The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X)
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Title: The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X)
Editor: Marshall P. Wilder
Release date: January 26, 2008 [eBook #24434]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24434
Credits: Produced by Suzanne Lybarger, Annie McGuire, Brian Janes
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WIT AND HUMOR OF AMERICA, VOLUME X (OF X) ***
Produced by Suzanne Lybarger, Annie McGuire, Brian Janes
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net
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Transcriber's Note: To aid in finding items through
the index, the following list contains the page
numbers covered in each volume:
Volume 1 - 1 - 220
Volume 2 - 221 - 402
Volume 3 - 403 - 584
Volume 4 - 585 - 802
Volume 5 is not Library Edition and has
different page numbering
Volume 6 - 985 - 1216
Volume 7 - 1217 - 1398
Volume 8 - 1399 - 1634
Volume 9 - 1635 - 1800
Volume 10 - 1801 - 2042
**********************************************************
Library Edition
THE WIT AND HUMOR OF AMERICA
In Ten Volumes
VOL. X
[Illustration: FRANK L. STANTON]
THE WIT AND HUMOR OF AMERICA
EDITED BY MARSHALL P. WILDER
_Volume X_
Funk & Wagnalls Company
New York and London
Copyright MDCCCCVII, BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
Copyright MDCCCCXI, THE THWING COMPANY
CONTENTS
PAGE
Araminta and the Automobile Charles Battell Loomis 1825
At Aunty's House James Whitcomb Riley 2007
Backsliding Brother, The Frank L. Stanton 1972
Biggs' Bar Howard D. Sutherland 1967
Bookworm's Plaint, A Clinton Scollard 1878
Breitmann in Politics Charles Godfrey Leland 1943
Concord Love Song, A James Jeffrey Roche 1913
Contentment Oliver Wendell Holmes 1952
Demon of the Study, The John Greenleaf Whittier 1869
Der Oak Und Der Vine Charles Follen Adams 1823
Double-Dyed Deceiver, A O. Henry 1927
Dum Vivimus Vigilamus John Paul 2005
Evidence in the Case of
Smith vs. Jones, The Samuel L. Clemens 1918
Fall Styles in Faces Wallace Irwin 1992
"Festina Lente" Robert J. Burdette 2016
Genial Idiot Discusses Leap
Year, The John Kendrick Bangs 2018
Great Prize Fight, The Samuel L. Clemens 1903
Had a Set of Double Teeth Holman F. Day 1994
Height of the Ridiculous, The Oliver Wendell Holmes 1832
Her Brother: Enfant Terrible Edmund L. Sabin 2001
Hezekiah Bedott's Opinion Frances M. Whicher 1893
His Grandmother's Way Frank L. Stanton 1901
Invisible Prince, The Henry Harland 1836
Jackpot, The Ironquill 2003
Jacob Phoebe Cary 1898
Johnny's Pa Wilbur D. Nesbit 1802
Lay of Ancient Rome, A Thomas Ybarra 2013
Little Bopeep and Little Boy Blue Samuel Minturn Peck 2015
Love Song Charles Godfrey Leland 1950
Maxims Benjamin Franklin 1804
Meeting, The S. E. Riser 1915
Mister Rabbit's Love Affair Frank L. Stanton 1887
Mother of Four, A Juliet Wilbor Tompkins 1976
Mothers' Meeting, A Madeline Bridges 1886
Nevada Sketches Samuel L. Clemens 1805
New Year Idyl, A Eugene Field 2011
Old-Time Singer, An Frank L. Stanton 1941
Oncl' Antoine on 'Change Wallace Bruce Amsbary 1891
Our Hired Girl James Whitcomb Riley 1888
Plain Language from Truthful James Bret Harte 1997
Poe-'em of Passion, A Charles F. Lummis 1879
Possession William J. Lampton 2000
Real Diary of a Real Boy, The Henry A. Shute 1881
Reason, The Ironquill 1890
Rubaiyat of Mathieu Lattellier Wallace Bruce Amsbary 1965
Settin' by the Fire Frank L. Stanton 1821
Shining Mark, A Ironquill 1877
"There's a Bower of Bean-Vines" Phoebe Cary 1916
To Bary Jade Charles Follen Adams 1899
Tom's Money Harriett Prescott Spofford 1955
Trial that Job Missed, The Kennett Harris 1917
Trouble-Proof Edwin L. Sabin 1801
Uncle Bentley and the Roosters Hayden Carruth 1873
Unsatisfied Yearning R. K. Munkittrick 1835
What Lack We Yet Robert J. Burdette 1897
When Lovely Woman Phoebe Cary 1834
Whisperer, The Ironquill 1822
Why Wait for Death and Time? Bert Leston Taylor 1866
Willy and the Lady Gelett Burgess 2009
Winter Dusk R. K. Munkittrick 1975
Winter Joys Eugene Field 1868
Ye Legende of Sir Yroncladde Wilbur D. Nesbitt 1973
COMPLETE INDEX AT THE END OF VOLUME X.
TROUBLE-PROOF[1]
BY EDWIN L. SABIN
Never rains where Jim is--
People kickin', whinin';
He goes round insistin',--
"Sun is _almost_ shinin'!"
Never's hot where Jim is--
When the town is sweatin';
He jes' sets and answers,--
"Well, _I_ ain't a-frettin'!"
Never's cold where Jim is--
None of _us_ misdoubt it,
Seein' we're nigh frozen!
_He_ "ain't _thought_ about it!"
Things that rile up others
Never seem to strike him!
"Trouble-proof," I call it,--
Wisht that I was like him!
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Lippincott's Magazine.
JOHNNY'S PA
BY WILBUR D. NESBIT
My pa--he always went to school,
He says, an' studied hard.
W'y, when he's just as big as me
He knew things by the yard!
Arithmetic? He knew it all
From dividend to sum;
But when he tells me how it was,
My grandma, she says "Hum!"
My pa--he always got the prize
For never bein' late;
An' when they studied joggerfy
He knew 'bout every state.
He says he knew the rivers, an'
Knew all their outs an' ins;
But when he tells me all o' that,
My grandma, she just grins.
My pa, he never missed a day
A-goin' to the school,
An' never played no hookey, nor
Forgot the teacher's rule;
An' every class he's ever in,
The rest he always led.
My grandma, when pa talks that way,
Just laughs an' shakes her head.
My grandma says 'at boys is boys,
The same as pas is pas,
An' when I ast her what she means
She says it is "because."
She says 'at little boys is best
When they grows up to men,
Because they know how good they was,
An' tell their children, then!
MAXIMS
BY BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Never spare the parson's wine, nor the baker's pudding.
A house without woman or firelight is like a body without soul or
spirit.
Kings and bears often worry their keepers.
Light purse, heavy heart.
He's a fool that makes his doctor his heir.
Ne'er take a wife till thou hast a house (and a fire) to put her in.
To lengthen thy life, lessen thy meals.
He that drinks fast pays slow.
He is ill-clothed who is bare of virtue.
Beware of meat twice boil'd, and an old foe reconcil'd.
The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in
his heart.
He that is rich need not live sparingly, and he that can live sparingly
need not be rich.
He that waits upon fortune is never sure of a dinner.
NEVADA SKETCHES
BY SAMUEL L. CLEMENS
IN CARSON CITY
I feel very much as if I had just awakened out of a long sleep. I
attribute it to the fact that I have slept the greater part of the time
for the last two days and nights. On Wednesday, I sat up all night, in
Virginia, in order to be up early enough to take the five o'clock stage
on Thursday morning. I was on time. It was a great success. I had a
cheerful trip down to Carson, in company with that incessant talker,
Joseph T. Goodman. I never saw him flooded with such a flow of spirits
before. He restrained his conversation, though, until we had traveled
three or four miles, and were just crossing the divide between Silver
City and Spring Valley, when he thrust his head out of the dark stage,
and allowed a pallid light from the coach lamps to illuminate his
features for a moment, after which he returned to darkness again, and
sighed and said, "Damn it!" with some asperity. I asked him who he meant
it for, and he said, "The weather out there." As we approached Carson,
at about half past seven o'clock, he thrust his head out again, and
gazed earnestly in the direction of that city--after which he took it in
again, with his nose very much frosted. He propped the end of that organ
upon the end of his finger, and looked pensively upon it--which had the
effect of making him cross-eyed--and remarked, "O, damn it!" with great
bitterness. I asked him what was up this time, and he said, "The cold,
damp fog--it is worse than the weather." This was his last. He never
spoke again in my hearing. He went on over the mountains with a lady
fellow passenger from here. That will stop his chatter, you know, for he
seldom speaks in the presence of ladies.
In the evening I felt a mighty inclination to go to a party somewhere.
There was to be one at Governor J. Neely Johnson's, and I went there and
asked permission to stand around a while. This was granted in the most
hospitable manner, and the vision of plain quadrilles soothed my weary
soul. I felt particularly comfortable, for if there is one thing more
grateful to my feelings than another, it is a new house--a large house,
with its ceilings embellished with snowy mouldings; its floors glowing
with warm-tinted carpets, with cushioned chairs and sofas to sit on, and
a piano to listen to; with fires so arranged you can see them, and know
there is no humbug about it; with walls garnished with pictures, and
above all mirrors, wherein you may gaze and always find something to
admire, you know. I have a great regard for a good house, and a girlish
passion for mirrors. Horace Smith, Esq., is also very fond of mirrors.
He came and looked in the glass for an hour with me. Finally it
cracked--the night was pretty cold--and Horace Smith's reflection was
split right down the centre. But where his face had been the damage was
greatest--a hundred cracks converged to his reflected nose, like spokes
from the hub of a wagon wheel. It was the strangest freak the weather
has done this winter. And yet the parlor seemed warm and comfortable,
too.
About nine o'clock the Unreliable came and asked Gov. Johnson to let him
stand on the porch. The creature has got more impudence than any person
I ever saw in my life. Well, he stood and flattened his nose against the
parlor window, and looked hungry and vicious--he always looks that
way--until Colonel Musser arrived with some ladies, when he actually
fell in their wake and came swaggering in looking as if he thought he
had been anxiously expected. He had on my fine kid boots, my plug hat,
my white kid gloves (with slices of his prodigious hands grinning
through the bursted seams), and my heavy gold repeater, which I had been
offered thousands and thousands of dollars for many and many a time. He
took those articles out of my trunk, at Washoe City, about a month ago,
when we went there to report the proceedings of the convention. The
Unreliable intruded himself upon me in his cordial way, and said, "How
are you, Mark, old boy? When d'you come down? It's brilliant, ain't it?
Appear to enjoy themselves, don't they? Lend a fellow two bits, can't
you?" He always winds up his remarks that way. He appears to have an
insatiable craving for two bits.
The music struck up just then and saved me. The next moment I was far,
far at sea in the plain quadrille. We carried it through with
distinguished success; that is, we got as far as "balance around" and
"half-a-man-left," when I smelled hot whisky punch, or something of that
nature. I tracked the scent through several rooms, and finally
discovered a large bowl from which it emanated. I found the omnipresent
Unreliable there, also. He set down an empty goblet and remarked that he
was diligently seeking the gentlemen's dressing room. I would have shown
him where it was, but it occurred to him that the supper table and the
punch bowl ought not to be left unprotected; wherefore we stayed there
and watched them until the punch entirely evaporated. A servant came in
then, to replenish the bowl, and we left the refreshments in his charge.
We probably did wrong, but we were anxious to join the hazy dance. The
dance was hazier than usual, after that. Sixteen couples on the floor at
once, with a few dozen spectators scattered around, is calculated to
have its effect in a brilliantly lighted parlor, I believe. Everything
seemed to buzz, at any rate. After all the modern dances had been danced
several times, the people adjourned to the supper-room. I found my
wardrobe out there, as usual, with the Unreliable in it. His old
distemper was upon him: he was desperately hungry. I never saw a man eat
as much as he did in my life. I have various items of his supper here in
my note-book. First, he ate a plate of sandwiches; then he ate a
handsomely iced poundcake; then he gobbled a dish of chicken salad;
after which he ate a roast pig; after that, a quantity of blanc-mange;
then he threw in several dozen glasses of punch to fortify his appetite,
and finished his monstrous repast with a roast turkey. Dishes of
brandy-grapes, and jellies, and such things, and pyramids of fruits
melted away before him as shadows fly at the sun's approach. I am of the
opinion that none of his ancestors were present when the five thousand
were miraculously fed in the old Scriptural times. I base my opinion on
the twelve bushels of scraps and the little fishes that remained over
after that feast. If the Unreliable himself had been there, the
provisions would just about have held out, I think.
... At about two o'clock in the morning the pleasant party broke up and
the crowd of guests distributed themselves around town to their
respective homes; and after thinking the fun all over again, I went to
bed at four o'clock. So having been awake forty-eight hours, I slept
forty-eight, in order to get even again.
CITY MARSHAL PERRY
John Van Buren Perry, recently re-elected City Marshal of Virginia City,
was born a long time ago, in County Kerry, Ireland, of poor but honest
parents, who were descendants, beyond question, of a house of high
antiquity. The founder of it was distinguished for his eloquence; he was
the property of one Baalam, and received honorable mention in the Bible.
John Van Buren Perry removed to the United States in 1792--after having
achieved a high gastronomical reputation by creating the first famine in
his native land--and established himself at Kinderhook, New Jersey, as a
teacher of vocal and instrumental music. His eldest son, Martin Van
Buren, was educated there, and was afterwards elected President of the
United States; his grandson, of the same name, is now a prominent New
York politician, and is known in the East as "Prince John;" he keeps up
a constant and affectionate correspondence with his worthy grandfather,
who sells him feet in some of his richest wildcat claims from time to
time.
While residing at Kinderhook, Jack Perry was appointed Commodore of the
United States Navy, and he forthwith proceeded to Lake Erie and fought
the mighty marine conflict, which blazes upon the pages of history as
"Perry's Victory." In consequence of this exploit, he narrowly escaped
the Presidency.
Several years ago Commodore Perry was appointed Commissioner
Extraordinary to the Imperial Court of Japan, with unlimited power to
treat. It is hardly worth while to mention that he never exercised that
power; he never treated anybody in that country, although he patiently
submitted to a vast amount of that sort of thing when the opportunity
was afforded him at the expense of the Japanese officials. He returned
from his mission full of honors and foreign whisky, and was welcomed
home again by the plaudits of a grateful nation.
After the war was ended, Mr. Perry removed to Providence, Rhode Island,
where he produced a complete revolution in medical science by inventing
the celebrated "Pain Killer" which bears his name. He manufactured this
liniment by the ship-load, and spread it far and wide over the suffering
world; not a bottle left his establishment without his beneficent
portrait upon the label, whereby, in time, his features became as well
known unto burned and mutilated children as Jack the Giant Killer's.
When pain had ceased throughout the universe Mr. Perry fell to writing
for a livelihood, and for years and years he poured out his soul in
pleasing and effeminate poetry.... His very first effort, commencing:
"How doth the little busy bee
Improve each shining hour," etc.--
gained him a splendid literary reputation, and from that time forward no
Sunday-school library was complete without a full edition of his
plaintive and sentimental "Perry-Gorics." After great research and
profound study of his subject, he produced that wonderful gem which is
known in every land as "The Young Mother's Apostrophe to Her Infant,"
beginning:
"Fie! fie! oo itty bitty pooty sing!
To poke oo footsy-tootsys into momma's eye!"
This inspired poem had a tremendous run, and carried Perry's fame into
every nursery in the civilized world. But he was not destined to wear
his laurels undisturbed: England, with monstrous perfidy, at once
claimed the "Apostrophe" for her favorite son, Martin Farquhar Tupper,
and sent up a howl of vindictive abuse from her polluted press against
our beloved Perry. With one accord, the American people rose up in his
defense, and a devastating war was only averted by a public denial of
the paternity of the poem by the great Proverbial over his own
signature. This noble act of Mr. Tupper gained him a high place in the
affection of this people, and his sweet platitudes have been read here
with an ever augmented spirit of tolerance since that day.
The conduct of England toward Mr. Perry told upon his constitution to
such an extent that at one time it was feared the gentle bard would fade
and flicker out altogether; wherefore, the solicitude of influential
officials was aroused in his behalf, and through their generosity he was
provided with an asylum in Sing Sing prison, a quiet retreat in the
state of New York. Here he wrote his last great poem, beginning:
"Let dogs delight to bark and bite,
For God hath made them so--
Your little hands were never made
To tear out each other's eyes with--"
and then proceeded to learn the shoemaker's trade in his new home, under
the distinguished masters employed by the commonwealth.
Ever since Mr. Perry arrived at man's estate his prodigious feet have
been a subject of complaint and annoyance to those communities which
have known the honor of his presence. In 1835, during a great leather
famine, many people were obliged to wear wooden shoes, and Mr. Perry,
for the sake of economy, transferred his bootmaking patronage from the
tan-yard which had before enjoyed his custom, to an undertaker's
establishment--that is to say, he wore coffins. At that time he was a
member of Congress from New Jersey, and occupied a seat in front of the
Speaker's throne. He had the uncouth habit of propping his feet upon his
desk during prayer by the chaplain, and thus completely hiding that
officer from every eye save that of Omnipotence alone. So long as the
Hon. Mr. Perry wore orthodox leather boots the clergyman submitted to
this infliction and prayed behind them in singular solitude, under mild
protest; but when he arose one morning to offer up his regular petition,
and beheld the cheerful apparition of Jack Perry's coffins confronting
him, "The jolly old bum went under the table like a sick porpus" (as Mr.
P. feelingly remarks), "and never shot off his mouth in that shanty
again."
Mr. Perry's first appearance on the Pacific Coast was upon the boards of
the San Francisco theaters in the character of "Old Pete" in Dion
Boucicault's "Octoroon." So excellent was his delineation of that
celebrated character that "Perry's Pete" was for a long time regarded as
the climax of histrionic perfection.
Since John Van Buren Perry has resided in Nevada Territory, he has
employed his talents in acting as City Marshal of Virginia, and in
abusing me because I am an orphan and a long way from home, and can
therefore be persecuted with impunity. He was re-elected day before
yesterday, and his first official act was an attempt to get me drunk on
champagne furnished to the Board of Aldermen by other successful
candidates, so that he might achieve the honor and glory of getting me
in the station-house for once in his life. Although he failed in his
object, he followed me down C street and handcuffed me in front of Tom
Peasley's, but officers Birdsall and Larkin and Brokaw rebelled against
this unwarranted assumption of authority, and released me--whereupon I
was about to punish Jack Perry severely, when he offered me six bits to
hand him down to posterity through the medium of this Biography, and I
closed the contract. But after all, I never expect to get the money.
A SUNDAY IN CARSON
I arrived in this noisy and bustling town of Carson at noon to-day, per
Layton's express. We made pretty good time from Virginia, and might have
made much better, but for Horace Smith, Esq., who rode on the box seat
and kept the stage so much by the head she wouldn't steer. I went to
church, of course,--I always go to church when I--when I go to
church--as it were. I got there just in time to hear the closing hymn,
and also to hear the Rev. Mr. White give out a long-metre doxology,
which the choir tried to sing to a short-metre tune. But there wasn't
music enough to go around: consequently, the effect was rather singular,
than otherwise. They sang the most interesting parts of each line,
though, and charged the balance to "profit and loss;" this rendered the
general intent and meaning of the doxology considerably mixed, as far as
the congregation were concerned, but inasmuch as it was not addressed to
them, anyhow, I thought it made no particular difference.
By an easy and pleasant transition, I went from church to jail. It was
only just down stairs--for they save men eternally in the second story
of the new court house, and damn them for life in the first. Sheriff
Gasheric has a handsome double office fronting on the street, and its
walls are gorgeously decorated with iron convict-jewelry. In the rear
are two rows of cells, built of bomb-proof masonry and furnished with
strong iron doors and resistless locks and bolts. There was but one
prisoner--Swazey, the murderer of Derrickson--and he was writing; I do
not know what his subject was, but he appeared to be handling it in a
way which gave him great satisfaction....
ADVICE TO THE UNRELIABLE ON CHURCH-GOING
In the first place, I must impress upon you that when you are dressing
for church, as a general thing, you mix your perfumes too much; your
fragrance is sometimes oppressive; you saturate yourself with cologne
and bergamot, until you make a sort of Hamlet's Ghost of yourself, and
no man can decide, with the first whiff, whether you bring with you air
from Heaven or from hell. Now, rectify this matter as soon as possible;
last Sunday you smelled like a secretary to a consolidated drug store
and barber shop. And you came and sat in the same pew with me; now don't
do that again.
In the next place when you design coming to church, don't lie in bed
until half past ten o'clock and then come in looking all swelled and
torpid, like a doughnut. Do reflect upon it, and show some respect for
your personal appearance hereafter.
There is another matter, also, which I wish to remonstrate with you
about. Generally, when the contribution box of the missionary department
is passing around, you begin to look anxious, and fumble in your vest
pockets, as if you felt a mighty desire to put all your worldly wealth
into it--yet when it reaches your pew, you are sure to be absorbed in
your prayer-book, or gazing pensively out of the window at far-off
mountains, or buried in meditation, with your sinful head supported by
the back of the pew before you. And after the box is gone again, you
usually start suddenly and gaze after it with a yearning look, mingled
with an expression of bitter disappointment (fumbling your cash again
meantime), as if you felt you had missed the one grand opportunity for
which you had been longing all your life. Now, to do this when you have
money in your pockets is mean. But I have seen you do a meaner thing. I
refer to your conduct last Sunday, when the contribution box arrived at
our pew--and the angry blood rises to my cheek when I remember with what
gravity and sweet serenity of countenance you put in fifty cents and
took out two dollars and a half....
THE UNRELIABLE
EDS. ENTERPRISE--I received the following atrocious document the morning
I arrived here. It was from that abandoned profligate, the Unreliable,
and I think it speaks for itself:
CARSON CITY, Thursday Morning.
