Imperial Valley press., 1910-04-23
THE RETURN FROM ELIZA
Career of the Colonel Recorded Upon Leaf Blown in From Days
 To Be.

Tn one of Ambrose Bierce's satires on history as it is written, the con- quest of Africa by Thaddeus Rosenfelt is recorded by the Future Historian.
 "In the year 1909, as the ancient Americans reckoned time. President Thaddeus Rosenfelt was for some of- fense now not known banished from his country and sent under heavy guard to Kalamazoo, an African penal colony noted for the number and fero- city of it's tigers. To these he was thrown by his keepers, as was se- cretly commanded by Congress, sitting as a high court of impeachment and conviction. But from a contemporan- eous chronicle by Wee Chandler (whose works are now in the i'm perial library of Timbuctoo) it appears that the tigers would not eat him. On the contrary, he ate them, a marked instance, says another writer of the period, of interpretation by an overrul- ing Providence
 "Awed by this obvious miracle, the fallen Presidents keepers renounced the faith of their fathers and worship ed him as a deity. Not only so, but by force ana arms they set up for him a temporal sovereignty which he ad- ministered from an ancient palace known as the Bleak House He bore the title of It, word signifying Me. The meaning of Me is unknown.
 Weeping freely because there were no more worlds to conquer Git was not then known that Arkansas had not been brought under the sway of the Whites), the victor resolved to in- wade his own country and carry away the Presidential Chair which he had once occupied, and which was then considered the most precious object existing since the Golden Fleece and the Holy Grail.
 Placing his son Kismet on the throne, he gathered a great army of Blacks, and travelling incognito under the name of Stanley, reached the western boundary of his new realm amid the exclamation of his troops who shouted, 'Thalassa, thalassa!' that being their name for the river Rubi- con, separating Africa from America There at the island of Elba he crossed on secret bridge and was received with effusion by the populace, by whose spokesman, Lord Clifford of Pin chot, he was thrice offered a kingly crown, which, according to Shakes poor, an obscure chronicler of the time, he did thrice refuse: This oc- cured in the reign of William the Fat, whom as an afterthought he de- posed and bastinadoed.
 Firmly reseated in the Presidential Chair (which had itself been firmly re- seated for William), Rosenfelt resolv- ed to remain in the land that loved him for the ructions he had made. By way of assuring the peace, he pro- ceeded to destroy colony of Anania-
  the fastnesses of the Rocky Noun tains, and then he marched against the Nacherfaquers, formidable tribe of the Bostonese hinterland. Afterwards he subdued and sold into slavery a troublesome people known as Demo- crats, who were taken to Lincoln, Ne braska, loaded with chains. The name of the purchaser is unknown.
 From this time on, the career of this remarkable personality is lost in the mists of antiquity. Some say that the earth opened and swallowed him; others that he wrote a book; and in an extant fragment of an ancient poem he is represented as chained to a rock in a caucus, with 'vultures' (epicures) eating his liver. Whatever may have been the manner of his sec ond removal from office, he is now. doubtless, as dead as the vivacity of his disposition permits"