around a rusty stove choked with soggy driftwood, he drinks sod-corn from a tin cup, plays "old sledge" upon the head of an empty keg, and reels home at nightfall, yelling through the timber, to his squalid cabin.

A score of lean, hungry curs pour in a canine cataract over the worm-fence by the horse-block as their master approaches, baying deep-mouthed welcome, filling the chambers of the forests with hoarse reverberations, mingled with an explosion of oaths and frantic imprecations. Snoring the night away in drunken slumber under a heap of gray blankets, he crawls into his muddy jeans at sun-up, takes a gurgling drink from a flat black bottle stoppered with a cob, goes to the log-pile by the front door, and with a dull ax slabs off an armful of green cottonwood to make a fire for breakfast, which consists of the inevitable "meat and bread" and a decoction of coffee burned to charcoal and drank without milk or sugar. Another pull at the bottle, a few grains of quinine if it is "ager" day, a "chaw" of navy, and the repast is finished. The sweet delights of home have been enjoyed, and the spiritual creature goes forth, invigorated for the struggle of life, to repeat the exploits of every yesterday of his existence.

Ingalls knew more of his hero than he revealed, and admitted, long afterwards, that he was bright

and extremely interesting. He had been a dragoon in the Mexican War. He became "a private in that noble army of chivalry which marched to Kansas to fight the Puritan idea" in border-ruffian days. At Marysville, December 21, 1857, he voted twenty-five times for the Lecompton constitution before noon. His "frame was of unearthly longitude and unspeakable emaciation", and these qualities fastened on him the sobriquet of "Shanghai", whence Ingalls derived "Shang", though he says he could never discover its origin. His name was Jonathan Gardner Lang. He was "jugfisherman, melon-raiser, truck-patch farmer, and town-drunkard", a later biography says. He lived at Sumner, and Ingalls never tired of hearing his stories, going with him sometimes in his boat to "jug" for catfish. He gives us this description of his "typical grandee":

I have heretofore alluded to Shang as the typical grandee of this ichthyological peerage. Whence he derived the appellation by which he was uniformly known, I could never satisfactorily ascertain. Whether it was his ancestral title, or merely a playful pseudonym bestowed upon him by some familiar friend in affection's most endearing hours, never disclosed. Of his

was

birth, his parentage, his antecedents, it were equally vain to inquire. He was unintentionally begotten in a concupiscence as idle and thoughtless as that of dogs or flies or swine. It has been surmised that he was evolved from the minor consciousness of his own squalor, but this must always remain a matter of conjecture.

To the most minute observer, his age was a question of the gravest doubt. He might have been thirty, he might have been a century, with no violation of the probabilities. His hair was a sandy sorrel, something like a Rembrandt interior, and strayed around his freckled scalp like the toplayer of a hayrick in a tornado. His eyes were two ulcers half filled with pale-blue starch. A thin, sharp nose projected above a lipless mouth that seemed always upon the point of breaking into the most grievous lamentations, and never opened save to take whiskey and tobacco in and let oaths and saliva out. A long, slender neck, yellow and wrinkled after the manner of a lizard's belly, bore this dome of thought upon its summit, itself projecting from a miscellaneous assortment of gents' furnishing goods, which covered a frame of unearthly longitude and unspeakable emaciation. Thorns and thongs supplied the place of buttons upon the costume of this Brummel of the bottom, coarsely patched beyond recognition of the original fabric. The coat had been

constructed for a giant, the pants for a pigmy. They were too long in the waist and too short in the leg, and flapped loosely around his shrunk shanks high above the point where his fearful feet were partially concealed by mismated shoes that permitted his great toes to peer from their gaping integuments, like the heads of two snakes of a novel species and uncommon fetor. The princely phenomenon was topped with a hat that had neither band nor brim nor crown;

"If that could shape be called which shape had none”.

His voice was high, shrill, and querulous, and his manner an odd mixture of fawning servility and apprehensive effrontery at the sight of a "damned Yankee Abolitionist", whom he hated and feared next to a negro who was not a slave.

Contemplating with horror the possibility of the victory of Shang in the Kansas conflict, Ingalls exclaims:

It is appalling to reflect what the condition of Kansas would have been to-day had its destiny been left in the hands of Shang and those of his associates who first did its voting and attempted to frame its institutions. A few hundred musheating chawbacons, her only population, would still have been chasing their razor-backed hogs through the thickets of black-jack, and jugging

for catfish in the chutes of the Missouri and the Kaw.

Shang was not wholly illiterate, for he read the brilliant article of which he was the hero. His indignation was great; his wrath was kindled against the author. He resolved to "have the law" on his traducer, having been advised thereto by that tout of the law known as the "jackleg", denominated in these degenerate days by the purulent epithet of "snitch". In his copy of the Kansas Magazine, Ingalls made notation of the settlement with Shang, as follows:

as

This delineation was popularly supposed to be drawn from life. Its original was alleged to be Jonathan G. Lang, a resident of Sumner, Atchison Co., since 1858. He was a native of Kentucky (Carroll Co.), and was commonly known "Shanghai", from the longitude of his neck and legs. The sketch can hardly be called an exaggeration, though it has some of the elements of caricature. Lang thought it was intended for him, and I finally restored the entente cordiale by presenting him with a sack of flour and some "side meat".