Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor Part 13

"I have a scheme to propose which cannot, I am persuaded, fail of succeeding, if you will lend your talent and skill for the execution of it. As I crossed the bridge, a little way above, I saw the dead body of a small dog, and near it a flat piece of wood rather longer than your person. Now, let us throw the dead dog into the river and give the Trout time to examine it; then, let us put the piece of wood into the water, and do you set yourself upon it so that it shall be lengthwise under you, and your mouth may lean over one edge and your tail hang in the water as if you were dead. The Trout, no doubt, will come up to you, when you may seize him and paddle to the bank with him, where I will be in waiting to help you land the prey."

The scheme pleased the Cat so much that, in spite of her repugnance to the wetting, which it promised her, she resolved to act the part which the cunning Fox had a.s.signed to her. They first threw the dead dog into the river and, going down the stream, they soon had the satisfaction of seeing the Trout glide up close to it and examine it.

They then returned to the bridge and put the piece of wood into the water, and the Cat, having placed herself upon it and taken a posture as if she were dead, was soon carried down by the current to where the Trout was. Apparently without the least suspicion, he came up close to the Cat's head, and she, seizing him by one of his gills, held him in spite of all his struggles. The task of regaining the bank still had to be performed, and this was no small difficulty, for the Trout struggled so hard, and the business of navigation was so new to the Cat, that not without great labor and fatigue did she reach the place where the Fox was waiting for her. As one end of the board struck the bank, the Fox put his right forepaw upon it, then seizing the fish near the tail, as the Cat let it go, he gave the board a violent push which sent it toward the middle of the stream, and instantly ran off with the Trout in his mouth toward the bridge.

It had so happened that after the Fox had quitted the bridge the last time, an Otter had come there to watch for fish, and he, seeing the Trout in the Fox's mouth, rushed toward him, and compelled him to drop the fish and put himself on the defensive. It had also happened that this Otter had been seen in an earlier part of the day, and that notice of him had been given to the farmer to whom the Cat belonged, and who had more than once declared that if ever he found her fis.h.i.+ng again she should be thrown into the river with a stone tied to her neck. The moment the farmer heard of the Otter, he took his gun, and followed by a laborer and two strong dogs, went toward the river, where he arrived just as the Cat, exhausted by the fatigue of her second voyage, was crawling up the bank. Immediately he ordered the laborer to put the sentence of drowning in execution; then, followed by his dogs, he arrived near the bridge just as the Fox and the Otter were about to join battle. Instantly the dogs set on the Fox and tore him to pieces; and the farmer, shooting the Otter dead on the spot, possessed himself of the Trout, which had thus served to detain first one, then the other of his destroyers, till a severe punishment had overtaken each of them. Moral.--The inexperienced are never so much in danger of being deceived and hurt as when they think themselves a match for the crafty, and suppose that they have penetrated their designs and seen through all their stratagems. As to the crafty, they are ever in danger, either by being overreached one by another or of falling in a hurry into some snare of their own, where, as commonly happens, should they be caught, they are treated with a full measure of severity.--Aesop, Jr., in America.

Robert C. Sands

A MONODY

Made on the Late Mr. Samuel Patch, by an Aadmirer of the Bathos

By water he shall die and take his end.--Shakespeare

Toll for Sam Patch! Sam Patch, who jumps no more, This or the world to come. Sam Patch is dead!

The vulgar pathway to the unknown sh.o.r.e Of dark futurity, he would not tread.

No friends stood sorrowing round his dying bed; Nor with decorous woe, sedately stepp'd Behind his corpse, and tears by retail shed-- The mighty river, as it onward swept, In one great wholesale sob, his body drowned and kept.

Toll for Sam Patch! he scorned the common way That leads to fame, up heights of rough ascent, And having heard Pope and Longinus say That some great men had risen by falls, he went And jumped, where wild Pa.s.saic's waves had rent The antique rocks--the air free pa.s.sage gave-- And graciously the liquid element Upbore him, like some sea-G.o.d on its wave; And all the people said that Sam was very brave.

Fame, the clear spirit that doth to heaven upraise, Let Sam to dive into what Byron calls The h.e.l.l of waters. For the sake of praise, He wooed the bathos down great waterfalls; The dizzy precipice, which the eye appals Of travelers for pleasure, Samuel found Pleasant as are to women lighted halls, Crammed full of fools and fiddles; to the sound Of the eternal roar, he timed his desperate bound.

Sam was a fool. But the large world of such Has thousands--better taught, alike absurd, And less sublime. Of fame he soon got much, Where distant cataracts spout, of him men heard.