_To the Unreliable:_
SIR--Observing the driver of the Virginia stage hunting after you this
morning, in order to collect his fare, I infer you are in town.
In the paper which you represent, I noticed an article which I took to
be an effusion from your muddled brain, stating that I had "cabbaged" a
number of valuable articles from you the night I took you out of the
streets of Washoe City and permitted you to occupy my bed.
I take this opportunity to inform you that I will compensate you at the
rate of $20 _per head_ for every one of these _valuable_ articles that I
received from you, providing you will relieve me of their presence. This
offer can be either accepted or rejected on your part: but providing you
don't see proper to accept it, you had better procure enough lumber to
make a box 4x8, and have it made as early as possible. Judge Dixon will
arrange the preliminaries if you don't accede. An early reply is
expected by RELIABLE.
Not satisfied with wounding my feelings by making the most extraordinary
reference to allusions in the above note, he even sent a challenge to
fight, in the same envelop with it, hoping to work upon my fears and
drive me from the country by intimidation. But I was not to be
frightened; I shall remain in the Territory. I guessed his object at
once, and determined to accept his challenge, choose weapons and things,
and scare him, instead of being scared myself. I wrote a stern reply to
him, and offered him mortal combat with boot-jacks at a hundred yards.
The effect was more agreeable than I could have hoped for. His hair
turned black in a single night, from excess of fear; then he went into a
fit of melancholy, and while it lasted he did nothing but sigh, and sob,
and snuffle, and slobber, and say "he wished he was in the quiet tomb;"
finally he said he would commit suicide--he would say farewell to the
cold, cold world, with its cares and troubles, and go to sleep with his
fathers, in perdition. Then rose up this young man, and threw his
demijohn out of the window, and took up a glass of pure water, and
drained it to the dregs. And then he fell to the floor in a swoon. Dr.
Tjader was called in, and as soon as he found that the cuss was
poisoned, he rushed down to the Magnolia Saloon and got the antidote,
and poured it down him. As he was drawing his last breath, he scented
the brandy and lingered yet a while on earth, to take a drink with the
boys. But for this he would have been no more--or possible a great deal
less--in a moment. So he survived; but he has been in a mighty
precarious condition ever since. I have been up to see how he was
getting along two or three times a day.... He is a very sick man; I was
up there a while ago, and I could see that his friends had begun to
entertain hopes that he would not get over it. As soon as I saw that,
all my enmity vanished; I even felt like doing the poor Unreliable a
kindness, and showing him, too, how my feelings toward him had changed.
So I went and bought him a beautiful coffin, and carried it up and set
it down on his bed and told him to climb in when his time was up. Well,
sir, you never saw a man so affected by a little act of kindness as he
was by that. He let off a sort of war-whoop, and went to kicking things
around like a crazy man; and he foamed at the mouth and went out of one
fit into another faster than I could take them down in my note-book....
I did not return to Virginia yesterday, on account of the wedding. The
parties were Hon. James H. Sturtevant, one of the first Pi-Utes of
Nevada, and Miss Emma Curry, daughter of the Hon. A. Curry, who also
claims that his is a Pi-Ute family of high antiquity.... I had heard it
reported that a marriage was threatened, so felt it my duty to go down
there and find out the facts of the case. They said I might stay, as it
was me.... I promised not to say anything about the wedding, and I
regard that promise as sacred--my word is as good as my bond.... Father
Bennett advanced and touched off the high contracting parties with the
hymeneal torch (married them, you know), and at the word of command from
Curry, the fiddle bows were set in motion, and the plain quadrilles
turned loose. Thereupon, some of the most responsible dancing ensued
that I ever saw in my life. The dance that Tam O'Shanter witnessed was
slow in comparison to it. They kept it up for six hours, and then
carried out the exhausted musicians on a shutter, and went down to
supper. I know they had a fine supper, and plenty of it, but I do not
know much else. They drank so much shampin around me that I got
confused, and lost the hang of things, as it were.... It was mighty
pleasant, jolly and sociable, and I wish to thunder I was married
myself. I took a large slice of bridal cake home with me to dream on,
and dreamt that I was still a single man, and likely to remain so, if I
live and nothing happens--which has given me a greater confidence in
dreams than I ever felt before. I cordially wish my newly-married couple
all kinds of happiness and prosperity, though.
YE SENTIMENTAL LAW STUDENT
EDS. ENTERPRISE--I found the following letter, or Valentine, or whatever
it is, lying on the summit, where it had been dropped unintentionally, I
think. It was written on a sheet of legal cap, and each line was duly
commenced within the red mark which traversed the sheet from top to
bottom. Solon appeared to have had some trouble getting his effusion
started to suit him. He had begun it, "Know all men by these presents,"
and scratched it out again; he had substituted, "Now at this day comes
the plaintiff, by his attorney," and scratched that out also; he had
tried other sentences of like character, and gone on obliterating them,
until, through much sorrow and tribulation, he achieved the dedication
which stands at the head of his letter, and to his entire satisfaction,
I do cheerfully hope. But what a villain a man must be to blend together
the beautiful language of love and the infernal phraseology of the law
in one and the same sentence! I know but one of God's creatures who
would be guilty of such depravity as this: I refer to the Unreliable. I
believe the Unreliable to be the very lawyer's-cub who sat upon the
solitary peak, all soaked in beer and sentiment, and concocted the
insipid literary hash I am talking about. The handwriting closely
resembles his semi-Chinese tarantula tracks.
SUGAR LOAF PEAK, February 14, 1863.
To the loveliness to whom these presents shall come, greeting:--This is
a lovely day, my own Mary; its unencumbered sunshine reminds me of your
happy face, and in the imagination the same doth now appear before me.
Such sights and scenes as this ever remind me, the party of the second
part, of you, my Mary, the peerless party of the first part. The view
from the lonely and segregated mountain peak, of this portion of what is
called and known as Creation, with all and singular the hereditaments
and appurtenances thereunto appertaining and belonging, is
inexpressively grand and inspiring; and I gaze, and gaze, while my soul
is filled with holy delight, and my heart expands to receive thy
spirit-presence, as aforesaid. Above me is the glory of the sun; around
him float the messenger clouds, ready alike to bless the earth with
gentle rain, or visit it with lightning, and thunder, and destruction;
far below the said sun and the messenger clouds aforesaid, lying prone
upon the earth in the verge of the distant horizon, like the burnished
shield of a giant, mine eyes behold a lake, which is described and set
forth in maps as the Sink of Carson; nearer, in the great plain, I see
the Desert, spread abroad like the mantle of a Colossus, glowing by
turns, with the warm light of the sun, hereinbefore mentioned, or darkly
shaded by the messenger clouds aforesaid; flowing at right angles with
said Desert, and adjacent thereto, I see the silver and sinuous thread
of the river, commonly called Carson, which winds its tortuous course
through the softly tinted valley, and disappears amid the gorges of the
bleak and snowy mountains--a simile of man!--leaving the pleasant valley
of Peace and Virtue to wander among the dark defiles of Sin, beyond the
jurisdiction of the kindly beaming sun aforesaid! And about said sun,
and the said clouds, and around the said mountains, and over the plain
and the river aforesaid, there floats a purple glory--a yellow mist--as
airy and beautiful as the bridal veil of a princess, about to be wedded
according to the rites and ceremonies pertaining to, and established by,
the laws or edicts of the kingdom or principality wherein she doth
reside, and whereof she hath been and doth continue to be, a lawful
sovereign or subject. Ah! my Mary, it is sublime! it is lovely! I have
declared and made known, and by these presents do declare and make known
unto you, that the view from Sugar Loaf Peak, as hereinbefore described
and set forth, is the loveliest picture with which the hand of the
Creator has adorned the earth, according to the best of my knowledge and
belief, so help me God.
Given under my hand, and in the spirit-presence of the bright being
whose love has restored the light of hope to a soul once groping in the
darkness of despair, on the day and year first above written.
(Signed)
SOLON LYCURGUS.
Law Student, and Notary Public in and for the said County of Storey, and
Territory of Nevada.
To Miss Mary Links, Virginia (and may the laws have her in their holy
keeping).
SETTIN' BY THE FIRE
BY FRANK L. STANTON
Never much on stirrin' roun'
(Sich warn't his desire),
Allers certain to be foun'
Settin' by the fire.
When the frost wuz comin' down--
Col' win' creepin' nigher,
Spent each day jest thataway--
Settin' by the fire.
When the dancin' shook the groun'--
Raised the ol' roof higher,
Never swung the gals eroun'--
Sot thar' by the fire.
Same ol' corner night an' day--
Never 'peared to tire;
Not a blessed word to say!
Jest sot by the fire.
When he died, by slow degrees,
Folks said: "He's gone higher;"
But it's my opinion he's
Settin' by the fire.
THE WHISPERER
BY IRONQUILL
He never tried to make a speech;
A speech was far beyond his reach.
He didn't even dare to try;
He did his work upon the sly.
He took the voter to the rear
And gently whispered in his ear.
He never wrote; he could not write;
He never tried that style of fight.
No argument of his was seen
In daily press or magazine.
He only tried to get up near
And whisper in the voter's ear.
It worked so well that he became
A person of abundant fame.
He couldn't write; he couldn't speak,
But still pursued his course unique.
He had a glorious career--
He whispered in the voter's ear.
DER OAK UND DER VINE
BY CHARLES FOLLEN ADAMS
I don'd vas preaching voman's righdts,
Or anyding like dot,
Und I likes to see all beoples
Shust gondented mit dheir lot;
Budt I vants to gondradict dot shap
Dot made dis leedle shoke:
"A voman vas der glinging vine,
Und man, der shturdy oak."
Berhaps, somedimes, dot may be drue;
Budt, den dimes oudt off nine,
I find me oudt dot man himself
Vas peen der glinging vine;
Und ven hees friendts dhey all vas gone,
Und he vas shust "tead proke,"
Dot's ven der voman shteps righdt in,
Und peen der shturdy oak.
Shust go oup to der paseball groundts
Und see dhose "shturdy oaks"
All planted roundt ubon der seats--
Shust hear dheir laughs und shokes!
Dhen see dhose vomens at der tubs,
Mit glothes oudt on der lines;
Vhich vas der shturdy oaks, mine friendts,
Und vhich der glinging vines?
Vhen sickness in der householdt comes,
Und veeks und veeks he shtays,
Who vas id fighdts him mitoudt resdt,
Dhose veary nighdts und days?
Who beace und gomfort alvays prings,
Und cools dot fefered prow?
More like id vas der tender vine
Dot oak he glings to, now.
"Man vants budt leedle here below,"
Der boet von time said;
Dhere's leedle dot man he _don'd_ vant,
I dink id means, inshted;
Und ven der years keep rolling on,
Dheir cares und droubles pringing,
He vants to pe der shturdy oak,
Und, also, do der glinging.
Maype, vhen oaks dhey gling some more,
Und don'd so shturdy peen,
Der glinging vines dhey haf some shance
To helb run Life's masheen.
In helt und sickness, shoy und pain,
In calm or shtormy veddher,
'T was beddher dot dhose oaks und vines
Should alvays gling togeddher.
ARAMINTA AND THE AUTOMOBILE
BY CHARLES BATTELL LOOMIS
Some persons spend their surplus on works of art; some spend it on
Italian gardens and pergolas; there are those who sink it in golf, and I
have heard of those who expended it on charity.
None of these forms of getting away with money appeal to Araminta and
myself. As soon as it was ascertained that the automobile was
practicable and would not cost a king's ransom, I determined to devote
my savings to the purchase of one.
Araminta and I lived in a suburban town; she because she loves Nature
and I because I love Araminta. We have been married for five years.
I am a bank clerk in New York, and morning and night I go through the
monotony of railway travel, and for one who is forbidden to use his eyes
on the train and who does not play cards it _is_ monotony, for in the
morning my friends are either playing cards or else reading their
papers, and one does not like to urge the claims of conversation on one
who is deep in politics or the next play of his antagonist; so my
getting to business and coming back are in the nature of purgatory. I
therefore hailed the automobile as a Heaven-sent means of swift motion
with an agreeable companion, and with no danger of encountering either
newspapers or cards. I have seen neither reading nor card-playing going
on in any automobile.
The community in which I live is not progressive, and when I said that I
expected to buy an automobile as soon as my ship came in I was frowned
upon by my neighbors. Several of them have horses, and all, or nearly
all, have feet. The horsemen were not more opposed to my proposed
ownership than the footmen--I should say pedestrians. They all thought
automobiles dangerous and a menace to public peace, but of course I
pooh-poohed their fears and, being a person of a good deal of stability
of purpose, I went on saving my money, and in course of time I bought an
automobile of the electric sort.
Araminta is plucky, and I am perfectly fearless. When the automobile was
brought home and housed in the little barn that is on our property, the
man who had backed it in told me that he had orders to stay and show me
how it worked, but I laughed at him--good-naturedly yet firmly. I said,
"Young man, experience teaches more in half an hour than books or
precepts do in a year. A would-be newspaper man does not go to a school
of journalism if he is wise; he gets a position on a newspaper and
learns for himself, and through his mistakes. I know that one of these
levers is to steer by, that another lets loose the power, and that there
is a foot-brake. I also know that the machine is charged, and I need to
know no more. Good day."
Thus did I speak to the young man, and he saw that I was a person of
force and discretion, and he withdrew to the train and I never saw him
again.
Araminta had been to Passaic shopping, but she came back while I was out
in the barn looking at my new purchase, and she joined me there. I
looked at her lovingly, and she returned the look. Our joint ambition
was realized; we were the owners of an automobile, and we were going out
that afternoon.
Why is it that cheap barns are so flimsily built? I know that our barn
is cheap because the rent for house and barn is less than what many a
clerk, city pent, pays for a cramped flat, but again I ask, why are they
flimsily built? I have no complaint to make. If my barn had been built
of good stout oak I might to-day be in a hospital.
It happened this way. Araminta said, "Let me get in, and we will take
just a little ride to see how it goes," and I out of my love for her
said, "Wait just a few minutes, dearest, until I get the hang of the
thing. I want to see how much go she has and just how she works."
Araminta has learned to obey my slightest word, knowing that love is at
the bottom of all my commands, and she stepped to one side while I
entered the gayly-painted vehicle and tried to move out of the barn. I
moved out. But I backed. Oh, blessed, cheaply built barn. My way was not
restricted to any appreciable extent. I shot gayly through the barn into
the hen yard, and the sound of the ripping clapboards frightened the
silly hens who were enjoying a dust-bath, and they fled in more
directions than there were fowls.
I had not intended entering the hen yard, and I did not wish to stay
there, so I kept on out, the wire netting not being what an automobile
would call an obstruction. I never lose my head, and when I heard
Araminta screaming in the barn, I called out cheerily to her, "I'll be
back in a minute, dear, but I'm coming another way."
And I did come another way. I came all sorts of ways. I really don't
know what got into the machine, but she now turned to the left and made
for the road, and then she ran along on her two left wheels for a
moment, and then seemed about to turn a somersault, but changed her
mind, and, still veering to the left, kept on up the road, passing my
house at a furious speed, and making for the open country. With as much
calmness as I could summon I steered her, but I think I steered her a
little too much, for she turned toward my house.
I reached one end of the front piazza at the same time that Araminta
reached the other end of it. I had the right of way, and she deferred to
me just in time. I removed the vestibule storm door. It was late in
March, and I did not think we should have any more use for it that
season. And we didn't.
I had ordered a strongly-built machine, and I was now glad of it,
because a light and weak affair that was merely meant to run along on a
level and unobstructed road would not have stood the assault on my
piazza. Why, my piazza did not stand it. It caved in, and made work for
an already overworked local carpenter who was behind-hand with his
orders. After I had passed through the vestibule, I applied the brake,
and it worked. The path is not a cinder one, as I think them untidy, so
I was not more than muddied. I was up in an instant, and looked at the
still enthusiastic machine with admiration.
"Have you got the hang of it?" said Araminta.
Now that's one thing I like about Araminta. She does not waste words
over non-essentials. The point was not that I had damaged the piazza. I
needed a new one, anyway. The main thing was that I was trying to get
the hang of the machine, and she recognized that fact instantly.
I told her that I thought I had, and that if I had pushed the lever in
the right way at first, I should have come out of the barn in a more
conventional way.
She again asked me to let her ride, and as I now felt that I could
better cope with the curves of the machine I allowed her to get in.
"Don't lose your head," said I.
"I hope I shan't," said she dryly.
"Well, if you have occasion to leave me, drop over the back. Never jump
ahead. That is a fundamental rule in runaways of all kinds."
Then we started, and I ran the motor along for upward of half a mile
after I had reached the highway, which I did by a short cut through a
field at the side of our house. There is only a slight rail fence
surrounding it, and my machine made little of that. It really seemed to
delight in what some people would have called danger.
"Araminta, are you glad that I saved up for this?"
"I am mad with joy," said the dear thing, her face flushed with
excitement mixed with expectancy. Nor were her expectations to be
disappointed. We still had a good deal to do before we should have ended
our first ride.
So far I had damaged property to a certain extent, but I had no one but
myself to reckon with, and I was providing work for people. I always
have claimed that he who makes work for two men where there was only
work for one before, is a public benefactor, and that day I was the
friend of carpenters and other mechanics.
Along the highway we flew, our hearts beating high, but never in our
mouths, and at last we saw a team approaching us. By "a team" I mean a
horse and buggy. I was raised in Connecticut, where a team is anything
you choose to call one.
The teamster saw us. Well, perhaps I should not call him a teamster
(although he was one logically): he was our doctor, and, as I say, he
saw us.
Now I think it would have been friendly in him, seeing that I was more
or less of a novice at the art of automobiling, to have turned to the
left when he saw that I was inadvertently turning to the left, but the
practice of forty years added to a certain native obstinacy made him
turn to the right, and he met me at the same time that I met him.
The horse was not hurt, for which I am truly glad, and the doctor joined
us, and continued with us for a season, but his buggy was demolished.
Of course I am always prepared to pay for my pleasure, and though it was
not, strictly speaking, my pleasure to deprive my physician of his
turn-out, yet if he _had_ turned out it wouldn't have happened--and, as
I say, I was prepared to get him a new vehicle. But he was very
unreasonable; so much so that, as he was crowding us--for the seat was
not built for more than two, and he is stout--I at last told him that I
intended to turn around and carry him home, as we were out for pleasure,
and he was giving us pain.
I will confess that the events of the last few minutes had rattled me
somewhat, and I did not feel like turning just then, as the road was
narrow. I knew that the road turned of its own accord a half-mile
farther on, and so I determined to wait.
"I want to get out," said the doctor tartly, and just as he said so
Araminta stepped on the brake, accidentally. The doctor got out--in
front. With great presence of mind I reversed, and so we did not run
over him. But he was furious and sulphurous, and that is why I have
changed to homeopathy. He was the only allopathic doctor in Brantford.
I suppose that if I had stopped and apologized, he would have made up
with me, and I would not have got angry with him, but I couldn't stop.
The machine was now going as she had done when I left the barn, and we
were backing into town.
Through it all I did not lose my coolness. I said: "Araminta, look out
behind, which is ahead of us, and if you have occasion to jump now, do
it in front, which is behind," and Araminta understood me.
She sat sideways, so that she could see what was going on, but that
might have been seen from any point of view, for we were the only things
going on--or backing.
Pretty soon we passed the wreck of the buggy, and then we saw the horse
grazing on dead grass by the roadside, and at last we came on a few of
our townfolk who had seen us start, and were now come out to welcome us
home. But I did not go home just then. I should have done so if the
machine had minded me and turned in at our driveway, but it did not.
Across the way from us there is a fine lawn leading up to a beautiful
greenhouse full of rare orchids and other plants. It is the pride of my
very good neighbor, Jacob Rawlinson.
The machine, as if moved by _malice prépense_, turned just as we came to
the lawn, and began to back at railroad speed.
I told Araminta that if she was tired of riding, now was the best time
to stop; that she ought not to overdo it, and that I was going to get
out myself as soon as I had seen her off.
I saw her off.
Then after one ineffectual jab at the brake, I left the machine
hurriedly, and as I sat down on the sposhy lawn I heard a tremendous but
not unmusical sound of falling glass----
I tell Araminta that it isn't the running of an automobile that is
expensive. It is the stopping of it.
THE HEIGHT OF THE RIDICULOUS
BY OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
I wrote some lines once on a time
In wondrous merry mood,
And thought, as usual, men would say
They were exceeding good.
They were so queer, so very queer,
I laughed as I would die;
Albeit, in the general way,
A sober man am I.
I called my servant, and he came;
How kind it was of him
To mind a slender man like me,
He of the mighty limb!
"These to the printer," I exclaimed,
And, in my humorous way,
I added, (as a trifling jest,)
"There'll be the devil to pay."
He took the paper, and I watched,
And saw him peep within;
At the first line he read, his face
Was all upon the grin.
He read the next; the grin grew broad,
And shot from ear to ear;
He read the third; a chuckling noise
I now began to hear.
The fourth; he broke into a roar;
The fifth; his waistband split;
The sixth; he burst five buttons off,
And tumbled in a fit.
Ten days and nights, with sleepless eye,
I watched that wretched man,
And since, I never dare to write
As funny as I can.
WHEN LOVELY WOMAN
BY PHOEBE CARY
When lovely woman wants a favor,
And finds, too late, that man won't bend,
What earthly circumstance can save her
From disappointment in the end?
The only way to bring him over,
The last experiment to try,
Whether a husband or a lover,
If he have feeling is--to cry.
UNSATISFIED YEARNING
BY R. K. MUNKITTRICK
Down in the silent hallway
Scampers the dog about,
And whines, and barks, and scratches,
In order to get out.
Once in the glittering starlight,
He straightway doth begin
To set up a doleful howling
In order to get in.
