Part 13 (1/2)
”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.