Alas for Sam! Had he aright preferred The kindly element, to which he gave Himself so fearlessly, we had not heard That it was now his winding sheet and grave, Nor sung, 'twixt tears and smiles, our requiem for the brave.

He soon got drunk with rum and with renown, As many others in high places do-- Whose fall is like Sam's last--for down and down, By one mad impulse driven, they flounder through The gulf that keeps the future from our view, And then are found not. May they rest in peace!

We heave the sigh to human frailty due-- And shall not Sam have his? The muse shall cease To keep the heroic roll, which she began in Greece--

With demiG.o.ds who went to the Black Sea For wool (and if the best accounts be straight, Came back, in Negro phraseology, With the same wool each upon his pate), In which she chronicled the deathless fate Of him who jumped into the perilous ditch Left by Rome's street commissioners, in a state Which made it dangerous, and by jumping which He made himself renowned and the contractors rich--

I say the muse shall quite forget to sound The chord whose music is undying, if She do not strike it when Sam Patch is drowned.

Leander dived for love. Leucadia's cliff The Lesbian Sappho leapt from in a miff, To punish Phaon; Icarus went dead Because the wax did not continue stiff; And, had he minded what his father said, He had not given a name unto his watery bed.

And h.e.l.le's case was all an accident, As everybody knows. Why sing of these?

Nor would I rank with Sam that man who went Down into Aetna's womb--Empedocles, I think he called himself. Themselves to please, Or else unwillingly, they made their springs; For glory in the abstract, Sam made his, To prove to all men, commons, lords, and kings, That "some things may be done, as well as other things."

I will not be fatigued, by citing more Who jump'd of old, by hazard or design, Nor plague the weary ghosts of boyish lore, Vulcan, Apollo, Phaeton--in fine All Tooke's Pantheon. Yet they grew divine By their long tumbles; and if we can match Their hierarchy, shall we not entwine One wreath? Who ever came "up to the scratch,"

And for so little, jumped so bravely as Sam Patch?

To long conclusions many men have jumped In logic, and the safer course they took; By any other they would have been stumped, Unable to argue, or to quote a book, And quite dumbfounded, which they cannot brook; They break no bones, and suffer no contusion, Hiding their woful fall, by hook and crook, In slang and gibberish, sputtering and confusion; But that was not the way Sam came to _his_ conclusion.

He jumped in person. Death or victory Was his device, "and there was no mistake,"

Except his last; and then he did but die, A blunder which the wisest men will make.

Aloft, where mighty floods the mountains break, To stand, the target of the thousand eyes, And down into the coil and water-quake, To leap, like Maia's offspring, from the skies-- For this all vulgar flights he ventured to despise.

And while Niagara prolongs its thunder, Though still the rock primeval disappears And nations change their bounds--the theme of wonder Shall Sam go down the cataract of long years: And if there be sublimity in tears, Those shall be precious which the adventurer shed When his frail star gave way, and waked his fears, Lest, by the ungenerous crowd it might be said, That he was all a hoax, or that his pluck had fled.

Who would compare the maudlin Alexander, Blubbering because he had no job in hand, Acting the hypocrite, or else the gander, With Sam, whose grief we all can understand?

His crying was not womanish, nor plann'd For exhibition; but his heart o'erswelled With its own agony, when he the grand, Natural arrangements for a jump beheld.

And measuring the cascade, found not his courage quelled.

His last great failure set the final seal Unto the record Time shall never tear, While bravery has its honor--while men feel The holy natural sympathies which are First, last and mightiest in the bosom. Where The tortured tides of Genesee descend, He came--his only intimate a bear-- (We know now that he had another friend), The martyr of renown, his wayward course to end.

The fiend that from the infernal rivers stole h.e.l.l-drafts for man, too much tormented him; With nerves unstrung, but steadfast of his soul, He stood upon the salient current's brim; His head was giddy, and his sight was dim; And then he knew this leap would be his last-- Saw air, and earth, and water, wildly swim, With eyes of many mult.i.tudes, dense and vast, That stared in mockery; none a look of kindness cast.

Beat down, in the huge amphitheatre, "I see before me the gladiator lie,"

And tier on tier, the myriads waiting there The bow of grace without one pitying eye-- He was a slave--a captive hired to die-- _Sam_ was born free as Caesar; and he might The hopeless issue have refused to try; No! with true leap, but soon with faltering flight-- "Deep in the roaring gulf, he plunged to endless night."

But, ere he leapt, he begged of those who made Money by this dread venture, that if he Should perish, such collection should be paid As might be picked up from the "company"

_To his Mother._ This, his last request, shall be-- Tho' she who bore him ne'er his fate should know-- An iris, glittering o'er his memory-- When all the streams have worn their barriers low, And, by the sea drunk up, forever cease to flow.

