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                                 CONTENTS
                                                          PAGE

  LET DAD AND SON BEWARE!                                    2

  ADVENTS AND PUBLIC PLUNDERERS.                             3

  THE MAYOR AND CHARLEY.                                     6

  LIFE OF STEPHEN H. BRANCH.                                 8




  [Illustration: STEPHEN H. BRANCH’S ALLIGATOR.
  Volume I.—No. 4.]      SATURDAY, MAY 15, 1858.      [Price 2 Cents.]


                    STEPHEN H. BRANCH’S ALLIGATOR.




Let Dad and Son Beware!


Peter Cooper and Mayor Tiemann are old and sacred friends of George
W. Matsell, who are more familiar with each other than they are
with the Bible, or morning and evening prayers. Mayor Tiemann was
elected with the express condition that Matsell should be restored
to his old position, and Peter Cooper and Mayor Tiemann, and James
W. Gerard, and Ambrose C. Kingsland are at work for their lives to
effect the restoration of Matsell, and all impends on the election of
a Commissioner in place of the noble Perrit. Matsell was in the city
at the last Mayoralty election, conspiring against Wood, who saved him
from the scaffold, after we convicted him of alienage and perjury,
and the dastard and sacrilegious abjuration of his country. And at
the late election, he stabbed his benefactor down in the dust, in the
assassin’s darkness, and did not play Brutus for the public virtue, but
to consummate his restoration to an office (he had always degraded)
which was in the contract between himself and Cooper, Tiemann, Gerard,
and Kingsland, and other slavish friends. We know them all and the
rendezvous of all their kindred Diavolos, whose names would fill the
jaws of the _Alligator_. Matsell professed to enter the city from
Iowa with flags and music on the day after Tiemann’s election, but he
was in the city long before, and concealed in as dark a cavern as the
odious Cataline, while conspiring to foil the patriotic Cicero, and
consign the eternal city to a million thieves. And we now warn Cooper,
Tiemann, Gerard, and Kingsland to beware. For if they foist Matsell on
the city through the purchase of Nye or Bowen with Mayoralty, Street
Commissioner, or the pap of the Mayor’s Executive vassals, we will make
disclosures that will make them stare like affrighted cats, (Gerard _a
la_ he-cat, and the others _a la_ she-cats,) and rock the city to its
carbonic entrails. Talmadge must remain, although he annoyed his nurse
and mother when a brat, and so did we; and in boyhood and early manhood
we both had worms, and raised Sancho Panza,

  And we rambled around the town,
  And saw perhaps Miss Julia Brown,

as we may develop in the publication of our funny reminiscences;
but we are both growing old, and told our experience at the recent
revival, and asked admission as pious pilgrims, when the deacons said
that we should both be put on five year’s trial, but we begged so hard
they let us in. Talmadge joined the Presbyterians, and he looks pale
and pensive, but we joined the noisy Methodists, and look mighty
cheerful, and sing and dance, and scream like the devil in delirium
tremens, and nervous neighbors murmur at our thundering methodistic
demonstrations. Talmadge as Recorder was too kind and lenient, but he
erred on the side of humanity, which is preferable to err on the side
of a pale and icy and bloodless liver, though we should steer between
the heart and liver, and consign the culprits to the pits and gulches
of the navel, where the voracious worms could soon devour them. The
valor of Talmadge conquered the ruffians of Astor Place, and he has a
Roman and Spartan nature, and is as generous and magnanimous as Clay
or Webster, whom he loved as his own big heart. No man ever had a more
genial or sympathising bosom, than Frederick A. Talmadge. And William
Curtis Noyes married his favorite daughter, and while, the spotless
Noyes walks the velvet earth, and his father-in-law is