THE INVISIBLE PRINCE[2]
BY HENRY HARLAND
At a masked ball given by the Countess Wohenhoffen, in Vienna, during
carnival week, a year ago, a man draped in the embroidered silks of a
Chinese mandarin, his features entirely concealed by an enormous Chinese
head in cardboard, was standing in the Wintergarten, the big,
dimly-lighted conservatory, near the door of one of the gilt-and-white
reception-rooms, rather a stolid-seeming witness of the multi-coloured
romp within, when a voice behind him said, "How do you do, Mr.
Field?"--a woman's voice, an English voice.
The mandarin turned round.
From a black mask, a pair of blue-gray eyes looked into his broad, bland
Chinese face; and a black domino dropped him an extravagant little
curtsey.
"How do you do?" he responded. "I'm afraid I'm not Mr. Field; but I'll
gladly pretend I am, if you'll stop and talk with me. I was dying for a
little human conversation."
"Oh you're afraid you're not Mr. Field, are you?" the mask replied
derisively. "Then why did you turn when I called his name?"
"You mustn't hope to disconcert me with questions like that," said he.
"I turned because I liked your voice."
He might quite reasonably have liked her voice, a delicate, clear, soft
voice, somewhat high in register, with an accent, crisp, chiselled,
concise, that suggested wit as well as distinction. She was rather
tall, for a woman; one could divine her slender and graceful, under the
voluminous folds of her domino.
She moved a little away from the door, deeper into the conservatory. The
mandarin kept beside her. There, amongst the palms, a _fontaine
lumineuse_ was playing, rhythmically changing colour. Now it was a
shower of rubies; now of emeralds or amethysts, of sapphires, topazes,
or opals.
"How pretty," she said, "and how frightfully ingenious. I am wondering
whether this wouldn't be a good place to sit down. What do _you_ think?"
And she pointed with a fan to a rustic bench.
So they sat down on the rustic bench, by the _fontaine lumineuse_.
"In view of your fear that you're not Mr. Field, it's rather a
coincidence that at a masked ball in Vienna you should just happen to be
English, isn't it?" she asked.
"Oh, everybody's more or less English, in these days, you know," said
he.
"There's some truth in that," she admitted, with a laugh. "What a
diverting piece of artifice this Wintergarten is, to be sure. Fancy
arranging the electric lights to shine through a dome of purple glass,
and look like stars. They do look like stars, don't they? Slightly
overdressed, showy stars, indeed; stars in the German taste; but stars,
all the same. Then, by day, you know, the purple glass is removed, and
you get the sun--the real sun. Do you notice the delicious fragrance of
lilac? If one hadn't too exacting an imagination, one might almost
persuade oneself that one was in a proper open-air garden, on a night in
May--Yes, everybody is more or less English, in these days. That's
precisely the sort of thing I should have expected Victor Field to
say."
"By-the-bye," questioned the mandarin, "if you don't mind increasing my
stores of knowledge, who _is_ this fellow Field?"
"This fellow Field? Ah, who indeed?" said she. "That's just what I wish
you'd tell me."
"I'll tell you with pleasure, after you've supplied me with the
necessary data," he promised cheerfully.
"Well, by some accounts, he's a little literary man in London," she
remarked.
"Oh, come! You never imagined that I was a little literary man in
London," protested he.
"You might be worse," she retorted. "However, if the phrase offends you,
I'll say a rising young literary man, instead. He writes things, you
know."
"Poor chap, does he? But then, that's a way they have, sizing up
literary persons?" His tone was interrogative.
"Doubtless," she agreed. "Poems and stories and things. And book
reviews, I suspect. And even, perhaps, leading articles in the
newspapers."
"_Toute la lyre enfin?_ What they call a penny-a-liner?"
"I'm sure I don't know what he's paid. I should think he'd get rather
more than a penny. He's fairly successful. The things he does aren't
bad," she said.
"I must look 'em up," said he. "But meantime, will you tell me how you
came to mistake me for him? Has he the Chinese type? Besides, what on
earth should a little London literary man be doing at the Countess
Wohenhoffen's?"
"He was standing near the door, over there," she told him, sweetly,
"dying for a little human conversation, till I took pity on him. No, he
hasn't exactly the Chinese type, but he's wearing a Chinese costume, and
I should suppose he'd feel uncommonly hot in that exasperatingly placid
Chinese head. _I'm_ nearly suffocated, and I'm only wearing a _loup_.
For the rest, why _shouldn't_ he be here?"
"If your _loup_ bothers you, pray take it off. Don't mind me," he urged
gallantly.
"You're extremely good," she responded. "But if I should take off my
_loup_, you'd be sorry. Of course, manlike, you're hoping that I'm young
and pretty."
"Well, and aren't you?"
"I'm a perfect fright. I'm an old maid."
"Thank you. Manlike, I confess I _was_ hoping you'd be young and pretty.
Now my hope has received the strongest confirmation. I'm sure you are,"
he declared triumphantly.
"Your argument, with a meretricious air of subtlety, is facile and
superficial. Don't pin your faith to it. Why _shouldn't_ Victor Field be
here?" she persisted.
"The Countess only receives tremendous swells. It's the most exclusive
house in Europe."
"Are you a tremendous swell?" she wondered.
"Rather!" he asseverated. "Aren't you?"
She laughed a little, and stroked her fan, a big fan, a big fan of
fluffy black feathers.
"That's very jolly," said he.
"What?" said she.
"That thing in your lap."
"My fan?"
"I expect you'd call it a fan."
"For goodness' sake, what would _you_ call it?" cried she.
"I should call it a fan."
She gave another little laugh. "You have a nice instinct for the _mot
juste_," she informed him.
"Oh, no," he disclaimed, modestly. "But I can call a fan a fan, when I
think it won't shock the sensibilities of my hearer."
"If the Countess only receives tremendous swells," said she, "you must
remember that Victor Field belongs to the Aristocracy of Talent."
"Oh, _quant à ça_, so, from the Wohenhoffens' point of view, do the
barber and the horse-leech. In this house, the Aristocracy of Talent
dines with the butler."
"Is the Countess such a snob?" she asked.
"No; she's an Austrian. They draw the line so absurdly tight in
Austria."
"Well, then, you leave me no alternative," she argued, "but to conclude
that Victor Field is a tremendous swell. Didn't you notice, I bobbed him
a curtsey?"
"I took the curtsey as a tribute to my Oriental magnificence," he
confessed. "Field doesn't sound like an especially patrician name. I'd
give anything to discover who you are. Can't you be induced to tell me?
I'll bribe, entreat, threaten--I'll do anything you think might persuade
you."
"I'll tell you at once, if you'll own up that you're Victor Field," said
she.
"Oh, I'll own up that I'm Queen Elizabeth if you'll tell me who you are.
The end justifies the means."
"Then you _are_ Victor Field?" she pursued him eagerly.
"If you don't mind suborning perjury, why should I mind committing it?"
he reflected. "Yes. And now, who are you?"
"No; I must have an unequivocal avowal," she stipulated. "Are you or are
you not Victor Field?"
"Let us put it at this," he proposed, "that I'm a good serviceable
imitation; an excellent substitute when the genuine article is not
procurable."
"Of course, your real name isn't anything like Victor Field," she
declared, pensively.
"I never said it was. But I admire the way in which you give with one
hand and take back with the other."
"Your real name--" she began. "Wait a moment--Yes, now I have it. Your
real name--It's rather long. You don't think it will bore you?"
"Oh, if it's really my real name, I daresay I'm hardened to it," said
he.
"Your real name is Louis Charles Ferdinand Stanislas John Joseph
Emmanuel Maria Anna."
"Mercy upon me," he cried, "what a name! You ought to have broken it to
me in instalments. And it's all Christian name at that. Can't you spare
me just a little rag of a surname, for decency's sake?" he pleaded.
"The surnames of royalties don't matter, Monseigneur," she said, with a
flourish.
"Royalties? What? Dear me, here's rapid promotion! I am royal now! And a
moment ago I was a little penny-a-liner in London."
"_L'un n'empêche pas l'autre._ Have you never heard the story of the
Invisible Prince?" she asked.
"I adore irrelevancy," said he. "I seem to have read something about an
invisible prince, when I was young. A fairy tale, wasn't it?"
"The irrelevancy is only apparent. The story I mean is a story of real
life. Have you ever heard of the Duke of Zeln?"
"Zeln? Zeln?" he repeated, reflectively. "No, I don't think so."
She clapped her hands. "Really, you do it admirably. If I weren't
perfectly sure of my facts, I believe I should be taken in. Zeln, as any
history would tell you, as any old atlas would show you, was a little
independent duchy in the center of Germany."
"Poor dear thing! Like Jonah in the center of the whale," he murmured,
sympathetically.
"Hush. Don't interrupt. Zeln was a little independent German duchy, and
the Duke of Zeln was its sovereign. After the war with France it was
absorbed by Prussia. But the ducal family still rank as royal highness.
Of course, you've heard of the Leczinskis?"
"Lecz--what?" said he.
"Leczinski," she repeated.
"How do you spell it?"
"L-e-c-z-i-n-s-k-i."
"Good. Capital. You have a real gift for spelling," he exclaimed.
"Will you be quiet," she said, severely, "and answer my question? Are
you familiar with the name?"
"I should never venture to be familiar with a name I didn't know," he
asserted.
"Ah, you don't know it? You have never heard of Stanislas Leczinska, who
was king of Poland? Of Marie Leczinska, who married Louis VI?"
"Oh, to be sure. I remember. The lady whose portrait one sees at
Versailles."
"Quite so. Very well," she continued, "the last representative of the
Leczinskis, in the elder line, was the Princess Anna Leczinska, who, in
1858, married the Duke of Zeln. She was the daughter of John Leczinski,
Duke of Grodnia and Governor of Galicia, and of the Archduchess
Henrietta d'Este, a cousin of the Emperor of Austria. She was also a
great heiress, and an extremely handsome woman. But the Duke of Zeln was
a bad lot, a viveur, a gambler, a spendthrift. His wife, like a fool,
made her entire fortune over to him, and he proceeded to play ducks and
drakes with it. By the time their son was born he'd got rid of the last
farthing. Their son wasn't born till '63, five years after their
marriage. Well, and then, what do you suppose the Duke did?"
"Reformed, of course. The wicked husband always reforms when a child is
born, and there's no more money," he generalized.
"You know perfectly well what he did," said she. "He petitioned the
German Diet to annul the marriage. You see, having exhausted the dowry
of the Princess Anna, it occurred to him that if she could only be got
out of the way, he might marry another heiress, and have the spending of
another fortune."
"Clever dodge," he observed. "Did it come off?"
"It came off, all too well. He based his petition on the ground that the
marriage had never been--I forget what the technical term is. Anyhow, he
pretended that the princess had never been his wife except in name, and
that the child couldn't possibly be his. The Emperor of Austria stood by
his connection, like the royal gentleman he is; used every scrap of
influence he possessed to help her. But the duke, who was a Protestant
(the princess was of course a Catholic), the duke persuaded all the
Protestant States in the Diet to vote in his favour. The Emperor of
Austria was powerless, the Pope was powerless. And the Diet annulled the
marriage."
"Ah," said the mandarin.
"Yes," she went on. "The marriage was annulled, and the child declared
illegitimate. Ernest Augustus, as the duke was somewhat inconsequently
named, married again, and had other children, the eldest of whom is the
present bearer of the title--the same Duke of Zeln one hears of,
quarreling with the croupiers at Monte Carlo. The Princess Anna, with
her baby, came to Austria. The Emperor gave her a pension, and lent her
one of his country houses to live in--Schloss Sanct--Andreas. Our
hostess, by-the-by, the Countess Wohenhoffen, was her intimate friend
and her _première dame d'honneur_."
"Ah," said the mandarin.
"But the poor princess had suffered more than she could bear. She died
when her child was four years old. The Countess Wohenhoffen took the
infant, by the Emperor's desire, and brought him up with her own son
Peter. He was called Prince Louis Leczinski. Of course, in all moral
right, he was the Hereditary Prince of Zeln. His legitimacy, for the
rest, and his mother's innocence, are perfectly well established, in
every sense but a legal sense, by the fact that he has all the physical
characteristics of the Zeln stock. He has the Zeln nose and the Zeln
chin, which are as distinctive as the Hapsburg lip."
"I hope, for the poor young man's sake, though, that they're not so
unbecoming?" questioned the mandarin.
"They're not exactly pretty," answered the mask. "The nose is a thought
too long, the chin is a trifle too short. However, I daresay the poor
young man is satisfied. As I was about to tell you, the Countess
Wohenhoffen brought him up, and the Emperor destined him for the Church.
He even went to Rome and entered the Austrian College. He'd have been on
the high road to a cardinalate by this time if he'd stuck to the
priesthood, for he had strong interest. But, lo and behold, when he was
about twenty, he chucked the whole thing up."
"Ah? _Histoire de femme?_"
"Very likely," she assented, "though I've never heard any one say so. At
all events, he left Rome, and started upon his travels. He had no money
of his own, but the Emperor made him an allowance. He started upon his
travels, and he went to India, and he went to America, and he went to
South Africa, and then, finally, in '87 or '88, he went--no one knows
where. He totally disappeared, vanished into space. He's not been heard
of since. Some people think he's dead. But the greater number suppose
that he tired of his false position in the world, and one fine day
determined to escape from it, by sinking his identity, changing his
name, and going in for a new life under new conditions. They call him
the Invisible Prince. His position _was_ rather an ambiguous one, wasn't
it? You see, he was neither one thing nor the other. He has no
_état-civil_. In the eyes of the law he was a bastard, yet he knew
himself to be the legitimate son of the Duke of Zeln. He was a citizen
of no country, yet he was the rightful heir to a throne. He was the last
descendant of Stanislas Leczinski, yet it was without authority that he
bore his name. And then, of course, the rights and wrongs of the matter
were only known to a few. The majority of people simply remembered that
there had been a scandal. And (as a wag once said of him) wherever he
went, he left his mother's reputation behind him. No wonder he found the
situation irksome. Well, there is the story of the Invisible Prince."
"And a very exciting, melodramatic little story, too. For my part, I
suspect your Prince met a boojum. I love to listen to stories. Won't you
tell me another? Do, please," he pressed her.
"No, he didn't meet a boojum," she returned. "He went to England, and
set up for an author. The Invisible Prince and Victor Field are one and
the same person."
"Oh, I say! Not really!" he exclaimed.
"Yes, really."
"What makes you think so?" he wondered.
"I'm sure of it," said she. "To begin with, I must confide to you that
Victor Field is a man I've never met."
"Never met--?" he gasped. "But, by the blithe way in which you were
laying his sins at my door, a little while ago, I supposed you were
sworn confederates."
"What's the good of masked balls, if you can't talk to people you've
never met?" she submitted. "I've never met him, but I'm one of his
admirers. I like his little poems. And I'm the happy possessor of a
portrait of him. It's a print after a photograph. I cut it from an
illustrated paper."
"I really almost wish I _was_ Victor Field," he sighed. "I should feel
such a glow of gratified vanity."
"And the Countess Wohenhoffen," she added, "has at least twenty
portraits of the Invisible Prince--photographs, miniatures, life-size
paintings, taken from the time he was born, almost, to the time of his
disappearance. Victor Field and Louis Leczinski have countenances as
like each other as two halfpence."
"An accidental resemblance, doubtless."
"No, it isn't an accidental resemblance," she affirmed.
"Oh, then you think it's intentional?" he quizzed.
"Don't be absurd. I might have thought it accidental, except for one or
two odd little circumstances. _Primo_, Victor Field is a guest at the
Wohenhoffens' ball."
"Oh, he _is_ a guest here?"
"Yes, he is," she said. "You are wondering how I know. Nothing simpler.
The same _costumier_ who made my domino, supplied his Chinese dress. I
noticed it at his shop. It struck me as rather nice, and I asked whom it
was for. The _costumier_ said, for an Englishman at the Hôtel de Bade.
Then he looked in his book, and told me the Englishman's name. It was
Victor Field. So, when I saw the same Chinese dress here to-night, I
knew it covered the person of one of my favorite authors. But I own,
like you, I was a good deal surprised. What on earth should a little
London literary man be doing at the Countess Wohenhoffen's? And then I
remembered the astonishing resemblance between Victor Field and Louis
Leczinski; and I remembered that to Louis Leczinski the Countess
Wohenhoffen had been a second mother; and I reflected that though he
chose to be as one dead and buried for the rest of the world, Louis
Leczinski might very probably keep up private relations with the
Countess. He might very probably come to her ball, incognito, and safely
masked. I observed also that the Countess's rooms were decorated
throughout with _white lilac_. But the white lilac is the emblematic
flower of the Leczinskis; green and white are their family colours.
Wasn't the choice of white lilac on this occasion perhaps designed as a
secret compliment to the Prince? I was taught in the schoolroom that two
and two make four."
"Oh, one can see that you've enjoyed a liberal education," he apprised
her. "But where were you taught to jump to conclusions? You do it with a
grace, an assurance. I too have heard that two and two make four; but
first you must catch your two and two. Really, as if there couldn't be
more than one Chinese costume knocking about Vienna, during carnival
week! Dear, good, sweet lady, it's of all disguises the disguise they're
driving hardest, this particular season. And then to build up an
elaborate theory of identities upon the mere chance resemblance of a
pair of photographs! Photographs indeed! Photographs don't give the
complexion. Say that your Invisible Prince is dark, what's to prevent
your literary man from being fair or sandy? Or _vice versâ_? And then,
how is a little German Polish princeling to write poems and things in
English? No, no, no; your reasoning hasn't a leg to stand on."
"Oh, I don't mind its not having legs," she laughed, "so long as it
convinces me. As for writing poems and things in English, you yourself
said that everybody is more or less English, in these days. German
princes are especially so. They all learn English, as a second
mother-tongue. You see, like Circassian beauties, they are mostly bred
up for the marriage market; and nothing is a greater help towards a good
sound remunerative English marriage, than a knowledge of the language.
However, don't be frightened. I must take it for granted that Victor
Field would prefer not to let the world know who he is. I happen to have
discovered his secret. He may trust to my discretion."
"You still persist in imagining that I'm Victor Field?" he murmured
sadly.
"I should have to be extremely simple-minded," she announced, "to
imagine anything else. You wouldn't be a male human being if you had sat
here for half an hour patiently talking about another man."
"Your argument," said he, "with a meretricious air of subtlety, is
facile and superficial. I thank you for teaching me that word. I'd sit
here till doomsday talking about my worst enemy, for the pleasure of
talking with you."
"Perhaps we have been talking of your worst enemy. Whom do the moralists
pretend a man's worst enemy is wont to be?" she asked.
"I wish you would tell me the name of the person the moralists would
consider _your_ worst enemy," he replied.
"I'll tell you directly, as I said before, if you'll own up," she
offered.
"Your price is prohibitive. I've nothing to own up to."
"Well then--good night," she said.
Lightly, swiftly, she fled from the conservatory, and was soon
irrecoverable in the crowd.
The next morning Victor Field left Vienna for London; but before he left
he wrote a letter to Peter Wohenhoffen. In the course of it he said:
"There was an Englishwoman at your ball last night with the reasoning
powers of a detective in a novel. By divers processes of elimination and
induction, she had formed all sorts of theories about no end of things.
Among others, for instance, she was willing to bet her halidome that a
certain Prince Louis Leczinski, who seems to have gone on the spree some
years ago, and never to have come home again--she was willing to bet
anything you like that Leczinski and I--_moi qui vous parle_--were to
all intents and purposes the same. Who was she, please? Rather a tall
woman, in a black domino, with gray eyes, or grayish-blue, and a nice
voice."
In the answer which he received from Peter Wohenhoffen towards the end
of the week, Peter said: "There were nineteen Englishwomen at my
mother's party, all of them rather tall, with nice voices, and gray or
blue-gray eyes. I don't know what colours their dominoes were. Here is a
list of them."
The names that followed were names of people whom Victor Field almost
certainly would never meet. The people Victor knew in London were the
sort of people a little literary man might be expected to know. Most of
them were respectable; some of them even deemed themselves rather smart,
and patronized him right Britishly. But the nineteen names in Peter
Wohenhoffen's list ("Oh, me! Oh, my!" cried Victor) were names to make
you gasp.
All the same, he went a good deal to Hyde Park during the season, and
watched the driving.
"Which of all those haughty high-born beauties is she?" he wondered
futilely.
And then the season passed, and then the year; and little by little, of
course, he ceased to think about her.
* * * * *
One afternoon last May, a man, habited in accordance with the fashion of
the period, stopped before a hairdresser's shop in Knightsbridge
somewhere, and, raising his hat, bowed to the three waxen ladies who
simpered from the window.
"Oh! It's Mr. Field!" a voice behind him cried. "What are those cryptic
rites that you're performing? What on earth are you bowing into a
hairdresser's window for?"--a smooth, melodious voice, tinged by an
inflection that was half ironical, half bewildered.
"I was saluting the type of English beauty," he answered, turning.
"Fortunately, there are divergencies from it," he added, as he met the
puzzled smile of his interlocutrice; a puzzled smile, indeed, but, like
the voice, by no means without its touch of irony.
She gave a little laugh; and then, examining the models critically,
"Oh?" she questioned. "Would you call that the type? You place the type
high. Their features are quite faultless, and who ever saw such
complexions?"
"It's the type, all the same," said he. "Just as the imitation
marionette is the type of English breeding."
"The imitation marionette? I'm afraid I don't follow," she confessed.
"The imitation marionettes. You've seen them at little theatres in
Italy. They're actors who imitate puppets. Men and women who try to
behave as if they weren't human, as if they were made of starch and
whalebone, instead of flesh and blood."
