Volume II Part 19 (1/2)
And Smiley says, sorter indifferent like, ”It might be a parrot, or it might be a canary, may be, but it ain't--it's only just a frog.”
And the feller took it, and looked at it careful, and turned it round this way and that, and says, ”H'm--so't is. Well, what's _he_ good for?”
”Well,” Smiley says, easy and careless, ”he's good enough for _one_ thing, I should judge--he can out-jump ary frog in Calaveras county.”
The feller took the box again, and took another long, particular look, and give it back to Smiley, and says, very deliberate, ”Well, I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog.”
”May be you don't,” Smiley says. ”May be you understand frogs, and may be you don't understand 'em; may be you've had experience, and may be you ain't, only a amature, as it were. Any ways, I've got _my_ opinion, and I'll risk forty dollars that he can out-jump any frog in Calaveras county.”
And the feller studied a minute, and then says, kinder sad like, ”Well, I'm only a stranger here, and I ain't got no frog; but if I had a frog, I'd bet you.”
And then Smiley says, ”That's all right--that's all right--if you'll hold my box a minute, I'll go and get you a frog.” And so the feller took the box, and put up his forty dollars along with Smiley's, and set down to wait.
So he set there a good while thinking and thinking to hisself, and then he got the frog out and prized his mouth open and took a teaspoon and filled him full of quail shot--filled him pretty near up to his chin--and set him on the floor. Smiley he went to the swamp and slopped around in the mud for a long time, and finally he ketched a frog, and fetched him in, and give him to this feller, and says:
”Now, if you're ready, set him alongside of Dan'l, with his fore-paws just even with Dan'l, and I'll give the word.” Then he says, ”One--two--three--jump!” and him and the feller touched up the frogs from behind, and the new frog hopped off, but Dan'l give a heave, and hysted up his shoulders--so--like a Frenchman, but it wan't no use--he couldn't budge; he was planted as solid as an anvil, and he couldn't no more stir than if he was anch.o.r.ed out. Smiley was a good deal surprised, and he was disgusted too, but he didn't have no idea what the matter was, of course.
The feller took the money and started away; and when he was going out at the door, he sorter jerked his thumb over his shoulders--this way--at Dan'l, and says again, very deliberate, ”Well, I don't see no pints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog.”
Smiley he stood scratching his head and looking down at Dan'l a long time, and at last he says, ”I do wonder what in the nation that frog throw'd off for--I wonder if there ain't some thing the matter with him--he 'pears to look mighty baggy, somehow.” And he ketched Dan'l by the nap of the neck, and lifted him up and says, ”Why, blame my cats, if he don't weigh five pound!” and turned him upside down, and he belched out a double handful of shot. And then he see how it was, and he was the maddest man--he set the frog down and took out after that feller, but he never ketched him. And--
(Here Simon Wheeler heard his name called from the front yard, and got up to see what was wanted.) And turning to me as he moved away, he said: ”Just set where you are, stranger, and rest easy--I an't going to be gone a second.”
But, by your leave, I did not think that a continuation of the history of the enterprising vagabond _Jim_ Smiley would be likely to afford me much information concerning the Rev. _Leonidas W._ Smiley, and so I started away.
At the door I met the sociable Wheeler returning, and he b.u.t.tonholed me and recommenced:
”Well, this-yer Smiley had a yaller one-eyed cow that didn't have no tail, only just a short stump like a bannanner, and--”
”Oh, hang Smiley and his afflicted cow!” I muttered, good-naturedly, and bidding the old gentleman good-day, I departed.
FITZ HUGH LUDLOW. (BORN, 1836--DIED, 1870.)
BEN THIRLWALL'S SCHOOLDAYS.
My name is Ben Thirlwall, and I am the son of rich but honest parents. I never had a wish ungratified until I was twelve years of age. My wish then was to stay on a two-year-old colt which had never been broken. He did not coincide with me, and a vast revelation of the resistances to individual will of which the universe is capable, also of a terrestrial horizon, bottom upward, burst upon me during the brief s.p.a.ce which I spent in flying over his head. Picked up senseless, I was carried to the bosom of my family on a wheelbarrow, and awoke to the consciousness that my parents had decided on sending me to a boarding-school,--a remedy to this day sovereign in the opinion of all well-regulated parents for all tangential aberrations from the back of a colt or the laws of society.
