Democratic Sentinel, Volume 9, Number 19, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 June 1885 — Orpheus C. Kerr. [ARTICLE]

Orpheus C. Kerr.

The author of “The Mackerel Brigade” is being rapidly forgotten of men. Do you remember after he had married Adah Isaacs Menken, and accompanied her to San Francisco, what a bubble of talk there was about it? He resembled then Artemus Ward a little—only that Mr. Newell (Mr. Kerr) was a much handsomer man, of the perfect blonde type and most cultivated in his manners. He is of a very aristocratic family, who repudiated his claims to their clemeney after he had wedded poor Menken. It is well known that it was a genuine love marriage on the part of the poet-author, even if, like many another, it was finally unfortunate. Kerr never regained his vivacity of spirits or his literary position after that fateful silence and its eventual separation. He did her justice after her death by giving to print the only truthful account of her unfortunate life. He lives now in New Jersey. Long since, after a dreadful illness, he was again reconciled to his family, but he was never ]ust himself. He is old now beyond his years; his yellow silken hair is turned a dusty gray; his mustache, that curled around the corners of his effeminate month in a wonderfully artistic way, is white and long. The whole face is one of pain and sadness; he stoops in the shoulders, and he was an Adonis in figure; is morbidly silent and reticent. He writes a little—not much for print; is an inveterate cigar-ette-smoker, and paces up and down some favorite walk or room by the hour, buried in his own gloomy reflections. The “unkindest cut” to poor Newell is that Western papers are copying his “Mackerel Brigade” papers without giving him credit, and even endeavor to so mutilate them as to be made “original. ” Is there any meaner thief in the world than the literary pilferer?— Cor. San Francisco Chronicle.

A bright prospect: “You will never want for a breakfast as long as you are able to earn it,” said a lazy, improvident man to his wife, as he introduced her to her new homo the other day, after their marriage.