On him who chooses to jump down cataracts, Why should the sternest moralist be severe?

Judge not the dead by prejudice--but facts, Such as in strictest evidence appear.

Else were the laurels of all ages sere.

Give to the brave, who have pa.s.sed the final goal-- The gates that ope not back--the generous tear; And let the muse's clerk upon her scroll In coa.r.s.e, but honest verse, make up the judgment roll.

_Therefore it is considered_ that Sam Patch Shall never be forgot in prose or rhyme; His name shall be a portion in the batch Of the heroic dough, which baking Time Kneads for consuming ages--and the chime Of Fame's old bells, long as they truly ring, Shall tell of him; he dived for the sublime, And found it. Thou, who, with the eagle's wing, Being a goose, would'st fly--dream not of such a thing!

THE BRITISH MATRON

(Anonymous)

I have heard a good deal of the tenacity with which English ladies retain their personal beauty to a late period of life; but (not to suggest that an American eye needs use and cultivation before it can quite appreciate the charm of English beauty at any age) it strikes me that an English lady of fifty is apt to become a creature less refined and delicate, so far as her physique goes, than anything that we Western people cla.s.s under the name of woman. She has an awful ponderosity of frame--not pulpy, like the looser development of our few fat women, but ma.s.sive, with solid beef and streaky tallow; so that (though struggling manfully against the ideal) you inevitably think of her as made up of steaks and sirloins. When she walks her advance is elephantine. When she sits down it is on a great round s.p.a.ce of her Maker's footstool, where she looks as if nothing could ever move her. She imposes awe and respect by the muchness of her personality, to such a degree that you probably credit her with far greater moral and intellectual force than she can fairly claim. Her visage is usually grim and stern, seldom positively forbidding, yet calmly terrible, not merely by its breadth and weight of feature, but because it seems to express so much well-defined self-reliance, such acquaintance with the world, its toils, troubles and dangers, and such st.u.r.dy capacity for trampling down a foe. Without anything positively salient, or actively offensive, or, indeed, unjustly formidable to her neighbors, she has the effect of a seventy-four-gun s.h.i.+p in time of peace; for, while you a.s.sure yourself that there is no real danger, you cannot help thinking how tremendous would be her onset if pugnaciously inclined, and how futile the effort to inflict any counter-injury. She certainly looks tenfold--nay, a hundredfold-- better able to take care of herself than our slender-framed and haggard womankind; but I have not found reason to suppose that the English dowager of fifty has actually greater courage, fort.i.tude and strength of character than our women of similar age, or even a tougher physical endurance than they. Morally, she is strong, I suspect, only in society and in common routine of social affairs, and would be found powerless and timid in any exceptional strait that might call for energy outside of the conventionalities amid which she has grown up.

You can meet this figure in the street, and live, and even smile at the recollection. But conceive of her in a ballroom, with the bare, brawny arms that she invariably displays there, and all the other corresponding development, such as is beautiful in the maiden blossom, but a spectacle to howl at in such an overblown cabbage-rose as this.

Yet, somewhere in this enormous bulk there must be hidden the modest, slender, violet-nature of a girl, whom an alien ma.s.s of earthliness has unkindly overgrown; for an English maiden in her teens, though very seldom so pretty as our own damsels, possesses, to say the truth, a certain charm of half-blossom, and delicately folded leaves, and tender womanhood, s.h.i.+elded by maidenly reserves, with which, somehow or other, our American girls often fail to adorn themselves during an appreciable moment. It is a pity that the English violet should grow into such an outrageously developed peony as I have attempted to describe. I wonder whether a middle-aged husband ought to be considered as legally married to all the accretions that have overgrown the slenderness of his bride, since he led her to the altar, and which make her so much more than he ever bargained for! Is it not a sounder view of the case that the matrimonial bond cannot be held to include the three-fourths of the wife that had no existence when the ceremony was performed? And ought not an English married pair to insist upon the celebration of a silver wedding at the end of twenty-five years to legalize all that corporeal growth of which both parties have individually come into possession since p.r.o.nounced one flesh?--_Our Old Home_.

THE POSTER GIRL

The blessed Poster Girl leaned out From a pinky-purple heaven; One eye was red and one was green; Her bang was cut uneven; She had three fingers on her hand, And the hairs on her head were seven,

Her robe, ungirt from clasp to hem, No sunflowers did adorn; But a heavy Turkish portiere Was very neatly worn; And the hat that lay along her back Was yellow like canned corn.

It was a kind of wobbly wave That she was standing on, And high aloft she flung a scarf That must have weighed a ton; And she was rather tall--at least She reached up to the sun.