"Ah, yes," she assented, with another little laugh. "That _would_ be
rather typical of our insular methods. But do you know what an engaging,
what a reviving spectacle you presented, as you stood there flourishing
your hat? What do you imagine people thought? And what would have
happened to you if I had just chanced to be a policeman instead of a
friend?"
"Would you have clapped your handcuffs on me?" he inquired. "I suppose
my conduct did seem rather suspicious. I was in the deepest depths of
dejection. One must give some expression to one's sorrow."
"Are you going towards Kensington?" she asked, preparing to move on.
"Before I commit myself, I should like to be sure whether you are," he
replied.
"You can easily discover with a little perseverance."
He placed himself beside her, and together they walked towards
Kensington.
She was rather taller than the usual woman, and slender. She was
exceedingly well-dressed; smartly, becomingly; a jaunty little hat of
strangely twisted straw, with an aigrette springing defiantly from it; a
jacket covered with mazes and labyrinths of embroidery; at her throat a
big knot of white lace, the ends of which fell winding in a creamy
cascade to her waist (do they call the thing a _jabot_?); and then....
But what can a man trust himself to write of these esoteric matters? She
carried herself extremely well, too: with grace, with distinction, her
head held high, even thrown back a little, superciliously. She had an
immense quantity of very lovely hair. Red hair? Yellow hair? Red hair
with yellow lights burning in it? Yellow hair with red fires shimmering
through it? In a single loose, full billow it swept away from her
forehead, and then flowed into a half-a-thousand rippling, crinkling,
capricious undulations. And her skin had the sensitive colouring, the
fineness of texture, that are apt to accompany red hair when it's
yellow, yellow hair when it's red. Her face, with its pensive,
quizzical eyes, its tip-tilted nose, its rather large mouth, and the
little mocking quirks and curves the lips took, with an alert, arch,
witty face; a delicate high-bred face; and withal a somewhat sensuous,
emotional face; the face of a woman with a vast deal of humour in her
soul; a vast deal of mischief; of a woman who would love to tease you,
and mystify you, and lead you on, and put you off; and yet who, in her
own way, at her own time, would know supremely well how to be kind.
But it was mischief rather than kindness that glimmered in her eyes at
present, as she asked, "You were in the deepest depths of dejection?
Poor man! Why?"
"I can't precisely determine," said he, "whether the sympathy that seems
to vibrate in your voice is genuine or counterfeit."
"Perhaps it's half and half," she suggested. "But my curiosity is
unmixed. Tell me your troubles."
"The catalogue is long. I've sixteen hundred million. The weather, for
example. The shameless beauty of this radiant spring day. It's enough to
stir all manner of wild pangs and longings in the heart of an
octogenarian. But, anyhow, when one's life is passed in a dungeon, one
can't perpetually be singing and dancing from mere exuberance of joy,
can one?"
"Is your life passed in a dungeon?" she exclaimed.
"Indeed, indeed, it is. Isn't yours?"
"It had never occurred to me that it was."
"You're lucky. Mine is passed in the dungeons of Castle Ennui," he said.
"Oh, Castle Ennui. Ah, yes. You mean you're bored?"
"At this particular moment I'm savouring the most exquisite excitement,"
he professed. "But in general, when I am not working or sleeping, I'm
bored to extermination--incomparably bored. If only one could work and
sleep alternately, twenty-four hours a day, the year round! There's no
use trying to play in London. It's so hard to find a playmate. The
English people take their pleasures without salt."
"The dungeons of Castle Ennui," she repeated meditatively. "Yes, we are
fellow-prisoners. I'm bored to extermination too. Still," she added,
"one is allowed out on parole, now and again. And sometimes one has
really quite delightful little experiences."
"It would ill become me, in the present circumstances, to dispute that,"
he answered, bowing.
"But the castle waits to reclaim us afterwards, doesn't it?" she mused.
"That's rather a happy image, Castle Ennui."
"I'm extremely glad you approve of it. Castle Ennui is the bastile of
modern life. It is built of prunes and prisms; it has its outer court of
convention, and its inner court of propriety; it is moated round by
respectability, and the shackles its inmates wear are forged of dull
little duties and arbitrary little rules. You can only escape from it at
the risk of breaking your social neck, or remaining a fugitive from
social justice to the end of your days. Yes, it _is_ a fairly decent
little image."
"A bit out of something you're preparing for the press?" she hinted.
"Oh, how unkind of you!" he cried. "It was absolutely extemporaneous."
"One can never tell, with _vous autres gens-de-lettres_," she laughed.
"It would be friendlier to say _nous autres gens d'esprit_," he
submitted.
"Aren't we proving to what degree _nous autres gens d'esprit sont
bêtes_," she remarked, "by continuing to walk along this narrow
pavement, when we can get into Kensington Gardens by merely crossing the
street. Would it take you out of your way?"
"I have no way. I was sauntering for pleasure, if you can believe me. I
wish I could hope that you have no way either. Then we could stop here,
and crack little jokes together the livelong afternoon," he said, as
they entered the Gardens.
"Alas, my way leads straight back to the Castle. I've promised to call
on an old woman in Campden Hill," said she.
"Disappoint her. It's good for old women to be disappointed. It whips up
their circulation."
"I shouldn't much regret disappointing the old woman," she admitted,
"and I should rather like an hour or two of stolen freedom. I don't mind
owning that I've generally found you, as men go, a moderately
interesting man to talk with. But the deuce of it is--You permit the
expression?"
"I'm devoted to the expression."
"The deuce of it is, I'm supposed to be driving," she explained.
"Oh, that doesn't matter. So many suppositions in this world are
baseless," he reminded her.
"But there's the prison van," she said. "It's one of the tiresome rules
in the female wing of Castle Ennui that you're always supposed, more or
less, to be driving. And though you may cheat the authorities by
slipping out of the prison van directly it's turned the corner, and
sending it on ahead, there it remains, a factor that can't be
eliminated. The prison van will relentlessly await my arrival in the old
woman's street."
"That only adds to the sport. Let it wait. When a factor can't be
eliminated, it should be haughtily ignored. Besides, there are higher
considerations. If you leave me, what shall I do with the rest of this
weary day?"
"You can go to your club."
He threw up his hand. "Merciful lady! What sin have I committed? I never
go to my club, except when I've been wicked, as a penance. If you will
permit me to employ a metaphor--oh, but a tried and trusty
metaphor--when one ship on the sea meets another in distress, it stops
and comforts it, and forgets all about its previous engagements and the
prison van and everything. Shall we cross to the north, and see whether
the Serpentine is in its place? Or would you prefer to inspect the
eastern front of the Palace? Or may I offer you a penny chair?"
"I think a penny chair would be the maddest of the three dissipations,"
she decided.
And they sat down in penny chairs.
"It's rather jolly here, isn't it?" said he. "The trees, with their
black trunks, and their leaves, and things. Have you ever seen such
sumptuous foliage? And the greensward, and the shadows, and the
sunlight, and the atmosphere, and the mistiness--isn't it like
pearl-dust and gold-dust floating in the air? It's all got up to imitate
the background of a Watteau. We must do our best to be frivolous and
ribald, and supply a proper foreground. How big and fleecy and white the
clouds are. Do you think they're made of cotton-wood? And what do you
suppose they paint the sky with? There never was such a brilliant,
breath-taking blue. It's much too nice to be natural. And they've
sprinkled the whole place with scent, haven't they? You notice how fresh
and sweet it smells. If only one could get rid of the sparrows--the
cynical little beasts! hear how they're chortling--and the people, and
the nursemaids and children. I have never been able to understand why
they admit the public to the parks."
"Go on," she encouraged him. "You're succeeding admirably in your effort
to be ribald."
"But that last remark wasn't ribald in the least--it was desperately
sincere. I do think it's inconsiderate of them to admit the public to
the parks. They ought to exclude all the lower classes, the people, at
one fell swoop, and then to discriminate tremendously amongst the
others."
"Mercy, what undemocratic sentiments!" she cried. "The People, the poor
dear People--what have they done?"
"Everything. What haven't they done? One could forgive their being dirty
and stupid and noisy and rude; one could forgive their ugliness, the
ineffable banality of their faces, their goggle-eyes, their protruding
teeth, their ungainly motions; but the trait one can't forgive is their
venality. They're so mercenary. They're always thinking how much they
can get out of you--everlastingly touching their hats and expecting you
to put your hand in your pocket. Oh, no, believe me, there's no health
in the People. Ground down under the iron heel of despotism, reduced to
a condition of hopeless serfdom, I don't say that they might not develop
redeeming virtues. But free, but sovereign, as they are in these days,
they're everything that is squalid and sordid and offensive. Besides,
they read such abominably bad literature."
"In that particular they're curiously like the aristocracy, aren't
they?" said she. "By-the-bye, when are you going to publish another book
of poems?"
"Apropos of bad literature?"
"Not altogether bad. I rather like your poems."
"So do I," said he. "It's useless to pretend that we haven't tastes in
common."
They were both silent for a bit. She looked at him oddly, an inscrutable
little light flickering in her eyes. All at once she broke out with a
merry trill of laughter.
"What are you laughing at?" he demanded.
"I'm hugely amused," she answered.
"I wasn't I aware that I'd said anything especially good."
"You're building better than you know. But if I am amused, _you_ look
ripe for tears. What is the matter?"
"Every heart knows its own bitterness," he answered. "Don't pay the
least attention to me. You mustn't let moodiness of mine cast a blight
upon your high spirits."
"No fear," she assured him. "There are pleasures that nothing can rob of
their sweetness. Life is not all dust and ashes. There are bright
spots."
"Yes, I've no doubt there are," he said.
"And thrilling little adventures--no?" she questioned.
"For the bold, I dare say."
"None but the bold deserve them. Sometimes it's one thing, and sometimes
it's another."
"That's very certain," he agreed.
"Sometimes, for instance," she went on, "one meets a man one knows, and
speaks to him. And he answers with a glibness! And then, almost
directly, what do you suppose one discovers?"
"What?" he asked.
"One discovers that the wretch hasn't a ghost of a notion who one
is--that he's totally and absolutely forgotten one!"
"Oh, I say! Really?" he exclaimed.
"Yes, really. You can't deny that _that's_ an exhilarating little
adventure."
"I should think it might be. One could enjoy the man's embarrassment,"
he reflected.
"Or his lack of embarrassment. Some men are of an assurance, of a _sang
froid_! They'll place themselves beside you, and walk with you, and talk
with you, and even propose that you should pass the livelong afternoon
cracking jokes with them in a garden, and never breathe a hint of their
perplexity. They'll brazen it out."
"That's distinctly heroic, Spartan, of them, don't you think?" he said.
"Intentionally, poor dears, they're very likely suffering agonies of
discomfiture."
"We'll hope they are. Could they decently do less?" said she.
"And fancy the mental struggles that must be going on in their brains,"
he urged. "If I were a man in such a situation I'd throw myself upon the
woman's mercy. I'd say, 'Beautiful, sweet lady! I know I know you. Your
name, your entirely charming and appropriate name, is trembling on the
tip of my tongue. But, for some unaccountable reason, my brute of a
memory chooses to play the fool. If you've a spark of Christian kindness
in your soul, you'll come to my rescue with a little clue."
"If the woman had a Christian sense of the ridiculous in her soul, I
fear you'd throw yourself on her mercy in vain," she warned.
"What _is_ the good of tantalizing people?"
"Besides," she continued, "the woman might reasonably feel slightly
humiliated to find herself forgotten in that bare-faced manner."
"The humiliation would be surely all the man's. Have you heard from the
Wohenhoffens lately?"
"The--what? The--who?" She raised her eyebrows.
"The Wohenhoffens," he repeated.
"What are the Wohenhoffens? Are they persons? Are they things?"
"Oh, nothing. My inquiry was merely dictated by a thirst for knowledge.
It occurred to me that you might have won a black domino at the masked
ball they gave, the Wohenhoffens. Are you sure you didn't?"
"I've a great mind to punish your forgetfulness by pretending that I
did," she teased.
"She was rather tall, like you, and she had gray eyes, and a nice voice,
and a laugh that was sweeter than the singing of nightingales. She was
monstrously clever, too, with a flow of language that would have made
her a leader in any sphere. She was also a perfect fiend. I have always
been anxious to meet her again, in order that I might ask her to marry
me. I'm strongly disposed to believe that she was you. Was she?" he
pleaded.
"If I say yes, will you at once proceed to ask me to marry you?" she
asked.
"Try it and see."
"_Ce n'est pas la peine._ It occasionally happens that a woman's already
got a husband."
"She said she was an old maid."
"Do you dare to insinuate that I look like an old maid?" she cried.
"Yes."
"Upon my word!"
"Would you wish me to insinuate that you look like anything so insipid
as a young girl? _Were_ you the woman of the black domino?" he
persisted.
"I should need further information, before being able to make up my
mind. Are the--what's their name?--Wohenheimer?--are the Wohenheimers
people one can safely confess to knowing? Oh, you're a man, and don't
count. But a woman? It sounds a trifle Jewish, Wohenheimer. But of
course there are Jews and Jews."
"You're playing with me like the cat in the adage," he sighed. "It's
too cruel. No one is responsible for his memory."
"And to think that this man took me down to dinner not two months ago!"
she murmured in her veil.
"You're as hard as nails. In whose house? Or--stay. Prompt me a little.
Tell me the first syllable of your name. Then the rest will come with a
rush."
"My name is Matilda Muggins."
"I've a great mind to punish your untruthfulness by pretending to
believe you," said he. "Have you really got a husband?"
"Why do you doubt it?" said she.
"I don't doubt it. Have you?"
"I don't know what to answer."
"Don't you know whether you've got a husband?" he protested.
"I don't know what I'd better let you believe. Yes, on the whole, I
think you may as well assume that I've got a husband," she concluded.
"And a lover, too?" he asked.
"Really! I like your impertinence!" she bridled.
"I only asked to show a polite interest. I knew the answer would be an
indignant negative. You're an Englishwoman, and you're _nice_. Oh, one
can see with half an eye that you're _nice_. But that a nice
Englishwoman should have a lover is as inconceivable as that she should
have side-whiskers. It's only the reg'lar bad-uns in England who have
lovers. There's nothing between the family pew and the divorce court.
One nice Englishwoman is a match for the whole Eleven Thousand Virgins
of Cologne."
"To hear you talk, one might fancy you were not English yourself. For a
man of the name of Field, you're uncommonly foreign. You _look_ rather
foreign, too, you know, by-the-bye. You haven't at all an English cast
of countenance," she considered.
"I've enjoyed the advantages of a foreign education. I was brought up
abroad," he explained.
"Where your features unconsciously assimilated themselves to a foreign
type? Where you learned a hundred thousand strange little foreign
things, no doubt? And imbibed a hundred thousand unprincipled little
foreign notions? And all the ingenuous little foreign prejudices and
misconceptions concerning England?" she questioned.
"Most of them," he assented.
"_Perfide Albion?_ English hypocrisy?" she pursued.
"Oh, yes, the English are consummate hypocrites. But there's only one
objection to their hypocrisy--it so rarely covers any wickedness. It's
such a disappointment to see a creature stalking toward you, laboriously
draped in sheep's clothing, and then to discover that it's only a sheep.
You, for instance, as I took the liberty of intimating a moment ago, in
spite of your perfectly respectable appearance, are a perfectly
respectable woman. If you weren't, wouldn't I be making furious love to
you, though!"
"As I am, I can see no reason why you shouldn't make furious love to me,
if it would amuse you. There's no harm in firing your pistol at a person
who's bullet-proof," she laughed.
"No; it's merely a wanton waste of powder and shot," said he. "However,
I shouldn't stick at that. The deuce of it is--You permit the
expression?"
"I'm devoted to the expression."
"The deuce of it is, you profess to be married."
"Do you mean to say that you, with your unprincipled foreign notions,
would be restrained by any such consideration as that?" she wondered.
"I shouldn't be for an instant--if I weren't in love with you."
"_Comment donc? Déjà?_" she cried with a laugh.
"Oh, _déjà_! Why not? Consider the weather--consider the scene. Is the
air soft, is it fragrant? Look at the sky--good heavens!--and the
clouds, and the shadows on the grass, and the sunshine between the
trees. The world is made of light to-day, of light and color, and
perfume and music. _Tutt 'intorno canta amor, amor, amor!_ What would
you have? One recognises one's affinity. One doesn't need a lifetime.
You began the business at the Wohenhoffens' ball. To-day you've merely
put on the finishing touches."
"Oh, then I _am_ the woman you met at the masked ball?" she cried.
"Look me in the eye, and tell me you're not," he defied her.
"I haven't the faintest interest in telling you I'm not. On the
contrary, it rather pleases me to let you imagine that I am."
"She owed me a grudge, you know. I hoodwinked her like everything," he
confided.
"Oh, did you? Then, as a sister woman, I should be glad to serve as her
instrument of vengeance. Do you happen to have such a thing as a watch
about you?" she inquired.
"Yes," he said.
"Will you be good enough to tell me what o'clock it is?"
"What are your motives for asking?"
"I'm expected at home at five."
"Where do you live?"
"What are the motives for asking?"
"I want to call upon you."
"You might wait till you're invited."
"Well, invite me--quick!"
"Never."
"Never?"
"Never, never, never," she asseverated. "A man who's forgotten me as you
have!"
"But if I've only met you once at a masked ball--"
"Can't you be brought to realise that every time you mistake me for that
woman of the masked ball you turn the dagger in the wound?" she
demanded.
"But if you won't invite me to call upon you, how and when am I to see
you again?"
"I haven't an idea," she answered, cheerfully. "I must go now. Good-by."
She rose.
"One moment," he interposed. "Before you go will you allow me to look at
the palm of your left hand?"
"What for?"
"I can tell fortunes. I'm extremely good at it," he boasted. "I'll tell
you yours."
"Oh, very well," she assented, sitting down again: and guilelessly she
pulled off her glove.
He took her hand, a beautifully slender, nervous hand, warm and soft,
with rosy, tapering fingers.
"Oho! you _are_ an old maid after all," he cried. "There's no wedding
ring."
"You villain!" she gasped, snatching the hand away.
"I promised to tell your fortune. Haven't I told it correctly?"
"You needn't rub it in, though. Eccentric old maids don't like to be
reminded of their condition."
"Will you marry _me_?"
"Why do you ask?"
"Partly for curiosity. Partly because it's the only way I can think of,
to make sure of seeing you again. And then, I like your hair. Will you?"
"I can't," she said.
"Why not?"
"The stars forbid. And I'm ambitious. In my horoscope it is written that
I shall either never marry at all, or--marry royalty."
"Oh, bother ambition! Cheat your horoscope. Marry me. Will you?"
"If you care to follow me," she said, rising again, "you can come and
help me to commit a little theft."
He followed her to an obscure and sheltered corner of a flowery path,
where she stopped before a bush of white lilac.
"There are no keepers in sight, are there? she questioned.
"I don't see any," he said.
"Then allow me to make you a receiver of stolen goods," said she,
breaking off a spray, and handing it to him.
"Thank you. But I'd rather have an answer to my question."
"Isn't that an answer?"
"Is it?"
"White lilac--to the Invisible Prince?"
"The Invisible Prince--Then you _are the black_ domino!" he exclaimed.
"Oh, I suppose so," she consented.
"And you _will_ marry me?"
"I'll tell the aunt I live with to ask you to dinner."
"But will you marry me?"
"I thought you wished me to cheat my horoscope?"
"How could you find a better means of doing so?"
"What! if I should marry Louis Leczinski--?"
"Oh, to be sure. You will have it that I was Louis Leczinski. But, on
that subject, I must warn you seriously--"
"One instant," she interrupted. "People must look other people straight
in the face when they're giving serious warnings. Look straight into my
eyes, and continue your serious warning."
"I must really warn you seriously," said he, biting his lip, "that if
you persist in that preposterous delusion about my being Louis
Leczinski, you'll be most awfully sold. I have nothing on earth to do
with Louis Leczinski. Your ingenious little theories, as I tried to
convince you at the time, were absolute romance."
Her eyebrows raised a little, she kept her eyes fixed steadily on
his--oh, in the drollest fashion, with a gaze that seemed to say "How
admirably you do it! I wonder whether you imagine I believe you. Oh, you
fibber! Aren't you ashamed to tell me such abominable fibs--?"
They stood still, eyeing each other thus, for something like twenty
seconds, and then they both laughed and walked on.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] From _Comedies and Errors_. Reprinted by permission of the John Lane
Company.
WHY WAIT FOR DEATH AND TIME?
BY BERT LESTON TAYLOR
I hold it truth with him who weekly sings
Brave songs of hope,--the music of "The Sphere,"--
That deathless tomes the living present brings:
Great literature is with us year on year.
Books of the mighty dead, whom men revere,
Remind me I can make _my_ books sublime.
But, prithee, bay my brow while I am here:
Why do we ever wait for Death and Time?
Shakespeare, great spirit, beat his mighty wings,
As I beat mine, for the occasion near.
He knew, as I, the worth of present things:
Great literature is with us year on year.
Methinks I meet across the gulf his clear
And tranquil eye; his calm reflections chime
With mine: "Why do we at the present fleer?
Why do we ever wait for Death and Time?"
The reading world with acclamation rings
For my last book. It led the list at Weir,
Altoona, Rahway, Painted Post, Hot Springs:
Great literature is with us year on year.
"The Bookman" gives me a vociferous cheer.
Howells approves. I can no higher climb.
Bring, then, the laurel: crown my bright career--
Why do we ever wait for Death and Time?
Critics, who pastward, ever pastward peer,
Great literature is with us year on year.
Trumpet my fame while I am in my prime:
Why do we ever wait for Death and Time?
WINTER JOYS
BY EUGENE FIELD
A man stood on the bathroom floor,
While raged the storm without,
One hand was on the water valve,
The other on the spout.
He fiercely tried to turn the plug,
But all in vain he tried,
"I see it all, I am betrayed,
The water's froze," he cried.
