A Modern Dogberry

— It is generally admitted that the salient types of humanity, simple, sublime, or grotesque, as delineated by the great universal writers, are always reappearing on the scene. Sometimes, indeed, they turn up with the identical words in their mouths which were given them to say by the masters of fiction. For instance, I am almost ready to give deposition that Dogberry but lately has been seen in the flesh: in official character a little different from his counterpart in the historic page which all remember ; for this time Dogberry was a young man of Yankee extraction, the conductor of a horse car in the city of New York. We had reached the junction of two lines, and some of the occupants of our car were to be “ transferred.”Among these was a bewildered old dame, speaking no other word save that she had brought from the Vaterland. Our kind-hearted Dogberry (for kind-hearted he was, be it placed to his credit), after vain endeavors of a verbal character, proceeded to direct his Teutonic passenger by conducting her a few steps towards the cross-town car. In a moment he returned, his honest face reddening with indignation. “If ever I help a woman agin, I ’ll know it ! She did nothin’ but call me ‘donkey, donkey ’! ” A passenger suggested that she was thanking him in her own language, but he still maintained his original opinion. “She called me donkey, and don’t you forgit it !” It is safe to say that Dogberry is still “ donkey ” to those who listened to his asseverations, and I have even written him down so, which is no less in keeping with his own injunction than with that of his ancient prototype.