Semi=weekly graphic., 1896-10-07
Egypt vs. Arkansaw.
From Brann's Iconoclast.

ntlu LNe 1ffeQeuldD Dl6 lslSlol luuC U
 incur the enemity of that journal
 istic Jehovah known as the Carbon dale (Ill.l Herald. Arkansas ha
 ever been a State familiar witt
 sorrow and acquainted with grle1
 but never until now did her cup ( misery slop over, her burden thei
 become too grievonS to be borne
 Pelion is piled on Ossa, horrors oI horrors head accumulate, one mls fortune doth gall his fellows kibe st fast they follow. At last the awiu 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 suo- sequent legs, lashes himself with lis 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 in that narrow w contracted. Godforsaken State. It's inhabitants, he says, are d lot of peak-nosed renegades N ho are a 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- yariably vote right opposite to the "peak-nosed renegades" of Rachen- sack aforesaid-that the action of the latter 'insures big increase in the honest money vote all over the North. , It were great pity to conffne the odor of so rare an exotic to the circulation of plate-fake country newspaper. Such colossal genius should have room ii which to burgeon and bloom, hence 1 take great pleasure in presenting him to the patrons of the Iconoclast. Ladies and gentlemen, this Is the editor of the Carbondale Herald, who will favor you with | correct imitation of man abont ta tear q at-please don't gn near the cage.
 Every time they bury man in Arkansas ] they dump wagon load of manure in the | grave so that he will rise on resurrection day. Its inhabitants are composed of miser- | able old women and lean, Ank-bellied yahoos Their principal occupation is drink ing whisky and hanging niggers. They are too internally lazy to eat full meal, and | consequently have hungry look. Nobody | ever saw fat man in Arkansas. They are too shiftless, too trihing,too worthless to even get fat. Some of them come north and take on a little flesh, 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 key-hole with both eyes at once. They are constantly looking around for some one 10 beat They are restless and uneasy, q condition they have acquired by lying awake at nights and listening to the notes of the buii-fTog and the hum of the ''muskeeters." Religiously
 
 heathens and the greater heathens, The heather get drunk every Sunday on mean whisky and raise the devil generally with sacred tniugs wh,n not too drunk. The worse than heathens haag and burn niggers for pastime, aad when they get down to business assassinate white men. real good Arkansas father licks his boys half to death if he catches him in d clean shirt on Sunday, but commeEds him II he has made success fui raid on his Il ighbUrs chicken coop.
 That's Il pretty good roast" but donbt it's originality. It reminds me very much of razzle-dazzle which Missouri paper once gave Egypt" alias Southern Illinois, of which Carbondale is the geographic al center. And the portrait it drew Of that section of the great Sucker 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 nnrtures a crop of | ,josephs: but because it's dense ignor- ance was thought to resemble the | thick darkness which Moses laid | upon ''the land of Mizriam''-be.l cause of popular superstition that | when the plaques were lifted from ancient Egypt they were transferred | to the Herald's territory, where, for fonr-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 of :" EgA pt" with nndisg guised disdain. l Worthless as an Egyptian ''scab- by as Egypt" long ago found place ii their vocabulary of invective In that section of Suckerdom where I first 0ped a sad blue eye to the garish light of day, and lay long debating whether 'twere more fun to be bloody pirate or a Baptist preacher to call a man "a son of Egypt" was considered an unfor- givable affront to his family, and meant a fight or foot-race It is a popular idea that, south of Centralia. the endowment of the nnonia c,,n-