Down to the kitchen then he rushed,
And in the basement dove,
Long strived he for to turn the plugs,
But all in vain he strove.
"The hydrant may be running yet,"
He cried in hopeful tone,
Alas, the hydrant too, was froze,
As stiff as any stone.
There came a burst, the water pipes
And plugs, oh, where were they?
Ask of the soulless plumber man
Who called around next day.
THE DEMON OF THE STUDY
BY JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
The Brownie sits in the Scotchman's room,
And eats his meat and drinks his ale,
And beats the maid with her unused broom,
And the lazy lout with his idle flail;
But he sweeps the floor and threshes the corn,
And hies him away ere the break of dawn.
The shade of Denmark fled from the sun,
And the Cocklane ghost from the barn-loft cheer,
The fiend of Faust was a faithful one,
Agrippa's demon wrought in fear,
And the devil of Martin Luther sat
By the stout monk's side in social chat.
The Old Man of the Sea, on the neck of him
Who seven times crossed the deep,
Twined closely each lean and withered limb,
Like the nightmare in one's sleep.
But he drank of the wine, and Sindbad cast
The evil weight from his back at last.
But the demon that cometh day by day
To my quiet room and fireside nook,
Where the casement light falls dim and gray
On faded painting and ancient book,
Is a sorrier one than any whose names
Are chronicled well by good King James.
No bearer of burdens like Caliban,
No runner of errands like Ariel,
He comes in the shape of a fat old man,
Without rap of knuckle or pull of bell;
And whence he comes, or whither he goes,
I know as I do of the wind which blows.
A stout old man with a greasy hat
Slouched heavily down to his dark, red nose,
And two gray eyes enveloped in fat,
Looking through glasses with iron bows.
Read ye, and heed ye, and ye who can,
Guard well your doors from that old man!
He comes with a careless "How d'ye do?"
And seats himself in my elbow-chair;
And my morning paper and pamphlet new
Fall forthwith under his special care,
And he wipes his glasses and clears his throat,
And, button by button, unfolds his coat.
And then he reads from paper and book,
In a low and husky asthmatic tone,
With the stolid sameness of posture and look
Of one who reads to himself alone;
And hour after hour on my senses come
That husky wheeze and that dolorous hum.
The price of stocks, the auction sales,
The poet's song and the lover's glee,
The horrible murders, the sea-board gales,
The marriage list, and the _jeu d'esprit_,
All reach my ear in the self-same tone,--
I shudder at each, but the fiend reads on!
Oh, sweet as the lapse of water at noon
O'er the mossy roots of some forest tree,
The sigh of the wind in the woods of June,
Or sound of flutes o'er a moonlight sea,
Or the low soft music, perchance, which seems
To float through the slumbering singer's dreams.
So sweet, so dear is the silvery tone,
Of her in whose features I sometimes look,
As I sit at eve by her side alone,
And we read by turns, from the self-same book,
Some tale perhaps of the olden time,
Some lover's romance or quaint old rhyme.
Then when the story is one of woe,--
Some prisoner's plaint through his dungeon-bar,
Her blue eye glistens with tears, and low,
Her voice sinks down like a moan afar;
And I seem to hear that prisoner's wail,
And his face looks on me worn and pale.
And when she reads some merrier song,
Her voice is glad as an April bird's,
And when the tale is of war and wrong,
A trumpet's summons is in her words,
And the rush of the hosts I seem to hear,
And see the tossing of plume and spear!
Oh, pity me then, when, day by day,
The stout fiend darkens my parlor door;
And reads me perchance the self-same lay
Which melted in music, the night before,
From lips as the lips of Hylas sweet,
And moved like twin roses which zephyrs meet!
I cross my floor with a nervous tread,
I whistle and laugh and sing and shout,
I flourish my cane above his head,
And stir up the fire to roast him out;
I topple the chairs, and drum on the pane,
And press my hands on my ears, in vain!
I've studied Glanville and James the wise.
And wizard black-letter tomes which treat
Of demons of every name and size
Which a Christian man is presumed to meet,
But never a hint and never a line
Can I find of a reading fiend like mine.
I've crossed the Psalter with Brady and Tate,
And laid the Primer above them all,
I've nailed a horseshoe over the grate,
And hung a wig to my parlor wall
Once worn by a learned Judge, they say,
At Salem court in the witchcraft day!
"_Conjuro te, sceleratissime_,
_Abire ad tuum locum!_"--still
Like a visible nightmare he sits by me,--
The exorcism has lost its skill;
And I hear again in my haunted room
The husky wheeze and the dolorous hum!
Ah! commend me to Mary Magdalen
With her sevenfold plagues, to the wandering Jew,
To the terrors which haunted Orestes when
The furies his midnight curtains drew,
But charm him off, ye who charm him can,
That reading demon, that fat old man!
UNCLE BENTLEY AND THE ROOSTERS
BY HAYDEN CARRUTH
The burden of Uncle Bentley has always rested heavily on our town.
Having not a shadow of business to attend to he has made other people's
business his own, and looked after it in season and out--especially out.
If there is a thing which nobody wants done, to this Uncle Bentley
applies his busy hand.
One warm summer Sunday we were all at church. Our pastor had taken the
passage on turning the other cheek, or one akin to it, for his text, and
was preaching on peace and quiet and non-resistance. He soon had us in a
devout mood which must have been beautiful to see and encouraging to the
good man.
Of course, Uncle Bentley was there--he always was, and forever in a
front pew, with his neck craned up looking backward to see if there was
anything that didn't need doing which he could do. He always tinkered
with the fires in the winter and fussed with the windows in the summer,
and did his worst with each. His strongest church point was ushering.
Not content to usher the stranger within our gates, he would usher all
of us, and always thrust us into pews with just the people we didn't
want to sit with. If you failed to follow him when he took you in tow,
he would stop and look back reproachfully, describing mighty indrawing
curves with his arm; and if you pretended not to see him, he would give
a low whistle to attract your attention, the arm working right along,
like a Holland windmill.
On this particular warm summer Sunday Uncle Bentley was in place wearing
his long, full-skirted coat, a queer, dark, bottle-green, purplish blue.
He had ushered to his own exceeding joy, and got two men in one pew, and
given them a single hymn-book, who wouldn't on week-days speak to each
other. I ought to mention that we had long before made a verb of Uncle
Bentley. To unclebentley was to do the wrong thing. It was a regular
verb, unclebentley, unclebentleyed, unclebentleying. Those two rampant
enemies in the same pew had been unclebentleyed.
The minister was floating along smoothly on the subject of peace when
Uncle Bentley was observed to throw up his head. He had heard a sound
outside. It was really nothing but one of Deacon Plummer's young
roosters crowing. The Deacon lived near, and vocal offerings from his
poultry were frequent and had ceased to interest any one except Uncle
Bentley. Then in the pauses between the preacher's periods we heard the
flapping of wings, with sudden stoppings and startings. Those
unregenerate fowls, unable to understand the good man's words, were
fighting. Even this didn't interest us--we were committed to peace. But
Uncle Bentley shot up like a jack-in-a-box and cantered down the aisle.
Of course, his notion was that the roosters were disturbing the
services, and that it was his duty to go out and stop them. We heard
vigorous "Shoos!" and "Take thats!" and "Consairn yous!" and then Uncle
Bentley came back looking very important, and as he stalked up the aisle
he glanced around and nodded his head, saying as clearly as words,
"There, where would you be without me?" Another defiant crow floated in
at the window.
The next moment the rushing and beating of wings began again, and down
the aisle went Uncle Bentley, the long tails of that coat fairly
floating like a cloud behind him. There was further uproar outside, and
Uncle Bentley was back in his place, this time turning around and
whispering hoarsely, "I fixed 'em!" But such was not the case, for twice
more the very same thing was repeated. The last time Uncle Bentley came
back he wore a calm, snug expression, as who should say, "Now I _have_
fixed 'em!" We should have liked it better if the roosters had fixed
Uncle Bentley. But nobody paid much attention except Deacon Plummer. The
thought occurred to him that perhaps Uncle Bentley had killed the fowls.
But he hadn't.
However, there was no more disturbance without, and after a time the
sermon closed. There was some sort of a special collection to be taken
up. Of course, Uncle Bentley always insisted on taking up all the
collections. He hopped up on this occasion and seized the plate with
more than usual vigor. His struggles with the roosters had evidently
stimulated him. He soon made the rounds and approached the table in
front of the pulpit to deposit his harvest. As he did so we saw to our
horror that the long tails of that ridiculous coat were violently
agitated. A sickening suspicion came over us. The next moment one of
those belligerent young roosters thrust a head out of either of those
coat-tail pockets. One uttered a raucous crow, the other made a vicious
dab. Uncle Bentley dropped the plate with a scattering of coin, seized a
coat skirt in each hand, and drew it front. This dumped both fowls out
on the floor, where they went at it hammer and tongs. What happened
after this is a blur in most of our memories. All that is certain is
that there was an uproar in the congregation, especially the younger
portion; that the Deacon began making unsuccessful dives for his
poultry; that the organist struck up "Onward, Christian Soldiers," and
that the minister waved us away without a benediction amid loud shouts
of, "Shoo!" "I swanny!" and, "Drat the pesky critters!" from your Uncle
Bentley.
Did it serve to subdue Uncle Bentley? Not in the least; he survived to
do worse things.
A SHINING MARK
BY IRONQUILL
A man came here from Idaho,
With lots of mining stock.
He brought along as specimens
A lot of mining rock.
The stock was worth a cent a pound
If stacked up in a pile.
The rock was worth a dollar and
A half per cubic mile.
We planted him at eventide,
'Mid shadows dim and dark;
We fixed him up an epitaph,--
"Death loves a mining shark."
A BOOKWORM'S PLAINT[3]
BY CLINTON SCOLLARD
To-day, when I had dined my fill
Upon a Caxton,--you know Will,--
I crawled forth o'er the colophon
To bask awhile within the sun;
And having coiled my sated length,
I felt anon my whilom strength
Slip from me gradually, till deep
I dropped away in dreamful sleep,
Wherein I walked an endless maze,
And dined on Caxtons all my days.
Then I woke suddenly. Alas!
What in my sleep had come to pass?
That priceless first edition row,--
Squat quarto and tall folio,--
Had, in my slumber, vanished quite;
Instead, on my astonished sight
The newest novels burst,--a gay
And most unpalatable array!
I, that have battened on the best,
Why should I thus be dispossessed
And with starvation, or the worst
Of diets, cruelly be curst?
FOOTNOTES:
[3] Lippincott's Magazine.
A POE-'EM OF PASSION
BY CHARLES F. LUMMIS
It was many and many a year ago,
On an island near the sea,
That a maiden lived whom you mightn't know
By the name of Cannibalee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than a passionate fondness for me.
I was a child, and she was a child--
Tho' her tastes were adult Feejee--
But she loved with a love that was more than love,
My yearning Cannibalee;
With a love that could take me roast or fried
Or raw, as the case might be.
And that is the reason that long ago,
In that island near the sea,
I had to turn the tables and eat
My ardent Cannibalee--
Not really because I was fond of her,
But to check her fondness for me.
But the stars never rise but I think of the size
Of my hot-potted Cannibalee,
And the moon never stares but it brings me nightmares
Of my spare-rib Cannibalee;
And all the night-tide she is restless inside,
Is my still indigestible dinner-belle bride,
In her pallid tomb, which is Me,
In her solemn sepulcher, Me.
THE REAL DIARY OF A REAL BOY
BY HENRY A. SHUTE
Mar. 11, 186----Went to church in the morning. the fernace was all
write. Mister Lennard preeched about loving our ennymies, and told every
one if he had any angry feelings towards ennyone to go to him and shake
hands and see how much better you wood feel. i know how it is becaus
when me and Beany are mad we dont have eny fun and when we make up the
one who is to blam always wants to treet. why when Beany was mad with me
becaus i went home from Gil Steels surprise party with Lizzie Towle, Ed
Towles sister, he woodent speak to me for 2 days, and when we made up he
treated me to ice cream with 2 spoons and he let me dip twice to his
once. he took pretty big dips to make up. Beany is mad if enny of the
fellers go with Lizzie Towle. she likes Beany better than she does enny
of the fellers and Beany ought to be satisfied, but sometimes he acks
mad when i go down there to fite roosters with Ed. i gess he needent
worry much, no feller isnt going to leave of fiting roosters to go with
no girls. well i most forgot that i was going to say, but after church i
went up to Micky Gould who was going to fite me behind the school house,
and said Micky lets be friends and Micky said, huh old Skinny, i can
lick you in 2 minits and i said you aint man enuf and he called me a
nockneed puke, and i called him a wall eyed lummix and he give me a
paist in the eye and i gave him a good one in the mouth, and then we
rassled and Micky threw me and i turned him, and he got hold of my new
false bosom and i got hold of his hair, and the fellers all hollered hit
him Micky, paist him Skinny, and Mister Purington, Pewts father pulled
us apart and i had Mickys paper collar and necktie and some of his hair
and he had my false bosom and when i got home father made me go to bed
and stay there all the afternoon for fiting, but i guess he didnt like
my losing my false bosom. ennyway he asked me how many times i hit Micky
and which licked. he let me get up at supper time. next time i try to
love my ennymy i am a going to lick him first.
Went to a sunday school concert in the evening. Keene and Cele sung now
i lay me down to sleep. they was a lot of people sung together and
Mister Gale beat time. Charlie Gerish played the violin and Miss Packard
sung. i was scart when Keene and Cele sung for i was afraid they would
break down, but they dident, and people said they sung like night harks.
i gess if they knowed how night harks sung they woodent say much. father
felt pretty big and to hear him talk you wood think he did the singing.
he give them ten cents apeace. i dident get none. you gest wait, old man
till i git my cornet.
Went to a corcus last night. me and Beany were in the hall in the
afternoon helping Bob Carter sprinkle the floor and put on the sordust.
the floor was all shiny with wax and aufully slipery. so Bob got us to
put on some water to take off the shiny wax. well write in front of the
platform there is a low platform where they get up to put in their votes
and then step down and Beany said, dont put any water there only jest
dry sordust. so i dident. well that night we went erly to see the fun.
Gim Luverin got up and said there was one man which was the oldest voter
in town and he ought to vote the first, the name of this destinkuished
sitizen was John Quincy Ann Pollard. then old mister Pollard got up and
put in his vote and when he stepped down his heels flew up and he went
down whak on the back of his head and 2 men lifted him up and lugged him
to a seat, and then Ed Derborn, him that rings the town bell, stepped up
pretty lively and went flat and swort terrible, and me and Beany nearly
died we laffed so. well it kept on, people dident know what made them
fall, and Gim Odlin sat write down in his new umbrella and then they
sent me down stairs for a pail of wet sordust and when i was coming up i
heard an awful whang, and when i got up in the hall they were lugging
old mister Stickney off to die and they put water on his head and lugged
him home in a hack. me and Beany dont know what to do. if we dont tell,
Bob will lose his place and if we do we will get licked.
Mar. 31. April fool day tomorrow. i am laying for Beany. old Francis
licked 5 fellers today becaus they sung rong when we was singing speek
kindly it is better for to rule by luv than feer.
June 14. Rashe Belnap and Horris Cobbs go in swimming every morning at
six o'clock. i got a licking today that beat the one Beany got. last
summer me and Tomtit Tomson and Cawcaw Harding and Whack and Poz and
Boog Chadwick went in swimming in May and all thru the summer until
October. one day i went in 10 times. well i dident say anything about it
to father so as not to scare him. well today he dident go to Boston and
he said i am going to teech you to swim. when i was as old as you i cood
swim said he, and you must lern, i said i have been wanting to lern to
swim, for all the other boys can swim. so we went down to the gravil and
i peeled off my close and got ready, now said he, you jest wade in up to
your waste and squat down and duck your head under. i said the water
will get in my nose. he said no it wont jest squat rite down. i cood
see him laffin when he thought i wood snort and sputter.
so i waded out a little ways and then div in and swam under water most
across, and when i came up i looked to see if father was surprised. gosh
you aught to have seen him. he had pulled off his coat and vest and
there he stood up to his waste in the water with his eyes jest bugging
rite out as big as hens eggs, and he was jest a going to dive for my
dead body. then i turned over on my back and waved my hand at him. he
dident say anything for a minute, only he drawed in a long breth. then
he began to look foolish, and then mad, and then he turned and started
to slosh back to the bank where he slipped and went in all over. When he
got to the bank he was pretty mad and yelled for me to come out. when i
came out he cut a stick and whaled me, and as soon as i got home he sent
me to bed for lying, but i gess he was mad becaus i about scart the life
out of him. but that nite i heard him telling mother about it and he
said that he div 3 times for me in about thirty feet of water. but he
braged about my swimming and said i cood swim like a striped frog. i
shall never forget how his boots went kerslosh kerslosh kerslosh when we
were skinning home thru croslots. i shall never forget how that old
stick hurt either. ennyhow he dident say ennything about not going in
again, so i gess i am all rite.
June 15, 186----Johnny Heeld, a student, came to me and wanted me to carry
some tickets to a dance round to the girls in the town. there was about
1 hundred of them. he read the names over to me and i said i knew them
all. so after school me and Beany started out and walked all over town
and give out the tickets. i had a long string of names and every time i
wood leave one i wood mark out the name. i dident give the Head girls
any because they told father about some things that me and Beany and
Pewt did and the Parmer girls and the Cilley girls lived way up on the
plains and i dident want to walk up there, so when i went over to
Hemlock side to give one, i went over to the factory boarding house and
give some to them. they was auful glad to get them too and said they
would go to the dance. some people was not at home and so i gave their
tickets to the next house. it took me till 8 o'clock and i got 1 dollar
for it. i dont believe those girls that dident get their tickets will
care much about going ennyway. i gess the Head girls wont want to tell
on me another time.
June 23. there is a dead rat in the wall in my room. it smells auful.
A MOTHERS' MEETING[4]
BY MADELINE BRIDGES
"Where's the maternal parent of
This boy that stands in need of beating,
And of this babe that pines for love?"
"Oh, she is at a Mothers' Meeting!"
"Fair daughter, why these young tears shed,
For passion's tale, too sweet and fleeting,
Lonely and mute, uncomforted?"
"My mother's at a Mothers' Meeting."
"Man, whom misfortunes jeer and taunt,
Whom frauds forsake, and hope is cheating,
Fly to your mother's arms." "I can't--
You see, she's at a Mothers' Meeting."
Alas, what next will woman do?
Love, duty, children, home, maltreating,
The while she, smiling, rallies to
The roll-call of a Mothers' Meeting!
FOOTNOTES:
[4] Lippincott's Magazine.
MISTER RABBIT'S LOVE AFFAIR
BY FRANK L. STANTON
One day w'en Mister Rabbit wuz a-settin' in de grass
He see Miss Mary comin', en he wouldn't let her pass,
Kaze he know she lookin' purty in de river lookin'glass,
O Mister Rabbit, in de mawnin'!
But de Mockin'bird wuz singin' in de blossom en de dew,
En he know 'bout Mister Rabbit, en he watchin' er 'im,
too;
En Miss Mary heah his music, en she tell 'im "Howdy-do!"
O Mister Rabbit, in de mawnin'!
Mister Rabbit 'low he beat 'im, en he say he'll l'arn ter sing,
En he tried it all de winter, en he kep' it up in spring;
But he wuzn't buil' fer singin', kaze he lack de voice en wing,--
Good-by, Mister Rabbit, in de mawnin'!
OUR HIRED GIRL
BY JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY
Our hired girl, she's 'Lizabuth Ann;
An' she can cook best things to eat!
She ist puts dough in our pie-pan,
An' pours in somepin' 'at's good and sweet,
An' nen she salts it all on top
With cinnamon; an' nen she'll stop
An' stoop an' slide it, ist as slow,
In th' old cook-stove, so's 'twon't slop
An' git all spilled; nen bakes it, so
It's custard pie, first thing you know!
An' nen she'll say:
"Clear out o' my way!
They's time fer work, an' time fer play!--
Take yer dough, an' run, Child; run!
Er I cain't git no cookin' done!"
When our hired girl 'tends like she's mad,
An' says folks got to walk the chalk
When _she's_ around, er wisht they had,
I play out on our porch an' talk
To th' Raggedy Man 'at mows our lawn;
An' he says "_Whew!_" an' nen leans on
His old crook-scythe, and blinks his eyes
An' sniffs all round an' says,--"I swawn!
Ef my old nose don't tell me lies,
It 'pears like I smell custard-pies!"
An' nen _he'll_ say,--
"'Clear out o' my way!
They's time fer work an' time fer play!
Take yer dough, an' run, Child; run!
Er _she_ cain't git no cookin' done!'"
Wunst our hired girl, one time when she
Got the supper, an' we all et,
An' it was night, an' Ma an' me
An' Pa went wher' the "Social" met,--
An' nen when we come home, an' see
A light in the kitchen-door, an' we
Heerd a maccordeum, Pa says "Lan'-
O'-Gracious! who can _her_ beau be?"
An' I marched in, an' 'Lizabuth Ann
Wuz parchin' corn fer the Raggedy Man!
_Better_ say
"Clear out o' the way!
They's time fer work, an' time fer play!
Take the hint, an' run, Child; run!
Er we cain't git no _courtin'_ done!"
THE REASON
BY IRONQUILL
Says John last night:
"William, by grab! I'm beat
To know why stolen kisses
Taste so sweet."
Says William: "Sho!
That's easily explained--
It's 'cause they're _syrup_-
titiously obtained."
* * * * *
O cruel thought!
O words of cruel might!
The coroner
He sat on John that night.
ONCL' ANTOINE ON 'CHANGE
BY WALLACE BRUCE AMSBARY
(_Antoine Boisvert, Raconteur._)
I've jus' com' from Chicago town,
A seein' all de sights
From stockyard to de ballet gairl,
All drass' in spangled tights.
