Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 August 1876 — The Orpheus Club. [ARTICLE]

The Orpheus Club.

Nobody ever knew*' precisely whose fault it w'as, but it caused a good deal of unpleasant feeling at the time. The Orpheus Club had just been organized, and it had met to have its first rehearsal. It began by trying to sing the Hallelujah Chorus. Now . I know, of course, that some of the members couldn’t sing much, and when the crowd first started in on the chorus maybe they really did make a kind of an uproarious noise; but nobody will make me believe that it sounded like the shrieks and groans of tlie dying. However, that waa what the people outside said; and it happened JustabouT the time that the Club began to sing, that Mrs. Dougherty, who lives on the first floor of the building ojiened her windows to let out the smoke that was caused by the chimney not drawing. Several pass-ers-by thought the house was a fire, and when the Club commenced to howl they let on that they thought the family in the second story was being burned limb from limb by the cruel flames, and were emitting fiendish and heart-rending yells in the midst of their suffering. Anyway somebody holloaed “ fire!” and then somebody else started the alarm bell, and in a couple of minutes or so the fire company ertne tearing around the corner, wild with anxiety to extinguish the conflagration. And the Club, all the time perfectly unconscious of the excitement, kept right on up stairs there, screeching the Hallelujah Chorus. 8o that by the time the firemen got the hose screwed on the plug, there were about eight hundred people in front of the house demanding to know why somebody didn’t get a ladder and rescue those wretched victims from an awful death. And the foreman of the company at last got so perfectly frantic about the agonizing screams of those roasting people, that he smashed in the front door with an ax, and rushing in, carried Mrs. Dougherty down the steps, she screaming all the time with the impression that the foreman was some kind of a robber who had come to snatch her away from her home and fly with her to some damp cave in the mountains, so that he could marry her. And w hen the President of the Orpheus Club came to tlie window to see what was the matter, he had hardly got his nose against the glass before a fireman upon the ladder smashed the sash with a spanner and turned in a two-inch stream, which washed the president across the room and caused the other members to howl louder than ever. So, for a while it was mighty exciting, and at last when tlie members came crowding down the stairs wet through, but not a bit scorched, and mad as fury, the news gradually spread through the crowd that there wasn’t a fire after all. Then, after a bit they shut off steam on the engine and rolled up their things and went home, all except the foremax, who dodged down tlie alley and took to the open country closely pursued by Mrs. Dougherty with a club, and bent, as she informed the bystanders, Upon killing the man who dragged her from her home and hugged her Willie he carried her down the steps, The Orpheus Club practice snow out in the woods. —Max Adder , in N. T. Weekly.