The princ.i.p.al's name was Barker; and my only clue to his character consisted in overhearing that he was an excellent disciplinarian. I was afraid to ask what that meant, but on reflection concluded it to be a geographical distinction, and, a.s.sociating him with Mesopotamia or Beloochistan, expected to find him a person of mild manners, who shaved his head, wore a tall hat of dyed sheep's wool, and did a large business in spices with people who visited him on camels in a front-yard surrounded by sheds, and having a fountain that played in the middle.
Having read several books of travels, I was corroborated in my view when I learned that Mr. Barker lived at the east, and still further, when on going around point Judith on the steamboat with my father, I became very sick at the stomach, as all the travellers had done in their first chapter.
I need not say that the reality of Mr. Barker was a very terrible awakening, which contained no lineament of my purple dream, save the bastinado. Without distinction of age or season the youths who, as per circular, enjoyed the softening influence of his refined Christian home, rose to the sound of the gong at five A.M., which may have been very nice in a home for the early Christians, but was reported among the boys to have entirely stopped the growth of Little Briggs. This was a child, whose mother had married again, and whose step-father had felt his duty to his future too keenly to deprive him of the benign influences of Barker at any time in the last six years. After rising, we had ten minutes to wash our faces and hands,--a period by the experience of mankind demonstrably insufficient, where the soap is of that kind very properly denominated cast-steel (though purists have a different spelling), and you have to break an inch of ice to get into the available region of your water-pitcher. Chunks, who has since made a large fortune on war-contracts, kept himself in peanuts and four-cent pies for an entire winter session, by selling an invention of his own, which consisted of soap, dissolved in water on the stove during the day-time, put in bottles hooked from the lamp-room by means of a false key, to be carried to bed and kept warm by boys, whose pocket-money and desire for a prompt detergent in the morning were adequate to the disburs.e.m.e.nt of half a dime a package. I myself took several violent colds from having the gla.s.s next my skin during severe nights; but that was nothing so bad as the case of Little Briggs, who from lack of the half-dime, often came down to prayers with a stripe of yesterday's pencil black on one side of his nose, and a shaving of soap, which, in the frenzy of despair he had gouged out of his stony cake, on the other.
The state of mind consistent with such a condition of countenance did not favor correct recitation of the tougher names in Deuteronomy; so, it can be a cause of surprise to no one, that, when called on at prayers, and prompted by a ridiculous neighbor, little Briggs sometimes a.s.serted Joshua to have driven out the Hivites and the Amorites, and the Canaanites and the Jebusites, and the Hitt.i.tes and the Perizzites, and the Moabites and the Musquito-bites, for which he was regularly sent to bed on Sat.u.r.day afternoon, as he had no pocket-money to stop, his papa desiring him to learn self-denial young, as he was intended for a missionary; though goodness knows that there wasn't enough of him to go round among many heathen.
From this specimen of discipline may be learned the entire Barkerian system of training. I was about to say, ”_ex uno disce omnes_,” but, as it's the only Latin I remember from the lot which got rubbed into--or rather over--me at Barker's, I'm rather sparing of it, not knowing but I can bring it in somewhere else with better effect. As with the Word of G.o.d, so with that of man,--the grand Barkerian idea of how to fix it in a boy's memory was to send him to bed, or excoriate his palm. If religion and polite learning could have been communicated by sheets, like chicken-pox, or blistered into one like the stern but curative cantharides, Mr. Barker's boys would have become the envy of mankind and the beloved of the G.o.ds; but not even Little Briggs died young from the latter or any other cause, which speaks volumes for his const.i.tution....
The two Misses Moodle came to establish a young ladies' seminary in the village of Mungerville, on whose outskirts our own school was situated, bringing along with them, as the county paper stated, ”that charming atmosphere of refinement and intellectuality in which they ever moved”; and, what was of more consequence, a capital of twenty girls to start with. Professional politeness inspired Mr. Barker to make a call on the fair strangers, which the personal fascinations of the younger Miss Moodle induced him to repeat. The atmosphere of refinement and intellectuality gradually acted on him in the nature of an intoxicating gas, until at length, after twenty-five years of successfully intrenched widowhood, he laid his heart in the mits of the younger Miss Moodle, and the two became one Barker.