But all de worstes' nonsens'
T'roo vich I got to wade,
I t'ink de t'ing dat gats de cake
Ees place called Board of Trade.
I heard moch talk about dem chap
Dey call de Bull an' Bear,
Dat play aroun' with price of stock
An' get you unaware.
Who'll tell you w'at your wheat
Will bring in Fevuary nex',
In jus' so smood an' quiet vay
De curé read his tex'.
An' dere dey vere out on de floor,
De mans who mak' de price
Of all de country produce,
A lookin' smood an' nice.
But dey had vink opon dere eye
Dat look you t'roo an' t'roo,
Like tricky bunko steerer ven
He's hunting after you.
Dey got de ball to roll ver' swif'
An' firs' fall from de dock
Vas bottom off on July pork;
An' heem dat held de stock
Commence to hiss an' wriggle
Lak' a yellow rattlesnake;
De res' buzz jus' lak' bumblebee
Stirred op vit hayin' rake.
Dis bottom off on July pork
Is strike me kin' of queer,
I's t'ink dat hogs is good for eat
Mos' all of de 'hole year.
Dose feller on Chicago town
Is mak' such fonny phrase
Dat--_entre nous_--I sometimes t'ink
Dat som' of dem ees craz'.
Den dere ees somet'ing happen
Dat mak' 'em more excite',
W'en news ees com' overe de vires
Dat Boer an' Britain fight,
I nevere saw such meex-op yet,
In days since I be born,
Dey scowl an' call wan nodder names,
Dere faces show moch scorn.
Wan man grow wild an' mos'ly craz',
De tears stream off his eyes,
Dere's nodder man dat's laf an' shout,
It's mak' me mos' surprise.
I guess it mak' som' diffe_rance_
Vich side you're on de fence,
But in dis Bear an' Bull meex-op
I see not ver' moch sense.
HEZEKIAH BEDOTT'S OPINION
BY FRANCES M. WHICHER
He was a wonderful hand to moralize, husband was, 'specially after he
begun to enjoy poor health. He made an observation once when he was in
one of his poor turns, that I never shall forget the longest day I live.
He says to me one winter evenin' as we was a settin' by the fire,--I was
a knittin' (I was always a wonderful great knitter) and he was a smokin'
(he was a master hand to smoke, though the doctor used to tell him he'd
be better off to let tobacker alone; when he was well he used to take
his pipe and smoke a spell after he'd got the chores done up, and when
he wa'n't well, used to smoke the biggest part of the time). Well, he
took his pipe out of his mouth and turned toward me, and I knowed
something was comin', for he had a pertikkeler way of lookin' round when
he was gwine to say anything oncommon. Well, he says to me, says he,
"Silly" (my name was Prissilly naterally, but he ginerally called me
"Silly," cause 'twas handier, you know). Well, he says to me, says he,
"Silly," and he looked pretty sollem, I tell you--he had a sollem
countenance naterally--and after he got to be deacon 'twas more so, but
since he'd lost his health he looked sollemer than ever, and certainly
you wouldent wonder at it if you knowed how much he underwent. He was
troubled with a wonderful pain in his chest, and amazin' weakness in the
spine of his back, besides the pleurissy in the side, and having the
ager a considerable part of the time, and bein' broke of his rest o'
nights 'cause he was so put to 't for breath when he laid down. Why it's
an onaccountable fact that when that man died he hadent seen a well day
in fifteen year, though when he was married and for five or six years
after I shouldent desire to see a ruggeder man that he was. But the time
I'm speakin' of he'd been out o' health nigh upon ten year, and O dear
sakes! how he had altered since the first time I ever see him! That was
to a quiltin' to Squire Smith's a spell afore Sally was married. I'd no
idee then that Sal Smith was a gwine to be married to Sam Pendergrass.
She'd ben keepin' company with Mose Hewlitt, for better'n a year, and
everybody said _that_ was a settled thing, and lo and behold! all of a
sudding she up and took Sam Pendergrass. Well, that was the first time I
ever see my husband, and if anybody'd a told me then that I should ever
marry him, I should a said--but lawful sakes! I most forgot, I was gwine
to tell you what he said to me that evenin', and when a body begins to
tell a thing I believe in finishin' on't some time or other. Some folks
have a way of talkin' round and round and round forevermore, and never
come to the pint. Now there's Miss Jinkins, she that was Poll Bingham
afore she was married, she is the tejusest individooal to tell a story
that ever I see in all my born days. But I was a gwine to tell you what
husband said. He says to me, says he, "Silly"; says I, "What?" I dident
say, "What, Hezekier?" for I dident like his name. The first time I ever
heard it I near killed myself a laffin. "Hezekier Bedott," says I,
"well, I would give up if I had sich a name," but then you know I had no
more idee o' marryin' the feller than you had this minnit o' marryin'
the governor. I s'pose you think it's curus we should a named our oldest
son Hezekiah. Well, we done it to please father and mother Bedott; it's
father Bedott's name, and he and mother Bedott both used to think that
names had ought to go down from gineration to gineration. But we always
called him Kier, you know. Speakin' o' Kier, he is a blessin', ain't he?
and I ain't the only one that thinks so, I guess. Now don't you never
tell nobody that I said so, but between you and me I rather guess that
if Kezier Winkle thinks she is a gwine to ketch Kier Bedott she is a
_leetle_ out of her reckonin'. But I was going to tell what husband
said. He says to me, says he, "Silly"; I says, says I, "What?" If I
dident say "what" when he said "Silly" he'd a kept on saying "Silly,"
from time to eternity. He always did, because you know, he wanted me to
pay pertikkeler attention, and I ginerally did; no woman was ever more
attentive to her husband than what I was. Well, he says to me, says he,
"Silly." Says I, "What?" though I'd no idee what he was gwine to say,
dident know but what 'twas something about his sufferings, though he
wa'n't apt to complain, but he frequently used to remark that he
wouldent wish his worst enemy to suffer one minnit as he did all the
time; but that can't be called grumblin'--think it can? Why I've seen
him in sitivation when you'd a thought no mortal could a helped
grumblin'; but _he_ dident. He and me went once in the dead of winter in
a one-hoss shay out to Boonville to see a sister o' hisen. You know the
snow is amazin' deep in that section o' the kentry. Well, the hoss got
stuck in one o' them are flambergasted snow-banks, and there we sot,
onable to stir, and to cap all, while we was a sittin' there, husband
was took with a dretful crik in his back. Now _that_ was what I call a
_perdickerment_, don't you? Most men would a swore, but husband dident.
He only said, says he, "Consarn it." How did we get out, did you ask?
Why we might a benn sittin' there to this day fur as _I_ know, if there
hadent a happened to come along a mess o' men in a double team, and
they hysted us out. But I was gwine to tell you that observation of
hisen. Says he to me, says he, "Silly" (I could see by the light o' the
fire, there dident happen to be no candle burnin', if I don't
disremember, though my memory is sometimes ruther forgitful, but I know
we wa'n't apt to burn candles exceptin' when we had company)--I could
see by the light of the fire that his mind was oncommon solemnized. Says
he to me, says he. "Silly." I says to him, says I, "What?" He says to
me, "_We're all poor critters!_"
WHAT LACK WE YET?
BY ROBERT J. BURDETTE
When Washington was president
He was a mortal icicle;
He never on a railroad went,
And never rode a bicycle.
He read by no electric lamp,
Ne'er heard about the Yellowstone;
He never licked a postage stamp,
And never saw a telephone.
His trousers ended at his knees;
By wire he could not snatch dispatch;
He filled his lamp with whale-oil grease,
And never had a match to scratch.
But in these days it's come to pass,
All work is with such dashing done,
We've all these things, but then, alas--
We seem to have no Washington!
JACOB
BY PHOEBE CARY
He dwelt among "Apartments let,"
About five stories high;
A man, I thought, that none would get,
And very few would try.
A boulder, by a larger stone
Half hidden in the mud,
Fair as a man when only one
Is in the neighborhood.
He lived unknown, and few could tell
When Jacob was not free;
But he has got a wife--and O!
The difference to me!
TO BARY JADE
BY CHARLES FOLLEN ADAMS
The bood is beabig brighdly, love;
The sdars are shidig too;
While I ab gazig dreabily,
Add thigkig, love, of you.
You caddot, oh! you caddot kdow,
By darlig, how I biss you--
(Oh, whadt a fearful cold I've got!--
Ck-_tish_-u! Ck-ck-_tish_-u!)
I'b sittig id the arbor, love,
Where you sat by by side,
Whed od that calb, autubdal dight
You said you'd be by bride.
Oh! for wud bobedt to caress
Add tederly to kiss you;
Budt do! we're beddy biles apart--
(Ho-_rash_-o! Ck-ck-_tish_-u!)
This charbig evedig brigs to bide
The tibe whed first we bet:
It seebs budt odly yesterday;
I thigk I see you yet.
Oh! tell be, ab I sdill your owd?
By hopes--oh, do dot dash theb!
(Codfoud by cold, 'tis gettig worse--
_Ck-tish-u!_ Ch-ck-_thrash_-eb!)
Good-by, by darlig Bary Jade!
The bid-dight hour is dear;
Add it is hardly wise, by love,
For be to ligger here.
The heavy dews are fallig fast:
A fod good-dight I wish you.
(Ho-_rash_-o!--there it is agaid--
Ck-_thrash_-ub! Ck-ck-_tish_-u!)
HIS GRANDMOTHER'S WAY
BY FRANK L. STANTON
Tell you, gran'mother's a queer one, shore--
Makes your heart go pitty-pat!
If the wind just happens to open a door,
She'll say there's "a sign" in that!
An' if no one ain't in a rockin'-chair
An' it rocks itself, she'll say: "Oh, dear!
Oh, dear! Oh, my!
I'm afeared 'at somebody is goin' to die!"
An' she makes me cry--
She makes me cry!
Once wuz a owl 'at happened to light
On our tall chimney-top,
An' screamed an' screamed in the dead o' night,
An' nuthin' could make it stop!
An' gran'ma--she uncovered her head
An' almos' frightened me out of the bed;
"Oh, dear; Oh, my!
I'm certain 'at some one is goin' to die!"
An' she made me cry--
She made me cry!
Just let a cow lean over the gate
An' bellow, an' gran'ma--she
Will say her prayers, if it's soon or late,
An' shake her finger at me!
An' then, an' then you'll hear her say:
"It's a sign w'en the cattle act that way!
Oh, dear! Oh, my!
I'm certain 'at somebody's goin' to die!"
Oh, she makes me cry--
She makes me cry!
Skeeriest person you ever seen!
Always a-huntin' fer "signs";
Says it's "spirits" 'at's good, or mean,
If the wind jest shakes the vines!
I always feel skeery w'en gran'ma's aroun'--
An' think 'at I see things, an' jump at each soun':
"Oh, dear! Oh, my!
I'm certain 'at somebody's goin' to die!"
Oh, she makes me cry--
She makes me cry!
_The Only True and Reliable Account of_
THE GREAT PRIZE FIGHT,
_For $100,000, at
Seal Rock Point, on Sunday Last,
Between His Excellency Gov. Stanford and Hon.
F. F. Low, Governor Elect of California._
REPORTED BY SAMUEL L. CLEMENS
For the past month the sporting world has been in a state of feverish
excitement on account of the grand prize fight set for last Sunday
between the two most distinguished citizens of California, for a purse
of one hundred thousand dollars. The high social standing of the
competitors, their exalted position in the arena of politics, together
with the princely sum of money staked upon the issue of the combat, all
conspired to render the proposed prize fight a subject of extraordinary
importance, and to give it an éclat never before vouchsafed to such a
circumstance since the world began. Additional lustre was shed upon the
coming contest by the lofty character of the seconds or bottle-holders
chosen by the two champions, these being no other than Judge Field (on
the part of Gov. Low), Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the
United States, and Hon. Wm. M. Stewart (commonly called "Bill Stewart,"
or "Bullyragging Bill Stewart"), of the city of Virginia, the most
popular as well as the most distinguished lawyer in Nevada Territory,
member of the Constitutional Convention, and future U. S. Senator for
the state of Washoe, as I hope and believe--on the part of Gov.
Stanford. Principals and seconds together, it is fair to presume that
such an array of talent was never entered for a combat of this
description upon any previous occasion.
Stewart and Field had their men in constant training at the Mission
during the six weeks preceding the contest, and such was the interest
taken in the matter that thousands visited that sacred locality daily to
pick up such morsels of information as they might, concerning the
physical and scientific improvement being made by the gubernatorial
acrobats. The anxiety manifested by the populace was intense. When it
was learned that Stanford had smashed a barrel of flour to atoms with a
single blow of his fist, the voice of the people was at his side. But
when the news came that Low had caved in the head of a tubular boiler
with one stroke of his powerful "mawley" (which term is in strict
accordance with the language of the ring) the tide of opinion changed
again. These changes were frequent, and they kept the minds of the
public in such a state of continual vibration that I fear the habit thus
acquired is confirmed, and that they will never more cease to oscillate.
The fight was to take place on last Sunday morning at ten o'clock. By
nine every wheeled vehicle and every species of animal capable of
bearing burthens, were in active service, and the avenues leading to the
Seal Rock swarmed with them in mighty processions whose numbers no man
might hope to estimate.
I determined to be upon the ground at an early hour. Now I dislike to be
exploded, as it were, out of my balmy slumbers, by a sudden, stormy
assault upon my door, and an imperative order to "Get up!"--wherefore I
requested one of the intelligent porters of the Lick House to call at
my palatial apartments, and murmur gently through the key-hole the magic
monosyllable "Hash!" That "fetched me."
The urbane livery-stable keeper furnished me with a solemn,
short-bodied, long-legged animal--a sort of animated counting-house
stool, as it were--which he called a "Morgan" horse. He told me who the
brute was "sired" by, and was proceeding to tell me who he was "dammed"
by, but I gave him to understand that I was competent to damn the horse
myself, and should probably do it very effectually before I got to the
battle-ground. I mentioned to him, however, that I was not proposing to
attend a funeral; it was hardly necessary to furnish me an animal gifted
with such oppressive solemnity of bearing as distinguished his "Morgan."
He said in reply, that Morgan was only pensive when in the stable, but
that on the road I would find him one of the liveliest horses in the
world.
He enunciated the truth.
The brute "bucked" with me from the foot of Montgomery street to the
Occidental Hotel. The laughter which he provoked from the crowds of
citizens along the sidewalks he took for applause, and honestly made
every effort in his power to deserve it, regardless of consequences.
He was very playful, but so suddenly were the creations of his fancy
conceived and executed, and so much ground did he take up with them,
that it was safest to behold them from a distance. In the self-same
moment of time, he shot his heels through the side of a street-car, and
then backed himself into Barry and Patten's and sat down on the
free-lunch table.
Such was the length of this Morgan's legs.
Between the Occidental and the Lick House, having become thoroughly
interested in his work, he planned and carried out a series of the most
extraordinary maneuvres ever suggested by the brain of any horse. He
arched his neck and went tripping daintily across the street sideways,
"rairing up" on his hind legs occasionally, in a very disagreeable way,
and looking into the second-story windows. He finally waltzed into the
large ice cream saloon opposite the Lick House, and--
But the memory of that perilous voyage hath caused me to digress from
the proper subject of this paper, which is the great prize fight between
Governors Low and Stanford. I will resume.
After an infinitude of fearful adventures, the history of which would
fill many columns of this newspaper, I finally arrived at the Seal Rock
Point at a quarter to ten--two hours and a half out from San Francisco,
and not less gratified than surprised that I ever got there at all--and
anchored my noble Morgan to a boulder on the hillside. I had to swathe
his head in blankets also, because, while my back was turned for a
single moment, he developed another atrocious trait of his most
remarkable character. He tried to eat little Augustus Maltravers
Jackson, the "humble" but interesting offspring of Hon. J. Belvidere
Jackson, a wealthy barber from San Jose. It would have been a comfort to
me to leave the infant to his fate, but I did not feel able to pay for
him.
When I reached the battle-ground, the great champions were already
stripped and prepared for the "mill." Both were in splendid condition,
and displayed a redundancy of muscle about the breast and arms which was
delightful to the eye of the sportive connoisseur. They were well
matched. Adepts said that Stanford's "heft" and tall stature were fairly
offset by Low's superior litheness and activity. From their heads to the
Union colors around their waists, their costumes were similar to that
of the Greek slave; from thence down they were clad in flesh-colored
tights and grenadier boots.
The ring was formed upon the beautiful level sandy beach above the Cliff
House, and within twenty paces of the snowy surf of the broad Pacific
Ocean, which was spotted here and there with monstrous sea-lions
attracted shoreward by curiosity concerning the vast multitude of people
collected in the vicinity.
At five minutes past ten, Brigadier-General Wright, the Referee,
notified the seconds to bring their men "up to the scratch." They did
so, amid the shouts of the populace, the noise whereof rose high above
the roar of the sea.
First Round.--The pugilists advanced to the centre of the ring, shook
hands, retired to their respective corners, and at the call of the
time-keeper, came forward and went at it. Low dashed out handsomely with
his left and gave Stanford a paster in the eye, and at the same moment
his adversary mashed him in the ear. (These singular phrases are
entirely proper, Mr. Editor--I find them in the copy of "Bell's Life in
London" now lying before me.) After some beautiful sparring, both
parties went down--that is to say, they went down to the bottle-holders,
Stewart and Field, and took a drink.
Second Round.--Stanford launched out a well intended plunger, but Low
parried it admirably and instantly busted him in the snoot. (Cries of
"Bully for the Marysville Infant!") After some lively fibbing (both of
them are used to it in political life,) the combatants went to grass.
(See "Bell's Life.")
Third Round.--Both came up panting considerably. Low let go a terrific
side-winder, but Stanford stopped it handsomely and replied with an
earthquake on Low's bread-basket. (Enthusiastic shouts of "Sock it to
him, my Sacramento Pet!") More fibbing--both down.
Fourth Round.--The men advanced and sparred warily for a few moments,
when Stanford exposed his cocoa-nut an instant, and Low struck out from
the shoulder and split him in the mug. (Cries of "Bully for the Fat
Boy!")
Fifth Round.--Stanford came up looking wicked, and let drive a heavy
blow with his larboard flipper which caved in the side of his
adversary's head. (Exclamations of "Hi! at him again Old Rusty!")
From this time until the end of the conflict, there was nothing regular
in the proceedings. The two champions got furiously angry, and used up
each other thus:
No sooner did Low realize that the side of his head was crushed in like
a dent in a plug hat, than he "went after" Stanford in the most
desperate manner. With one blow of his fist he mashed his nose so far
into his face that a cavity was left in its place the size and shape of
an ordinary soup-bowl. It is scarcely necessary to mention that in
making room for so much nose, Gov. Stanford's eyes were crowded to such
a degree as to cause them to "bug out" like a grasshopper's. His face
was so altered that he scarcely looked like himself at all.
I never saw such a murderous expression as Stanford's countenance now
assumed; you see it was so concentrated--it had such a small number of
features to spread around over. He let fly one of his battering rams and
caved in the other side of Low's head. Ah me, the latter was a ghastly
sight to contemplate after that--one of the boys said it looked "like a
beet which somebody had trod on it."
Low was "grit" though. He dashed out with his right and stove Stanford's
chin clear back even with his ears. Oh, what a horrible sight he was,
gasping and reaching after his tobacco, which was away back among his
under-jaw teeth.
Stanford was unsettled for a while, but he soon rallied, and watching
his chance, aimed a tremendous blow at his favorite mark, which crushed
in the rear of Gov. Low's head in such a way that the crown thereof
projected over his spinal column like a shed.
He came up to the scratch like a man, though, and sent one of his
ponderous fists crashing through his opponent's ribs and in among his
vitals, and instantly afterward he hauled out poor Stanford's left lung
and smacked him in the face with it.
If I ever saw an angry man in my life it was Leland Stanford. He fairly
raved. He jumped at his old speciality, Gov. Low's head; he tore it
loose from his body and knocked him down with it. (Sensation in the
crowd.)
Staggered by his extraordinary exertion, Gov. Stanford reeled, and
before he could recover himself the headless but indomitable Low sprang
forward, pulled one of his legs out by the roots, and dealt him a
smashing paster over the eye with the end of it. The ever watchful Bill
Stewart sallied out to the assistance of his crippled principal with a
pair of crutches, and the battle went on again as fiercely as ever.
At this stage of the game the battle ground was strewn with a
sufficiency of human remains to furnish material for the construction of
three or four men of ordinary size, and good sound brains enough to
stock a whole county like the one I came from in the noble old state of
Missouri. And so dyed were the combatants in their own gore that they
looked like shapeless, mutilated, red-shirted firemen.
The moment a chance offered, Low grabbed Stanford by the hair of the
head, swung him thrice round and round in the air like a lasso, and
then slammed him on the ground with such mighty force that he quivered
all over, and squirmed painfully, like a worm; and behold, his body and
such of his limbs as he had left, shortly assumed a swollen aspect like
unto those of a rag doll-baby stuffed with saw-dust.
He rallied again, however, and the two desperadoes clinched and never
let up until they had minced each other into such insignificant odds and
ends that neither was able to distinguish his own remnants from those of
his antagonist. It was awful.
Bill Stewart and Judge Field issued from their corners and gazed upon
the sanguinary reminiscences in silence during several minutes. At the
end of that time, having failed to discover that either champion had got
the best of the fight, they threw up their sponges simultaneously, and
Gen. Wright proclaimed in a loud voice that the battle was "drawn." May
my ears never again be rent asunder with a burst of sound similar to
that which greeted this announcement, from the multitudes. Amen.
