Democratic Sentinel, Volume 5, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 July 1881 — THE CHROMIQUE. [ARTICLE]

THE CHROMIQUE.

Squiffffinß Dabbles lu tlie Fine Arts. You haven’t seen that now invention, the chromique, have you ? Well, it is a kind of second cousin to a chromo. It looks like' a plate of ground glass, and in the center is a circular place that looks like transparent glass; but it isn’t, for when the eye is applied to it a lovely colored picture appears. Squiggins boards up town, ana is a very moral man. He is devoted to his wife, and she, poor thing, has always supposed that the sun rose and set in his mild blue eyes. Last week she went away to see her mother, and it was while she was gone that the chromique peddler called at Squiggins’ room. The agent explained how nicely the chromique worked, and Squiggins was delighted, but said that he boarded with a ounoua kind of a landlady, and she might grumble even if he took out one of her panes of glass and put in a $4,000 oil painting ; but the peddler knew his business, and, seeing that Squiggins was quite taken with the new invention, he finally persuaded him to let him set a pane with the chromique in it in the old transon over the door. So Squiggins selected a mild and lovely picture of Pharaoh’s daughter finding little Moses, and was so delighted with it that he paid the agent in advance and then hurried down town to work. Now this agent took an occasional drink, and so elated was he at his good luck that he went out and took about four too many, and when he got back to the room he couldn’t tell a photo of the Niagara falls from a wood-cut of a man with a sprink-ling-pot, and barely reme’mbering that there was a woman in the picture that Squiggins picked out, he made a wild dive at the lot and fished out a picture of an actress in a very high low suit (high in the skirt and low in the neck), that was intended only for bar and clubrooms, and fixing this in nicely he left the house. The landlady, meanwhile, had had her suspicions aroused. She could not understand this ground-glass business, and was convinced that Squiggins was up to some mischief while his poor, dear wife was away, and had put up the glass to keep her from finding it out. She did not propose to have any room in her house that she could not see into, so, after trying her usual place, the key-hole, and seeing nothing, she mounted a chair and looked through the little place in the transom. The boarders say that the yell she gave startled even the fat and lazy people in the institution, and every woman in the bouse came running to look at her, and, to crown all, Mr. Squiggins’ wife, who came four days earlier than she was expected to, came ;»rancing up the stairs. “What is it?” yelled she, taking leaps that would have paralyzed a kangaroo. “What?” yelled the landlady, “just look at tne brazen-faced thing that your husband has brought into this house, my house, my boarding house ! Look, you poor deceived creature, and never trust man again.” Mrs. S. looked, and then she yelled, and this hurried up Squiggins, who was just coming home, and who, thinking from the yells that some one was beating his wife, came up stairs even faster than she did ; but, instead of embracing him, his wife flew at him like a tiger, while the other boarders pointed at the glass and yelled “Shame!” He caught their gestures and yelled: “ It’s a cromique,” but his wife only yelled the louder and scratched and shrieked : “Yes, I know she’sacomique ! Some variety singer, I’ll warrant,” and heaven knows what would have become of poor Squiggins; but at this moment four old maids that were trying to get a peep pressed too hard against the still-soft putty, and the cromique dropped out and disclosed a vacant room. This stopped everything, and Squiggins, after being nearly hugged to death by his now-repentant wife, stamped the glass into a thousand pieces, ana, turning around, then and there gave the inquisitive landlady a piece of his mind and commenced packing up to move. A vacant room is for rent. You can tell the house by seeing four old maids with cut fingers looking out the windows.— Evansville Araus.