Rensselaer Republican, Volume 16, Number 45, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 July 1884 — Eloquence of the Finger. [ARTICLE]

Eloquence of the Finger.

Well, you can just bet there is mute eloquence in a finger. And sometimes it is h great deal mutter, and then, hgain, it isn’t to awfully mute as it would be if it were more mute than it was. When you shut a car door upon it. Ah! Jee-whiz! You comprawney voo, do you not? We thought you would. How mute is the eloquence then ? Let us draw the veil over the dreadful scene. Or when you are sewing on a button, and ipm the needle clear through the end of it! Hi, hi, Ho, Jimmineddy! Or you have lost a suspender. Not lost, but gone up your back. In feeling for it, you run a stray pin under your finger nail, about fourteen inches, apparently. Held, oh Baal! When you reach under a locking chair, to pick up your pencil, and a fat man rocks back on your fingers! Eheu! hei! vaha! Jimminy pelt! When you lift off a red-hot lamp chimney with your bare hand. Murder! When you take a base ball from the bat with the end of i£ Whoop! When it is hooked into your buttonhole by a man-who has a new plan for retiring the silver dollar, or has invented a safety Car coupler. Oh death! These are jjhe times when it is not so mutely mute”as its intense mutability would seem to warrant It is somewhat muter when the man from whom you are proposing to borrow $25 until next day, slowly draws down the corner of his left eye with it, as though to invite you to prospect for indications of spring in the corner “when the corners waving, Annie dear. 5 ' O, sad muteness.

When the friend to whom you are explaining the bonanza beauties of a little Western land deal into which you can let him come, gazes at you fixedly, and silently lays his eloquent fore finger alongside of his unflinching nose. O, pitifulmiscue 1 When the head waiter pins you with his distant finger and points you to the last table in the darkest corner of the long dining room. O, slow starvation! When the man taps with his finger on the counter to indicate the place where the cash must repose e’er he weigheth out the groceries. O, elequent brevity ! When he; her father, stands at the parlor door and voicelessly points at the clock, and mayhap, to the door. ! ... . .... . After all, it is a quest iop if the mute eloquence of the unspoken finger be .not the greatest eloquence. In fact, it is. — R. J. Burdette.