By order of Gen. Wright, baskets were procured, and Bill Stewart and
Judge Field proceeded to gather up the fragments of their late
principals, while I gathered up my notes and went after my infernal
horse, who had slipped his blankets and was foraging among the
neighboring children. I--
P. S.--Messrs. Editors, I have been the victim of an infamous hoax. I
have been imposed upon by that ponderous miscreant, Mr. Frank Lawler, of
the Lick House. I left my room a moment ago, and the first man I met on
the stairs was Gov. Stanford, alive and well, and as free from
mutilation as you or I. I was speechless. Before I reached the street, I
actually met Gov. Low also, with his own head on his own shoulders, his
limbs intact, his inner mechanism in its proper place, and his cheeks
blooming with gorgeous robustitude. I was amazed. But a word of
explanation from him convinced me that I had been swindled by Mr. Lawler
with a detail account of a fight which had never occurred, and was never
likely to occur; that I had believed him so implicitly as to sit down
and write it out (as other reporters have done before me) in language
calculated to deceive the public into the conviction that I was present
at it myself, and to embellish it with a string of falsehoods intended
to render that deception as plausible as possible. I ruminated upon my
singular position for many minutes, arrived at no conclusion--that is to
say, no satisfactory conclusion, except that Lawler was an accomplished
knave and I was a consummate ass. I had suspected the first before,
though, and been acquainted with the latter fact for nearly a quarter of
a century.
In conclusion, permit me to apologize in the most abject manner to the
present Governor of California, to Hon. Mr. Low, the Governor elect, to
Judge Field and to Hon. Wm. M. Stewart, for the great wrong which my
natural imbecility has impelled me to do them in penning and publishing
the foregoing sanguinary absurdity. If it were to do over again, I don't
really know that I would do it. It is not possible for me to say how I
ever managed to believe that refined and educated gentlemen like these
could stoop to engage in the loathsome and degrading pastime of
prize-fighting. It was just Lawler's work, you understand--the lubberly,
swelled up effigy of a nine-days drowned man! But I shall get even with
him for this. The only excuse he offers is that he got the story from
John B. Winters, and thought of course it must be just so--as if a
future Congressman for the state of Washoe could by any possibility tell
the truth! Do you know that if either of these miserable scoundrels
were to cross my path while I am in this mood I would scalp him in a
minute? That's me--that's my style.
A CONCORD LOVE-SONG
BY JAMES JEFFREY ROCHE
Shall we meet again, love,
In the distant When, love,
When the Now is Then, love,
And the Present Past?
Shall the mystic Yonder,
On which I ponder,
I sadly wonder,
With thee be cast?
Ah, the joyless fleeting
Of our primal meeting,
And the fateful greeting
Of the How and Why!
Ah, the Thingness flying
From the Hereness, sighing
For a love undying
That fain would die!
Ah, the Ifness sadd'ning,
The Whichness madd'ning,
And the But ungladd'ning,
That lie behind!
When the signless token
Of love is broken
In the speech unspoken
Of mind to mind!
But the mind perceiveth
When the spirit grieveth,
And the heart relieveth
Itself of woe;
And the doubt-mists lifted
From the eyes love-gifted
Are rent and rifted
In the warmer glow.
In the inner Me, love,
As I turn to thee, love,
I seem to see, love,
No Ego there.
But the Meness dead, love,
The Theeness fled, love,
And born instead, love,
An Usness rare!
THE MEETING
BY S. E. KISER
One day, in Paradise,
Two angels, beaming, strolled
Along the amber walk that lies
Beside the street of gold.
At last they met and gazed
Into each other's eyes,
Then dropped their harps, amazed,
And stood in mute surprise.
And other angels came,
And, as they lingered near,
Heard both at once exclaim:
"Say, how did you get here?"
"THERE'S A BOWER OF BEAN-VINES"
BY PHOEBE CARY
There's a bower of bean-vines in Benjamin's yard,
And the cabbages grow round it, planted for greens;
In the time of my childhood 'twas terribly hard
To bend down the bean-poles, and pick off the beans.
That bower and its products I never forget,
But oft, when my landlady presses me hard,
I think, are the cabbages growing there yet,
Are the bean-vines still bearing in Benjamin's yard?
No, the bean-vines soon withered that once used to wave,
But some beans had been gathered, the last that hung on;
And a soup was distilled in a kettle, that gave
All the fragrance of summer when summer was gone.
Thus memory draws from delight, ere it dies,
An essence that breathes of it awfully hard;
As thus good to my taste as 'twas then to my eyes,
Is that bower of bean-vines in Benjamin's yard.
THE TRIAL THAT JOB MISSED
BY KENNETT HARRIS
Job had troubles, I admit;
Clearly was his patience shown,
Yet he never had to sit
Waiting at the telephone--
Waiting, waiting to connect,
The receiver at his lobe.
That's a trial, I expect,
Would have been too much for Job!
After minutes of delay,
While the cramps attacked his knees,
Then to hear Miss Central say
Innocently: "Number, please!"
When the same he'd shouted out
Twenty times--he'd rend his robe,
Tear his hair, I've little doubt;
'Twould have been too much for Job.
Job, with all the woes he bore,
Never got the "busy" buzz
When he tempted was of yore
In the ancient land of Uz.
Satan missed it when he sought
His one tender spot to probe;
If of "central" he had thought,
She'd have been too much for Job!
THE EVIDENCE IN THE CASE OF SMITH VS. JONES
BY SAMUEL L. CLEMENS
I reported this trial simply for my own amusement, one idle day last
week, and without expecting to publish any portion of it--but I have
seen the facts in the case so distorted and misrepresented in the daily
papers that I feel it my duty to come forward and do what I can to set
the plaintiff and defendant right before the public. This can best be
done by submitting the plain, unembellished statements of the witnesses
as given under oath before his Honor Judge Sheperd, in the Police Court,
and leaving the people to form their own judgment of the matters
involved, unbiased by argument or suggestion of any kind from me.
There is that nice sense of justice and that ability to discriminate
between right and wrong, among the masses, which will enable them, after
carefully reading the testimony I am about to set down here, to decide
without hesitation which is the innocent party and which the guilty in
the remarkable case of Smith vs. Jones, and I have every confidence that
before this paper shall have been out of the printing-press twenty-four
hours, the high court of The People, from whose decision there is no
appeal, will have swept from the innocent man all taint of blame or
suspicion, and cast upon the guilty one a deathless infamy.
To such as are not used to visiting the Police Court, I will observe
that there is nothing inviting about the place, there being no rich
carpets, no mirrors, no pictures, no elegant sofa or arm-chairs to
lounge in, no free lunch--and, in fact, nothing to make a man who has
been there once desire to go again--except in cases where his bail is
heavier than his fine is likely to be, under which circumstances he
naturally has a tendency in that direction again, of course, in order to
recover the difference.
There is a pulpit at the head of the hall, occupied by a handsome
gray-haired judge, with a faculty of appearing pleasant and impartial to
the disinterested spectator, and prejudiced and frosty to the last
degree to the prisoner at the bar.
To the left of the pulpit is a long table for reporters; in front of the
pulpit the clerks are stationed, and in the centre of the hall a nest of
lawyers. On the left again are pine benches behind a railing, occupied
by seedy white men, negroes, Chinamen, Kanakas--in a word, by the seedy
and dejected of all nations--and in a corner is a box where more can be
had when they are wanted.
On the right are more pine benches, for the use of prisoners, and their
friends and witnesses.
An officer, in a gray uniform, and with a star upon his breast, guards
the door.
A holy calm pervades the scene.
The case of Smith vs. Jones being called, each of these parties
(stepping out from among the other seedy ones) gave the court a
particular and circumstantial account of how the whole thing occurred,
and then sat down.
The two narratives differed from each other.
In reality, I was half persuaded that these men were talking about two
separate and distinct affairs altogether, inasmuch as no single
circumstance mentioned by one was even remotely hinted at by the other.
Mr. Alfred Sowerby was then called to the witness-stand, and testified
as follows:
"I was in the saloon at the time, your Honor, and I see this man Smith
come up all of a sudden to Jones, who warn't saying a word, and split
him in the snoot--"
LAWYER.--"Did what, sir?"
WITNESS.--"Busted him in the snoot."
LAWYER.--"What do you mean by such language as that? When you say that
the plaintiff suddenly approached the defendant, who was silent at the
time, and 'busted him in the snoot,' do you mean that the plaintiff
struck the defendant?"
WITNESS.--"That's me--I'm swearing to that very circumstance--yes, your
Honor, that was just the way of it. Now, for instance, as if you was
Jones and I was Smith. Well, I comes up all of a sudden and says I to
your Honor, says I, 'D--n your old tripe--'"
(Suppressed laughter in the lobbies.)
THE COURT.--"Order in the court! Witness, you will confine yourself to a
plain statement of the facts in this case, and refrain from the
embellishments of metaphor and allegory as far as possible."
WITNESS.--(Considerably subdued.)--"I beg your Honor's pardon--I didn't
mean to be so brash. Well, Smith comes up to Jones all of a sudden and
mashed him in the bugle--"
LAWYER.--"Stop! Witness, this kind of language will not do. I will ask
you a plain question, and I require you to answer it simply, yes or no.
Did--the--plaintiff--strike--the defendant? Did he strike him?"
WITNESS.--"You bet your sweet life he did. Gad! he gave him a paster in
the trumpet--"
LAWYER.--"Take the witness! take the witness! take the witness! I have
no further use for him."
The lawyer on the other side said he would endeavor to worry along
without more assistance from Mr. Sowerby, and the witness retired to a
neighboring bench.
Mr. McWilliamson was next called, and deposed as follows:
"I was a-standing as close to Mr. Smith as I am to this pulpit,
a-chaffing with one of the lager beer girls--Sophronia by name, being
from summers in Germany, so she says, but as to that, I--"
LAWYER.--"Well, now, never mind the nativity of the lager beer girl, but
state, as concisely as possible, what you know of the assault and
battery."
WITNESS.--"Certainly--certainly. Well, German or no German,--which I'll
take my oath I don't believe she is, being of a red-headed disposition,
with long, bony fingers, and no more hankering after Limberger cheese
than--"
LAWYER.--"Stop that driveling nonsense and stick to the assault and
battery. Go on with your story."
WITNESS.--"Well, sir, she--that is, Jones--he sidled up and drawed his
revolver and tried to shoot the top of Smith's head off, and Smith run,
and Sophronia she walloped herself down in the saw-dust and screamed
twice, just as loud as she could yell. I never see a poor creature in
such distress--and then she sung out: 'O, H--ll's fire! What are they up
to now? Ah, my poor dear mother, I shall never see you more!'--saying
which, she jerked another yell and fainted away as dead as a wax figger.
Thinks I to myself, I'll be danged if this ain't gettin' rather dusty,
and I'll--"
THE COURT.--"We have no desire to know what you thought; we only wish to
know what you saw. Are you sure Mr. Jones endeavored to shoot the top of
Mr. Smith's head off?"
WITNESS.--"Yes, your Honor."
THE COURT.--"How many times did he shoot?"
WITNESS.--"Well, sir, I couldn't say exactly as to the number--but I
should think--well, say seven or eight times--as many as that, anyway."
THE COURT.--"Be careful now, and remember you are under oath. What kind
of a pistol was it?"
WITNESS.--"It was a Durringer, your Honor."
THE COURT.--"A derringer! You must not trifle here, sir. A derringer
only shoots once--how then could Jones have fired seven or eight times?"
(The witness is evidently as stunned by that last proposition as if a
brick had struck him.)
WITNESS.--"Well, your Honor--he--that is, she--Jones, I mean--Soph--"
THE COURT.--"Are you sure he fired more than one shot? Are you sure he
fired at all?"
WITNESS.--"I--I well, perhaps he didn't--and--and your Honor may be
right. But you see, that girl, with her dratted yowling--altogether, it
might be that he did only shoot once."
LAWYER.--"And about his attempting to shoot the top of Smith's head
off--didn't he aim at his body, or his legs? Come now."
WITNESS.--(Entirely confused)--"Yes, sir--I think he did--I--I'm pretty
certain of it. Yes, sir, he must a fired at his legs."
(Nothing was elicited on the cross-examination, except that the weapon
used by Mr. Jones was a bowie knife instead of a derringer, and that he
made a number of desperate attempts to scalp the plaintiff instead of
trying to shoot him. It also came out that Sophronia, of doubtful
nativity, did not faint, and was not present during the affray, she
having been discharged from her situation on the previous evening.)
Washington Billings, sworn, said: "I see the row, and it warn't in no
saloon--it was in the street. Both of 'em was drunk, and one was a
comin' up the street, and t'other was a goin' down. Both of 'em was
close to the houses when they fust see each other, and both of 'em made
their calculations to miss each other, but the second time they tacked
across the pavement--driftin'-like, diagonal--they come together, down
by curb--al-mighty soggy, they did--which staggered 'em a moment, and
then, over they went, into the gutter. Smith was up fust, and he made a
dive for a cobble and fell on Jones; Jones dug out and made a dive for a
cobble, and slipped his hold and jammed his head into Smith's stomach.
They each done that over again, twice more, just the same way. After
that, neither of 'em could get up any more, and so they just laid there
in the slush and clawed mud and cussed each other."
(On the cross-examination, the witness could not say whether the parties
continued the fight afterward in the saloon or not--he only knew they
began it in the gutter, and to the best of his knowledge and belief they
were too drunk to get into a saloon, and too drunk to stay in it after
they got there if there were any orifice about it that they could fall
out again. As to weapons, he saw none used except the cobble-stones, and
to the best of his knowledge and belief they missed fire every time
while he was present.)
Jeremiah Driscoll came forward, was sworn, and testified as follows:--"I
saw the fight, your Honor, and it wasn't in a saloon, nor in the street,
nor in a hotel, nor in--"
THE COURT.--"Was it in the city and county of San Francisco!"
WITNESS.--"Yes, your Honor, I--I think it was."
THE COURT.--"Well, then, go on."
WITNESS.--"It was up in the Square. Jones meets Smith, and they both go
at it--that is, blackguarding each other. One called the other a thief,
and the other said he was a liar, and then they got to swearing
backwards and forwards pretty generally, as you might say, and finally
one struck the other over the head with a cane, and then they closed and
fell, and after that they made such a dust and the gravel flew so thick
that I couldn't rightly tell which was getting the best of it. When it
cleared away, one of them was after the other with a pine bench, and the
other was prospecting for rocks, and--"
LAWYER.--"There, there, there--that will do--that--will--do! How in the
world is any one to make head or tail out of such a string of nonsense
as that? Who struck the first blow?"
WITNESS.--"I can not rightly say, sir, but I think--"
LAWYER.--"You think!--don't you know?"
WITNESS.--"No, sir, it was all so sudden, and--"
LAWYER.--"Well, then, state, if you can, who struck the last."
WITNESS.--"I can't, sir, because--"
LAWYER.--"Because what?"
WITNESS.--"Because, sir, you see toward the last they clinched and went
down, and got to kicking up the gravel again, and--"
LAWYER.--(Resignedly)--"Take the witness--take the witness."
(The testimony on the cross-examination went to show that during the
fight, one of the parties drew a slung-shot and cocked it, but to the
best of the witness' knowledge and belief, he did not fire; and at the
same time, the other discharged a hand-grenade at his antagonist, which
missed him and did no damage, except blowing up a bonnet store on the
other side of the street, and creating a momentary diversion among the
milliners.) He could not say, however, which drew the slung-shot or
which threw the grenade. (It was generally remarked by those in the
court room, that the evidence of the witness was obscure and
unsatisfactory. Upon questioning him further, and confronting him with
the parties to the case before the court, it transpired that the faces
of Jones and Smith were unknown to him, and that he had been talking
about an entirely different fight all the time.)
Other witnesses were examined, some of whom swore that Smith was the
aggressor, and others that Jones began the row; some said they fought
with their fists, others that they fought with knives, others tomahawks,
others revolvers, others clubs, others axes, others beer mugs and
chairs, and others swore there had been no fight at all. However, fight
or no fight, the testimony was straightforward and uniform on one point,
at any rate, and that was, that the fuss was about two dollars and forty
cents, which one party owed the other, but after all, it was impossible
to find out which was the debtor and which the creditor.
After the witnesses had all been heard, his Honor, Judge Sheperd,
observed that the evidence in this case resembled, in a great many
points, the evidence before him in some thirty-five cases every day, on
an average. He then said he would continue the case, to afford the
parties an opportunity of procuring more testimony.
(I have been keeping an eye on the Police Court for the last few days.
Two friends of mine had business there, on account of assault and
battery concerning Washoe stocks, and I felt interested, of course.) I
never knew their names were James Johnson and John Ward, though, until I
heard them answer to them in that court. When James Johnson was called,
one of these young men said to the other: "That's you, my boy." "No,"
was the reply, "it's you--my name's John Ward--see, I've got it written
here on a card." Consequently, the first speaker sung out, "Here!" and
it was all right. As I was saying, I have been keeping an eye on that
court, and I have arrived at the conclusion that the office of Police
Judge is a profitable and a comfortable thing to have, but then, as the
English hunter said about fighting tigers in India under a shortness of
ammunition, "It has its little drawbacks." Hearing testimony must be
worrying to a Police Judge sometimes, when he is in his right mind. I
would rather be secretary to a wealthy mining company, and have nothing
to do but advertise the assessments and collect them in carefully, and
go along quiet and upright, and be one of the noblest works of God, and
never gobble a dollar that didn't belong to me--all just as those
fellows do, you know. (Oh, I have no talent for sarcasm, it isn't
likely.) But I trespass.
Now, with every confidence in the instinctive candor and fair dealing of
my race, I submit the testimony in the case of Smith vs. Jones to the
people, without comment or argument, well satisfied that after a perusal
of it, their judgment will be as righteous as it is final and impartial,
and that whether Smith be cast out and Jones exalted, or Jones cast out
and Smith exalted, the decision will be a holy and a just one.
I leave the accused and the accuser before the bar of the world--let
their fate be pronounced.
A DOUBLE-DYED DECEIVER
BY O. HENRY
The trouble began in Laredo. It was the Llano Kid's fault, for he should
have confined his habit of manslaughter to Mexicans. But the Kid was
past twenty; and to have only Mexicans to one's credit at twenty is to
blush unseen on the Rio Grande border.
It happened in old Justo Valdos's gambling house. There was a poker game
at which sat players who were not all friends, as happens often where
men ride in from afar to shoot Folly as she gallops. There was a row
over so small a matter as a pair of queens; and when the smoke had
cleared away it was found that the Kid had committed an indiscretion,
and his adversary had been guilty of a blunder. For, the unfortunate
combatant, instead of being a Greaser, was a high-blooded youth from the
cow ranches, of about the Kid's own age and possessed of friends and
champions. His blunder in missing the Kid's right ear only a sixteenth
of an inch when he pulled his gun did not lessen the indiscretion of the
better marksman.
The Kid, not being equipped with a retinue, nor bountifully supplied
with personal admirers and supporters--on account of a rather umbrageous
reputation even for the border--considered it not incompatible with his
indisputable gameness to perform that judicious tractional act known as
"pulling his freight."
Quickly the avengers gathered and sought him. Three of them overtook him
within a rod of the station. The Kid turned and showed his teeth in that
brilliant but mirthless smile that usually preceded his deeds of
insolence and violence, and his pursuers fell back without making it
necessary for him even to reach for his weapon.
But in this affair the Kid had not felt the grim thirst for encounter
that usually urged him on to battle. It had been a purely chance row,
born of the cards and certain epithets impossible for a gentleman to
brook, that had passed between the two. The Kid had rather liked the
slim, haughty, brown-faced young chap whom his bullet had cut off in the
first pride of manhood. And now he wanted no more blood. He wanted to
get away and have a good long sleep somewhere in the sun on the mesquit
grass with his handkerchief over his face. Even a Mexican might have
crossed his path in safety while he was in this mood.
The Kid openly boarded the north-bound passenger-train that departed
five minutes later. But at Webb, a few miles out, where it was flagged
to take on a traveler, he abandoned that manner of escape. There were
telegraph stations ahead; and the Kid looked askance at electricity and
steam. Saddle and spur were his rocks of safety.
The man whom he had shot was a stranger to him. But the Kid knew that he
was of the Corralitos outfit from Hidalgo; and that the punchers from
that ranch were more relentless and vengeful than Kentucky feudists when
wrong or harm was done to one of them. So, with the wisdom that has
characterized many great fighters, the Kid decided to pile up as many
leagues as possible of chaparral and pear between himself and the
retaliation of the Corralitos bunch.
Near the station was a store; and near the store, scattered among the
mesquits and elms, stood the saddled horses of the customers. Most of
them waited, half asleep, with sagging limbs and drooping heads. But
one, a long-legged roan with a curved neck, snorted and pawed the turf.
Him the Kid mounted, gripped with his knees, and slapped gently with the
owner's own quirt.
If the slaying of the temerarious card-player had cast a cloud over the
Kid's standing as a good and true citizen, this last act of his veiled
his figure in the darkest shadows of disrepute. On the Rio Grande
border, if you take a man's life you sometimes take trash; but if you
take his horse, you take a thing the loss of which renders him poor,
indeed, and which enriches you not--if you are caught. For the Kid there
was no turning back now.
With the springing roan under him he felt little care or uneasiness.
After a five-mile gallop he drew in to the plainsman's jogging trot, and
rode northeastward toward the Nueces River bottoms. He knew the country
well--its most tortuous and obscure trails through the great wilderness
of brush and pear, and its camps and lonesome ranches where one might
find safe entertainment. Always he bore to the east; for the Kid had
never seen the ocean, and he had a fancy to lay his hand upon the mane
of the great Gulf, the gamesome colt of the greater waters.
So after three days he stood on the shore at Corpus Christi, and looked
out across the gentle ripples of a quiet sea.
