What Methuselah Thinks of Dr. Osler

The Virgin Throned in the West: A Tabloid Tangle of Love and History

“Boss” Tweed on Tainted Money, With Some Nonsense Definitions of Fads and Finance

How the Creation Centered About a Petticoat: A Revised Version of Darwin’s “Ascent of Man”

When Adam Was a Boy: Random Recollections of the Oldest Inhabitant

Election Day Beyond The Styx

Noah’s Personally-Conducted Excursion to Earth

The Man With the Megaphone

Epilogue. The Land of Fulfilled Desire

 Pleasantries in Passing.

JOHN KENDRICK BANGS, House-boat-on-the-Styx, care The Century Association, New York—Perhaps you, as self-elected jester at the court of the Son of the Morning, will wonder that a newspaper man should deliberately set out on a pilgrimage to Hades. I have often been told I ought to go there, but I pause on the banks of the Styx for reflection ere I rush in where all but fools fear to tread. Yet in mirroring forth the doings of the diocese of Bishop Beelzebub, I shall cast no reflections save on the dead, who can reflect no more, and like that other clown, more famous than I, will “use the devil himself with courtesy.” Having been an iconoclast, and as it is only a step from the breaking of idols to the smashing of trusts, I have had the temerity to dream of ending the monopoly of the particular section of the universe hitherto sacred to Lucifer and Bangs. As you have a copyright on Hades, you could make it hot for me if I invaded your territory without permission, so I ask you for a “dead head” pass. I don’t claim more than my rightful share; there will still be room enough for both of us to roast chestnuts on the other side of the Styx.

Pardon this discomfiture of sense by nonsense, yet I am not going to make an excuse for this abuse of absurdities, for what is nonsense but the flower of sense, the wine of wit, the harmony of 

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