The Galena (Illinois) Gazette tells a curious story. On a recent Sunday afternoon the Gate City, the first boat of the season, landed at its wharf in that city, whither a large crowd of people were attracted. The superintendent of a certain Sunday-school noticed the crowd on his way to his school, and mentally sighed at the thought that many of his flock might be there. He was, however, delighted to find teachers and scholars all in their accustomed places, and presently addressed them, saying that he was proud that not even the first boat of the season had drawn away one of them. The Gazette says:

“In the twinkling of an eye there was a general stampede for the door, and when that Sunday-school superintendent arose from the floor, where he had been violently thrown by the retreating mass, and had collected his thoughts sufficiently to determine in his own mind whether he was himself or some one else, he cast his eyes about the room, and through the partially settled dust he made the sad discovery that he was alone with several rows of empty benches. His scholars had remained in blissful ignorance of the news until he had given them the cue.” (“Home and Foreign Gossip,” Harper’s Weekly 18 [2 May 74]: 379)

Borrowed Plumage.

Who now wears his laurels in peace? They are snatched from every brow. No poet is original, no orator but borrows his finest imagery, no [romancist?] but has stolen his plots and best characters; and, if critics cannot discover any other source from whence an apparent novel idea is obtained, they will prove to demonstration that the author has plag[i]arised himself. This is an age of literary piracy; and our boast is of the discovery that every person who ever wrote or spoke did no more at best than to dress up other persons’ ideas in a new form. Proceeding on the assumption that “there is nothing new under the sun,” we have persuaded ourselves to believe that somebody thought of everything before anybody else. The really original man must have existed in prehistoric times, for history manifests that originality is undiscoverable. It is now our turn to be dethroned from our pedestal by the shafts of criticism at the hands of the valiant literary knight who presides over the “Editor’s Drawer” of Harper’s Monthly. The particular Bohemian referred to has been crusading among the musty manuscript[s] of his ideal of originality” Mark Twain (?) and has made the discovery that the story published some months ago in the Galena Gazette, entitled “The First Boat of the Season,” was originally told by the aforesaid great humorist. The assumption of the Harper’s Monthly critic inspires us to say in the language of a certain gentleman who stole the remark from somebody else, “Am I Ami, or am I not Ami? If I am not Ami, who in the d” 1 am I?” This then, is our reply to the unjust, untrue, unprofessional, unpolicied, unpracticable, unprincipled and ridiculously absurd assumption that we have ever strutted under borrowed plumage. (J. B. Brown 1874 [bib13379])

opening of navigation on the Galena river . . . by the arrival, in this city, yesterday, of the steamer Gate City. . . . She came splendidly into port about 2 p. m., and was greeted thither by about a thousand or two small boys who had left the Sunday School to run itself, in order to see this, the first event of the kind for the season. (J. B. Brown 1874 [bib13377])