Captain Boone, of the schooner Flyaway, stood near his skiff, which
one of his crew was guarding in the surf. When ready to sail he
had discovered that one of the necessaries of life, in the
parallelogrammatic shape of plug tobacco, had been forgotten. A sailor
had been despatched for the missing cargo. Meanwhile the captain paced
the sands, chewing profanely at his pocket store.
A slim, wiry youth in high-heeled boots came down to the water's edge.
His face was boyish but with a premature severity that hinted at a man's
experience. His complexion was naturally dark; and the sun and wind of
an outdoor life had burned it to a coffee brown. His hair was as black
and straight as an Indian's; his face had not yet been upturned to the
humiliation of a razor; his eyes were a cold and steady blue. He carried
his left arm somewhat away from his body, for pearl-handled .45s are
frowned upon by town marshals, and are a little bulky when packed in the
left armhole of one's vest. He looked beyond Captain Boone at the gulf
with the impersonal and expressionless dignity of a Chinese emperor.
"Thinkin' of buyin' that 'ar gulf, buddy?" asked the captain, made
sarcastic by his narrow escape from a tobaccoless voyage.
"Why, no," said the Kid gently, "I reckon not. I never saw it before. I
was just looking at it. Not thinking of selling it, are you?"
"Not this trip," said the captain. "I'll send it to you C. O. D. when I
get back to Buenas Tierras. Here comes that capstan-footed lubber with
the chewin'. I ought to've weighed anchor an hour ago."
"Is that your ship out there?" asked the Kid.
"Why, yes," answered the captain, "if you want to call a schooner a
ship, and I don't mind lyin'. But you better say Miller and Gonzales,
owners, and ordinary, plain, Billy-be-damned old Samuel K. Boone,
skipper."
"Where are you going to?" asked the refugee.
"Buenas Tierras, coast of South America--I forget what they called the
country the last time I was there. Cargo--lumber, corrugated iron, and
machetes."
"What kind of a country is it?" asked the Kid--"hot or cold?"
"Warmish, buddy," said the captain. "But a regular Paradise Lost for
elegance of scenery and be-yooty of geography. Ye're wakened every
morning by the sweet singin' of red birds with seven purple tails, and
the sighin' of breezes in the posies and roses. And the inhabitants
never work, for they can reach out and pick steamer baskets of the
choicest hothouse fruit without gettin' out of bed. And there's no
Sunday and no ice and no rent and no troubles and no use and no nothin'.
It's a great country for a man to go to sleep with, and wait for
somethin' to turn up. The bananys and oranges and hurricanes and
pineapples that ye eat comes from there."
"That sounds to me!" said the Kid, at last betraying interest. "What'll
the expressage be to take me out there with you?"
"Twenty-four dollars," said Captain Boone; "grub and transportation.
Second cabin. I haven't got a first cabin."
"You've got my company," said the Kid, pulling out a buckskin bag.
With three hundred dollars he had gone to Laredo for his regular
"blowout." The duel in Valdo's had cut short his season of hilarity, but
it had left him with nearly $200 for aid in the flight that it had made
necessary.
"All right, buddy," said the captain. "I hope your ma won't blame me for
this little childish escapade of yours." He beckoned to one of the
boat's crew. "Let Sanchez lift you out to the skiff so you won't get
your feet wet."
II
Thacker, the United States consul at Buenas Tierras, was not yet drunk.
It was only eleven o'clock; and he never arrived at his desired state
of beatitude--a state wherein he sang ancient maudlin vaudeville songs
and pelted his screaming parrot with banana peels--until the middle of
the afternoon. So, when he looked up from his hammock at the sound of a
slight cough, and saw the Kid standing in the door of the consulate, he
was still in a condition to extend the hospitality and courtesy due from
the representative of a great nation.
"Don't disturb yourself," said the Kid easily. "I just dropped in. They
told me it was customary to light at your camp before starting in to
round up the town. I just came in on a ship from Texas."
"Glad to see you, Mr. ----," said the consul.
The Kid laughed.
"Sprague Dalton," he said. "It sounds funny to me to hear it. I'm called
the Llano Kid in the Rio Grande country."
"I'm Thacker," said the consul. "Take that cane-bottom chair. Now if
you've come to invest, you want somebody to advise you. These dingies
will cheat you out of the gold in your teeth if you don't understand
their ways. Try a cigar?"
"Much obliged," said the Kid, "but if it wasn't for my corn shucks and
the little bag in my back pocket, I couldn't live a minute." He took out
his "makings," and rolled a cigarette.
"They speak Spanish here," said the consul. "You'll need an interpreter.
If there's anything I can do, why, I'd be delighted. If you're buying
fruit lands or looking for a concession of any sort, you'll want
somebody who knows the ropes to look out for you."
"I speak Spanish," said the Kid, "about nine times better than I do
English. Everybody speaks it on the range where I come from. And I'm
not in the market for anything."
"You speak Spanish?" said Thacker thoughtfully. He regarded the Kid
absorbedly.
"You look like a Spaniard, too," he continued. "And you're from Texas.
And you can't be more than twenty or twenty-one. I wonder if you've got
any nerve."
"You got a deal of some kind to put through?" asked the Texan, with
unexpected shrewdness.
"Are you open to a proposition?" said Thacker.
"What's the use to deny it?" said the Kid. "I got into a little gun
frolic down in Laredo and plugged a white man. There wasn't any Mexican
handy. And I come down to your parrot-and-monkey range just for to smell
the morning-glories and marigolds. Now, do you _sabe_?"
Thacker got up and closed the door.
"Let me see your hand," he said.
He took the Kid's left hand, and examined the back of it closely.
"I can do it," he said excitedly. "Your flesh is as hard as wood and as
healthy as a baby's. It will heal in a week."
"If it's a fist fight you want to back me for," said the Kid, "don't put
your money up yet. Make it gun work, and I'll keep you company. But no
barehanded scrapping, like ladies at a tea-party, for me."
"It's easier than that," said Thacker. "Just step here, will you?"
Through the window he pointed to a two-story white-stuccoed house with
wide galleries rising amid the deep green tropical foliage on a wooded
hill that sloped gently from the sea.
"In that house," said Thacker, "a fine old Castilian gentleman and his
wife are yearning to gather you into their arms and fill your pockets
with money. Old Santos Urique lives there. He owns half the gold-mines
in the country."
"You haven't been eating loco weed, have you?" asked the Kid.
"Sit down again," said Thacker, "and I'll tell you. Twelve years ago
they lost a kid. No, he didn't die--although most of 'em here do from
drinking the surface water. He was a wild little devil, even if he
wasn't but eight years old. Everybody knows about it. Some Americans who
were through here prospecting for gold had letters to Señor Urique, and
the boy was a favorite with them. They filled his head with big stories
about the States; and about a month after they left, the kid
disappeared, too. He was supposed to have stowed himself away among the
banana bunches on a fruit steamer, and gone to New Orleans. He was seen
once afterward in Texas, it was thought, but they never heard anything
more of him. Old Urique has spent thousands of dollars having him looked
for. The madam was broken up worst of all. The kid was her life. She
wears mourning yet. But they say she believes he'll come back to her
some day, and never gives up hope. On the back of the boy's left hand
was tattooed a flying eagle carrying a spear in his claws. That's old
Urique's coat of arms or something that he inherited in Spain."
The Kid raised his left hand slowly and gazed at it curiously.
"That's it," said Thacker, reaching behind the official desk for his
bottle of smuggled brandy. "You're not so slow. I can do it. What was I
consul at Sandakan for? I never knew till now. In a week I'll have the
eagle bird with the frog-sticker blended in so you'd think you were
born with it. I brought a set of the needles and ink just because I was
sure you'd drop in some day, Mr. Dalton."
"Oh, hell," said the Kid. "I thought I told you."
"All right, 'Kid,' then. It won't be that long. How does Señorito Urique
sound, for a change?"
"I never played son any that I remember of," said the Kid. "If I had any
parents to mention they went over the divide about the time I gave my
first bleat. What is the plan of your round-up?"
Thacker leaned back against the wall and held his glass up to the light.
"We've come now," said he, "to the question of how far you're willing to
go in a little matter of the sort."
"I told you why I came down here," said the Kid simply.
"A good answer," said the consul. "But you won't have to go that far.
Here's the scheme. After I get the trade-mark tattooed on your hand I'll
notify old Urique. In the meantime I'll furnish you with all of the
family history I can find out, so you can be studying up points to talk
about. You've got the looks, you speak the Spanish, you know the facts,
you can tell about Texas, you've got the tattoo mark. When I notify them
that the rightful heir has returned and is waiting to know whether he
will be received and pardoned, what will happen? They'll simply rush
down here and fall on your neck, and the curtain goes down for
refreshments and a stroll in the lobby."
"I'm waiting," said the Kid. "I haven't had my saddle off in your camp
long, pardner, and I never met you before; but if you intend to let it
go at a parental blessing, why, I'm mistaken in my man, that's all."
"Thanks," said the consul. "I haven't met anybody in a long time that
keeps up with an argument as well as you do. The rest of it is simple.
If they take you in only for a while it's long enough. Don't give 'em
time to hunt up the strawberry mark on your left shoulder. Old Urique
keeps anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 in his house all the time in a
little safe that you could open with a shoe buttoner. Get it. My skill
as a tattooer is worth half the boodle. We go halves and catch a tramp
steamer for Rio Janeiro. Let the United States go to pieces if it can't
get along without my services. _Que dice, señor?_"
"It sounds to me!" said the Kid, nodding his head. "I'm out for the
dust."
"All right, then," said Thacker. "You'll have to keep close until we get
the bird on you. You can live in the back room here. I do my own
cooking, and I'll make you as comfortable as a parsimonious Government
will allow me."
Thacker had set the time at a week, but it was two weeks before the
design that he patiently tattooed upon the Kid's hand was to his notion.
And then Thacker called a _muchacho_, and despatched this note to the
intended victim:
EL SEÑOR DON SANTOS URIQUE,
LA CASA BLANCA.
_My Dear Sir:_ I beg permission to inform you that there is in my
house as a temporary guest a young man who arrived in Buenas
Tierras from the United States some days ago. Without wishing to
excite any hopes that may not be realized, I think there is a
possibility of his being your long-absent son. It might be well for
you to call and see him. If he is, it is my opinion that his
intention was to return to his home, but upon arriving here, his
courage failed him from doubts as to how he would be received.
Your true servant,
THOMPSON THACKER.
Half an hour afterward--quick time for Buenas Tierras--Señor Urique's
ancient landau drove to the consul's door, with the barefooted coachman
beating and shouting at the team of fat, awkward horses.
A tall man with a white mustache alighted, and assisted to the ground a
lady who was dressed and veiled in unrelieved black.
The two hastened inside, and were met by Thacker with his best
diplomatic bow. By his desk stood a slender young man with clear-cut,
sun-browned features and smoothly brushed black hair.
Señora Urique threw back her heavy veil with a quick gesture. She was
past middle age, and her hair was beginning to silver, but her full,
proud figure and clear olive skin retained traces of the beauty peculiar
to the Basque province. But, once you had seen her eyes, and
comprehended the great sadness that was revealed in their deep shadows
and hopeless expression, you saw that the woman lived only in some
memory.
She bent upon the young man a long look of the most agonized
questioning. Then her great black eyes turned, and her gaze rested upon
his left hand. And then with a sob, not loud, but seeming to shake the
room, she cried "_Hijo mio!_" and caught the Llano Kid to her heart.
III
A month afterward the Kid came to the consulate in response to a message
sent by Thacker.
He looked the young Spanish _caballero_. His clothes were imported, and
the wiles of the jewelers had not been spent upon him in vain. A more
than respectable diamond shone on his finger as he rolled a shuck
cigarette.
"What's doing?" asked Thacker.
"Nothing much," said the Kid calmly. "I eat my first iguana steak
to-day. They're them big lizards, you _sabe_? I reckon, though, that
frijoles and side bacon would do me about as well. Do you care for
iguanas, Thacker?"
"No, nor for some other kinds of reptiles," said Thacker.
It was three in the afternoon, and in another hour he would be in his
state of beatitude.
"It's time you were making good, sonny," he went on, with an ugly look
on his reddened face. "You're not playing up to me square. You've been
the prodigal son for four weeks now, and you could have had veal for
every meal on a gold dish if you'd wanted it. Now, Mr. Kid, do you think
it's right to leave me out so long on a husk diet? What's the trouble?
Don't you get your filial eyes on anything that looks like cash in the
Casa Blanca? Don't tell me you don't. Everybody knows where old Urique
keeps his stuff. It's U. S. currency, too; he don't accept anything
else. What's doing? Don't say 'nothing' this time."
"Why, sure," said the Kid, admiring his diamond, "there's plenty of
money up there. I'm no judge of collateral in bunches, but I will
undertake for to say that I've seen the rise of $50,000 at a time in
that tin grub box that my adopted father calls his safe. And he lets me
carry the key sometimes just to show me that he knows I'm the real
little Francisco that strayed from the herd a long time ago."
"Well, what are you waiting for?" asked Thacker angrily. "Don't you
forget that I can upset your apple cart any day I want to. If old Urique
knew you were an impostor, what sort of things would happen to you? Oh,
you don't know this country, Mr. Texas Kid. The laws here have got
mustard spread between 'em. These people here'd stretch you out like a
frog that had been stepped on, and give you about fifty sticks at every
corner of the plaza. And they'd wear every stick out, too. What was left
of you they'd feed to alligators."
"I might as well tell you now, pardner," said the Kid, sliding down low
on his steamer chair, "that things are going to stay just as they are.
They're about right now."
"What do you mean?" asked Thacker, rattling the bottom of his glass on
his desk.
"The scheme's off," said the Kid. "And whenever you have the pleasure of
speaking to me address me as Don Francisco Urique. I'll guarantee I'll
answer to it. We'll let Colonel Urique keep his money. His little tin
safe is as good as the time-locker in the First National Bank of Laredo
as far as you and me are concerned."
"You're going to throw me down, then, are you?" said the consul.
"Sure," said the Kid cheerfully. "Throw you down. That's it. And now
I'll tell you why. The first night I was up at the colonel's house they
introduced me to a bedroom. No blankets on the floor--a real room, with
a bed and things in it. And before I was asleep, in comes this
artificial mother of mine and tucks in the covers. 'Panchito,' she says,
'my little lost one, God has brought you back to me. I bless his name
forever.' It was that, or some truck like that, she said. And down comes
a drop or two of rain and hits me on the nose. And all that stuck by me,
Mr. Thacker. And it's been that way ever since. And it's got to stay
that way. Don't you think that it's for what's in it for me, either,
that I say so. If you have any such ideas, keep 'em to yourself. I
haven't had much truck with women in my life, and no mothers to speak
of, but here's a lady that we've got to keep fooled. Once she stood it;
twice she won't. I'm a low-down wolf, and the devil may have sent me on
this trail instead of God, but I'll travel it to the end. And now, don't
forget that I'm Don Francisco Urique whenever you happen to mention my
name."
"I'll expose you to-day, you--you double-dyed traitor," stammered
Thacker.
The Kid arose and, without violence, took Thacker by the throat with a
hand of steel, and shoved him slowly into a corner. Then he drew from
under his left arm his pearl-handled .45 and poked the cold muzzle of it
against the consul's mouth.
"I told you why I come here," he said, with his old freezing smile. "If
I leave here, you'll be the reason. Never forget it, pardner. Now, what
is my name?"
"Er--Don Francisco Urique," gasped Thacker.
From outside came a sound of wheels, and the shouting of some one, and
the sharp thwacks of a wooden whipstock upon the backs of fat horses.
The Kid put up his gun, and walked toward the door. But he turned again
and came back to the trembling Thacker, and held up his left hand with
its back toward the consul.
"There's one more reason," he said slowly, "why things have got to stand
as they are. The fellow I killed in Laredo had one of them same pictures
on his left hand."
Outside, the ancient landau of Don Santos Urique rattled to the door.
The coachman ceased his bellowing. Señora Urique, in a voluminous gay
gown of white lace and flying ribbons, leaned forward with a happy look
in her great soft eyes.
"Are you within, dear son?" she called, in the rippling Castilian.
"_Madre mio, yo vengo_ [mother, I come]," answered the young Don
Francisco Urique.
AN OLD-TIME SINGER
BY FRANK L. STANTON
I don't want any hymnbook when the Methodists is nigh,
A-linin' out the ol' ones that went thrillin' to the sky
In the ol' campmeetin' seasons, when 'twuz "Glory hallelu!"
An' "Brother, rise an' tell us what the Lord has done fer you!"
Fer I know them songs so perfect that when I git the swing
O' the tune they want to go to I kin shet my eyes an' sing!
"On Jordan's stormy banks," an' ol' "Amazin' Grace"--they seem
So nat'ral, I'm like some one that's singin' in a dream!
Oh, when it comes to them ol' songs I allus does my part;
An' I've got the ol'-time Bible down, as you might say, "by heart!"
When the preacher says the fust word in the givin' of his text
I smile with satisfaction, kaze I know what's comin' next!
The wife says: "That's amazin'!" an' the preacher says--says he,
With lots o' meanin' in his voice, an' lookin' queer at me "Sence
you know more o' the Bible than the best o' us kin teach,
Don't you think you orter practice what you're payin' us to preach?"
Well, _that_ gits me in a _corner_--an' I sorter raise my eyes
An' the tune about them titles to the "mansions in the skies"!
I want the benediction then--I'm ready to depart!
But when it comes to singin'--well, I've got the hymns by heart!
BREITMANN IN POLITICS
SHOWING HOW MR. HIRAM TWINE "PLAYED OFF" ON SMITH
BY CHARLES GODFREY LELAND
VIDE LICET: Dere vas a fillage
Whose vode alone vouldt pe
Apout enoof to elegdt a man,
Und gife a mayority;
So de von who couldt scoop dis seddlement
Vould make a pully hit;
Boot dough dey vere Deutschers, von und all,
Dey all go von on Schmit.
Now it happenet to gome to bass
Dat in dis liddle town
De Deutsch vas all exshpegdin
Dat Mishder Schmit coom down,
His brinciples to fore-setzen
Und his ideés to deach,
(Dat is, fix oop de brifate pargains)
Und telifer a pooblic sbeech.
Now Twine vas a gyrotwistive cuss,
Ash blainly ish peen shown,
Und vas alfays an out-findin
Votefer might pe known;
Und mit some of his circumswindles
He fix de matter so
Dat he'd pe himself at dis meetin
And see how dings vas go.
Oh shtrangely in dis leben
De dings kits vorked apout!
Oh voonderly Fortuna
Makes toorn us insite out!
Oh sinkular de luck-wheel rolls!
Dis liddle meeding dere
Fixt Twine _ad perpendiculum_--
Shoost suit him to a hair!
Now it hoppenit on dis efenin
De Deutschers, von und all,
Vere avaitin mit impatience
De openin of de ball;
Und de shates of nite vere fallin
Und de shdars begin to plink,
Und dey vish dat Schmit vouldt hoorry,
For 'dvas dime to dake a trink.
Dey hear some hoofs a-dramplin,
Und dey saw, und dinked dey knowed,
Der bretty greature coomin,
On his horse along de road;
Und ash he ride town in-ward
De likeness vas so plain
Dey donnered out, "Hooray for Schmit!"
Enough to make it rain.
Der Twine vas shtart like plazes;
Boot oopshtarted too his wit,
Und he dinks, "Great Turnips! what if I
Could bass for Colonel Schmit?
Gaul dern my heels! _I'll do it_,
Und go the total swine!
Oh, Soap-balls! what a chance!" said dis
Dissembulatin Twine.
Den 'twas "Willkomm! willkomm, Mishder Schmit!"
Ringsroom on efery site;
Und "First-rate! How dy-do yourself?"
Der Hiram Twine replied.
Dey ashk him, "Come und dake a trink?"
But dey find it mighdy queer
Ven Twine informs dem none boot hogs
Vould trink dat shtinkin bier;
Dat all lager vas nodings boot boison;
Und ash for Sherman wein,
He dinks it vas erfounden
Exshbressly for Sherman schwein;
Dat he himself vas a demperanceler--
Dat he gloria in de name;
Und atfise dem all, for tecency's sake,
To go und do de same.
Dese bemarks among de Deutschers
Vere apout ash vell receife
Ash a cats in a game of den-bins,
Ash you may of coorse peliefe:
De heat of de reception
Vent down a dootzen tegrees,
Und in place of hurraws dere vas only heardt
De rooslin of de drees.
Und so in solemn stille
Dey scorched him to de hall,
Vhere he maket de oradion
Vitch vas so moosh to blease dem all;
Und dis vay he pegin it:
"Pefore I furder go,
I vish dat my obinions
You puddin-het Dootch should know.
"Und ere I norate to you,
I think it only fair
We should oonderstand each other
Prezactly, chunk and square.
Dere are boints on vhich ve tisagree,
And I will plank de facts--
I don't go round slanganderin
My friendts pehind deir packs.
"So I beg you dake it easy
If on de raw I touch,
Vhen I say I can't apide de sound
Of your groontin, shi-shing Dutch.
Should I in the Legisladure
As your slumgullion shtand,
I'll have a bill forbidding Dutch
Troo all dis 'versal land.
"Should a husband talk it to his frau,
To deat' he should pe led;
If a mutter breat' it to her shild,
I'd bunch her in de head;
Und I'm sure dat none vill atfocate
Ids use in public schools,
Oonless dey're peastly, nashdy, prutal,
Sauerkraut-eaten vools."
Here Mishder Twine, to gadder breat,
Shoost make a liddle pause,
Und see sechs hundert gapin eyes,
Sechs hundert shdarin chaws,
Dey shtanden erstarrt like frozen;
Von faindly dried to hiss;
Und von set: "Ish it shleeps I'm treamin?
Gottausend! vat ish dis?"
Twine keptet von eye on de vindow,
Boot poldly went ahet:
"Of your oder shtinkin hobits
No vordt needt hier pe set.
Shtop
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