Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 May 1875 — He Didn’t Want to Run. [ARTICLE]

He Didn’t Want to Run.

The predecessor of our present Coroner; Barney Maginn, was a man named Walsh. He was telling me the other day about the singular circumstances attending his election to the office. “ You know,” said Mr. Walsh, “ that I didn’t want that position. When they talked of nominating me I told them, says I: ‘ It’s no use; you needn’t elect me; I’m not going to serve* D’you s’pose I’m going to gWe up a respectable business to become a kind of State bodysnatcher? D’you imagine I’m going to occupy my time skeeling about over this county mauling dpad people, and plunging things into them, and setting on them to find out what killed them? Well, I just ain’t. I’m no professional corpseinvestigator. I’m down on this postmortem foolery anyway. I don’t intend to spend my life rassling with bones lying all around the State. There’s no sense in it. Why don’t you chuck them into the sepulcher and be done with it? When a man’s bio wed up with gunpowder and comes down in mince meat it don’t interest me to know what killed him; so you needn’t make me Coroner, for I won’t serve.’ “ Well, sir, do you believe that those fellers persisted in nominating me on the Republican ticket! Yes, they did; actually put me up as a candidate. So I published a letter declining the nomination ; but they absolutely had the insufferable cheek to keep me on the ticket and to hold mass meetings, at which they made speeches in my favor. I was mad as thunder about it, because it showed such a scand’lous disregard of my feelings; and so I chummed in with the Democrats, and for about two months I went around to the Democratic mass meetings and spoke against myself and in favor of the opposition candidate. I thought I had them for sure, because I knew more about my own failings than those other fellers aid, and I enlarged upon them until I made myself out — well, I just heaped up the iniquity until I used to go home feeling that I was a good deal wickeder sinner than I ever thought I was before. It did me good, too. I reformed. I’ve been a better man ever since.

“ Now you’d a thought people would a considered me pretty fair authority about my own unfitness for the office, but I hope I may be killed and eaten if the citizens oi this county positively didn’t go to the polls and elect me by about 800 majority. They did, indeed. I was the worst cut up of any man you ever saw. I had repeaters around at the polls, too, voting for the Democratic candidate, and I paid four of the judges to falsify the returns so as to return him. But it was no use; the majority was too big. They had me in a hole. And on election night the Republican Executive Committee came round to serenade me. and as soon as the band struck up I opened on theUi with a shot-gun and wounded the bass-drummer in the leg. But they kept on playing, and after a while when they stopped they poked some congratulatory resolutions under the front door, and gave me three cheers and went home. I was never so annoyed in my life. “ Then they sent me round my certificate of election; but I refused to receive it, and as sure as I’m alive those fellers grabbed me and held me while Bill Harmer rammed that certificate into my coat-pocket, and then they all quit. The next day a man was run over on the railroad and they wanted me to tend to him. But I had my mad up and I wouldn’t. So what does the Sheriff do but come here with a gang of police and carry me oat there by force? And he scared up a jury, which brought in a verdict. Then they wanted me to take the fees, but I wouldn’t touch them. I said I wasn’t going to give my sanction to the proceedings. But of course it was no use. I thought I was living in a free country, but I wasn’t. The Sheriff drew the money and got a mandamus from the Court, and he came here one day while I was at dinner. When I said I wouldn’t touch a dollar of it he drew a pistol and said if I didn’t take those funds he’d blow my brains out. So what was a man to do? I resigned fifteen times; but somehow those resignations were suppressed. I never heard from them. Well, sir, at last I caved, and for three years I kept skirmishing around perfectly disgusted, meditating over folks that had died suddenly and inquiring about old, dilapidated cadavers that were picked, up in various places. li And, do you know that, on toward the end of my term, they had the face to try to nominate me againl It’s a positive fact. Those politicians wanted me to run again; said I was the most popular Coroner the county ever had; said that everybody liked my way of handling a corpse, it was so full of feeling and sympathy, and a lot more slush like that!'But what did I do? I wasn’t going to run any such risk again. I wasn’t going to submit to such despotism as that more’n once, anyway. So I slid up to the city, and the day before the convention met I sent word down that I was dead. Circulated a report that I’d been killed by falling oli a ferry-boat.' Then they hung the convention hall in black and passed resolutions of rtespect,and then they nominated Barney Maginn. “On the day after election I turned up, and you never sj>w men look so miserable, so cut to the heart, as those politicians. They said it was an infamous shame to play it on them that way, and they declared that they’d run me for Sheriff at the next election to make up for it. If they do I’m going to move for good. I’m going to sail for Colorado or some other decent {lace, where thev’ll let a man alone, ’ll die in my tracts before I’ll ever take another office in this county. I will, now mind me!” — Max Adeler , in New York Weekly. —lt takes more feed to make a pound of beef than a pound of butter, yet the One sells for five to eight cents and the other for thirty. A good cow will make 209 pounds of butter in a season, worth, say, sixty dollars, while the same feed fed to a dry cow will hardly add one-fourth that amount t* her value. It would be cheaper, therefore, to sell the dry cow in the spring for what she would bring and invest the money in a new milch cow than to attempt to fatten her to turn off in the fall. — Farmers' Union. —Kate Chase Sprague, upon learning that the library of her father, the late Chief Justice Chase, was to be Bold at auction in Washington, has telegraphed from Europe forbidding the sale. She intends to purchase and preserve it in the family. *. Before all our centennial celebrations are finished the history of tl|£ Revolution will have repeated itself—on paper—a good many times. .-a. :