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Updated: June 14, 2025
Three months later, when the Methodists opened their regular winter revival, Mehronay, becoming enraged at what he called the tin-horn clothes of the travelling evangelist conducting the meetings, began to make fun of him in the paper; and, as a revivalist in a church is a sacred person while the meetings are going on, we had to kill Mehronay's items about the revival; whereupon, his professional pride being hurt, Mehronay went forth into the streets, got haughtily drunk, and strutted up and down Main Street scattering sirs and misters and madams about so lavishly that men who did not appreciate his condition thought he had gone mad.
The office devil, who was late mailing the papers that night, says that about seven o'clock Mehronay came in singing "Jean, Jean, my Bonnie Jean," and that he went to his trunk, took out his celluloid cuffs, a new sky-blue and shell-pink necktie that none of us had seen before, a clean paper collar and the boy, who probably was mistaken, swears Mehronay also took his white shirt in a bundle which he proudly tucked under his arm and toddled out of the office whistling a wedding march.
One morning when we were sitting in the office before going out to the street for the morning's grist, Mehronay dog-eared a fat piece of copy and jabbed it on the hook as he started for the door. "My boy was drunk last night," he said. "Me and his mother felt so bad over it that I gave him a pretty straight talk this morning. There it is." The office dropped its jaw and bugged its eyes.
But that was an office mystery. We never have solved it, and no one had the courage to tease Mehronay about it the next morning.
All day Saturday, in order to square himself with the printers who set up his sermon, and to rehabilitate himself in the graces of the others about the office who knew of his weakness, Mehronay turned in the gayest lot of copy that he had ever written.
There was a smile in every one of them, and if he wrote more than ten lines there was a laugh. It was Mehronay who referred to Huddleson's livery-stable joint where the old soaks got their beer in a stall and salted it from the feed-box as "a gilded palace of sin."
Mehronay originated the fiction that there was an association in town formed to insure its members against wedding invitations which, in case of loss, paid the afflicted member a pickle dish or a napkin ring, to present as his offering to the bride.
While we were sitting in judgment on poor Red Martin, in toddled Simon Mehronay, who is visiting in town from New York in the company of the vestal virgin who had, as he expressed it, snatched him as a brand from the burning. Mehronay has been gone from town nearly twenty years, and until they told him he did not know how Red Martin had fallen.
Mehronay started a mythical Widowers' Protective Foot-racing Society, and the town had great sport with the old boys whose names he used so wittily that it transcended impudence. Mehronay got up a long list of husbands who wiped dishes when the family was "out of a girl," as our people say, and organised them into a union to strike for their altars and their kitchen fires.
But Miss Larrabee that was who used to edit the society page for our paper, but who now lives in New York told us when she was home that as she was walking down Fourth Avenue one winter day when the street was empty, she saw Mehronay standing before the window of a liquor store looking intently at the display of bottled goods before him.
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