A PERSECUTED CANDIDATE.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXI, Issue 4910, 16 December 1876, Page 2 (Supplement)

A PERSECUTED CANDIDATE.

“No, sir, I’ll never run for office again,” said Judge Pitman, just after the last election in our State. “ You know when they came and asked me if I’d accept a nomination to the Legislature, they told me that the whole community wanted me to run, and that I was certain to be elected because T was a man whose character was so good that nobody could find fault with it. I thought so myself, and I agreed to run: and accordingly they nominated me. , Well, sir, the very next morning the Argus came out. with an assertion that I had been detected in stealing chickens, and it gave a full history of the case, together with pictures of the chickens, and after darkly hinting that since abandoning chicken stealing I had been continually engaged in other forms of robbery, it asked if the people of this State wanted to see a chicken-thief making laws: for them. And the mischief of it was that I did hook a couple of chickens from my grandmother’s coop when I was a small boy, but how’n the thunder they ever found it out beats me. It was fifty-two years ago. “Now, look at my nose 1 , ’Taint much of a nose for beauty is it? I know well enough that it’s crooked. But nobody ever alluded to it until I was nominated, and then the Argus said that there was a tradition that I had the nose smashed around sideways during my career as a prize-fighter, although some people insisted that I had run it hard against a door while I was drunk. And then all the, illustrated papers in the State began to publish pictures of me with a nose like the jibsheet of an oyster sloop, only twisted round sideways, until .1 looked .as if I was tied to half a ton of crooked proboscis, and one of them said that when I sneezed on the front porch the concussion acted like a boomerang and blew the back door open. . ; “ And then the ytaokled me about my was record. You know I was out wit the militia. And the Argus published a letter from a maa who said that during the battle of Gettysburg I was hid in a refrigerator in a. cellar in the town, pretending that I was ordered there to mount guard over some rations of cold beef. And the Argus asserted that the only military manoeuvre I was ever good at was falling back; that whenever the enemy was expected to be approaching I always made a bee-line for Nova Scotia, and never turned up until after the fight but once, and then we were surprised, and I fired my musket so wildly that I shot my own .colonel ,in the leg, and surrendered to art Irishman who belonged to our regiment, and who came up to me to borrow a plug of tobacco. To tell the truth, I wasn’t much of a fighting man, but how in the mischief they found out about that refrigerator gets me. Awful, isn’t it ? I wouldn’t have minded it so much only they got up a poster and stuck it around the streets, and headed it ‘ Pitman’s War Record,’ and put on it a picture of me with a monstrous lopsided nose sitting inside that refrigerator gnawing at a bone out of the roast beef.

“ And then as the campaign went along they accused me of having delirium, tremens, of beating my wife, of wiping my nose on my sleeve, of robbing a bank, of selling my dead aunt to a medical college, and of holding the doctrine that the whale didn’t swallow Jonah, and that when Moses crossed the Red Sea he paddled oyer in a boat. The Argus said that if my wife dared to tell how I treated her the community would he filled with horror, but anybody might see for themselves who would notice that her back hair was all thinned out, . and said that I had a wen on my leg that unfitted me for active duty anyhow, even if I had not forfeited all claim to public confidence by turning my grandfather out of doors when he was dying of consumption, and then setting my dog on him, and making the aged man roost in a mulberry tree on the coldest night last winter for fear of being eaten up. , - “ People began to avoid me on the street, the general impression' prevailed that I was a desperate and hardened villain. I might have stood that, but you know the way they levied on me for expenses was awful. There was that brass baud. I kept that brass band in luxury for three months ; and it used to come around' and serenade me three nights in the week, and, wake all the babies in the neighborhood. 'l'lost: two hundred votes in consequence of those wakened babies. Then the clubs would come - and call me out tor a speech,; and when I would* get through I would have to ask them in for a feed, and they would stay there 1 and howl until: four o’clock in the mdruing, and get drunk, and: fight, and smash the furniture, and bleed over: the carpets. Then they would assess me for a mass meeting, and adjourn. I handed but cash! for posters and rum, and brass bands, and bar-i .becues, and fireworks, and torchlight processions, and transparencies, and for flags, aridthe ; Argus all the time accusing me of buying up; votes and having repeaters in my pay. j . “The night of the election, the brass band and the club came round to congratulate me’ on my success, and after having a final spree] and a concluding riot in the parlor, I went to. bed,' glad I had won anyhow. The first thing I saw in the Argus in the morning was the 1 announcement that the hoary-headed chicken-* stealer had' been - beaten by two thousand! majority, and would have to keep his eccentric, nose at home, and spend his time in reflecting that a free people would never elect to a responsible office a man who would tree his; consumptive'grandfather and traffic in the remains of his aimt. So that lets me out in' polities. When I-run for office again, you chuck ine right into an insane asylum,’ —Max 'Adder.-' '■>•< ! 1 ’