THE ORPHEUS CLUB.

Patea Mail, Volume II, Issue 177, 20 December 1876, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE ORPHEUS CLUB.

Nobody ever knew precisely whose fault it was, but it caused a good deal of unpleasant feeling at the time. The Orpheus Club had just been organised, 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 the dying. However, that was what the people outside said ; and it happened, just about the time that the club began to sing, that Mrs 'Dougherty, who lives on the first floor of the building, opened her windows to let out the smoke that was caused by the chimney not drawing. Several passers-by thought the house was on fire, and when the club commenced, to howl, they let on'that'they thought the family in the second storey 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 shouted —“ Fire !” and in a couple of minutes or so the fireengine came tearing round the corner, and the club, all the time perfectly unconscious of the excitement, kept right on upstairs there, screeching out the chorus. So that by the time the firemen got the hose on the plug, there were about eight hundred I 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 firemen at last got so perfectly frantic about the agonising screams of those roasting people, that he smashed in the front door with an axe, and rushing in, carried Mrs Dougherty down the steps, she screaming all the time with the impression that the man was some kind of a robber who had come to snatch her .away from her home, and fly with her to some damp cave, so that he could marry her. And when the president of the clnb came to the 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 and turned in a 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 the members came crowding down the stairs wet through, but not scorched, and mad as fury, the news gradually spread through the crowd that there was not 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 foreman, who dodged down the alley, 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 while he carried her down the steps. The Orpheus Club practises now out in the fields.—American paper, i *