the movement in its inception soon
became aware of their mistake, and abandoned all connection therewith.
Others followed at a later date, and about the year 1873 a general
disbandment ensued, leaving only guerillas in the field.

CHAPTER XIX.

THE LAST OF THE K.'S.

A Popular Fallacy--Karl Konstant Esq.--A Fit Companion for the
Wandering Jew--Awaiting Events--The First Visitation--An Intricate
Subject for the Hospitals and Doctors--Getting Even with the
Latter--Put Away--Yellow Jack on a Raid--K. K. K., Esq., in his
Prison Cell--Promoted to the Hospital--An Uncommon Defiance--A
Picturesque Outside--Waiting for the End--K. Konstant Kain Struggles
back to Shore--"Do not Weep"--A Critical Moment--A New Cast and
entire Change of Scenery--"Gruel" did it--Waited upon by a Deputation
of Citizens--"Young Man, Go West"--The New Orleans
Pest-House--Konfounded, Krooked Konundrum.

Some dealer in those cheap apothegms which commend themselves to the
public gullibility, through the public tendency to moralize concerning
subjects of which it knows nothing, has rendered himself famous, and the
great majority of mankind asses, by the announcement that "everything must
have an end." Without a design of reopening a dead controversy, or so much
as mentioning the word "fossil," we must be permitted to record a belief
that the author of this sage prophecy had never heard of the
mathematician's war involving the crookedness of the half circle, and was
grossly uninformed on the topic of the great Woman's Rights movement and
those leaders who have concerned themselves about its temperature for the
past two hundred years. And while the cause of orthodoxy might be safely
entrusted to two such examples of

"The few immortal _things_
That were not born to die,"

it is in no sense of triumphing over a fallen adversary that we add the
conviction that the beaming countenance of Karl Konstant Kain, the last of
the K.'s, had never dawned upon this prophet's sense of the ridiculous.

We shall introduce him to the reader as he was, and is, and without any
reference to a future--that with him is but a name, a fleeting shadow. And
in order that this reminiscence may be perfect, it will be needful to
relate that he had reached, at this period of his existence, a climax of
loneliness and gaunt despair that would have rendered him a fit companion
for the "Wandering Jew," and a most unfit o