurtures q crop oi Josephs; but because it's dense ignor- ance was thought to resemble tht thick darkness which Moses laid upon the land of Marian be cause of a popular superstition that when the plaques were lifted from ancient Egypt they were transferred to the Herald's territory, where. fol four-and-thirty centuries. they have faithfully observed the Biblical law to be fruitful and multiply The people of North and Central Illinois have ever regarded the denizens o
 Egypt with undisguised disdain
 "WorthleSs as an Egyptian, ''scab
 by as Egypt, long ago found place in their vocabulary of inyective IT l that section of SuekeFd0D1 where