Chapter IV: Part 4

In my native mountains there once lived one of these old gluttonous dreamers. I think he was the champion eater of the world. Many a time I have seen him at my grandfather's table, and the viands and battercakes vanished "like the baseless fabric of a vision,"--he left not "a wreck behind." But one day, in the voracity of his shark-like appetite, he unfortunately undertook too large a contract for the retirement of an immense slice of ham. It scraped its way down his rebellious esophagus for about two inches, and lodged as tightly as a bullet in a rusty gun. His prodigious Adam's apple suddenly shot up to his chin; his eyes protruded, and his purple neck craned and shortened by turns, like a trombone in full blast. He scrambled from the table and pranced about the room like a horse with blind staggers. My grandfather sprang at him and dealt him blow after blow in the back, which sounded like the blows of a mallet on a dry hide; but the ham wouldn't budge. The old man ran out into the yard and seized a plank about three feet long, and rushed into the room with it drawn.

"Now William," said he, "get down on your all-fours." William got down. "Now William, when I hit, you swallow." He hit, and it popped like a Winchester rifle.

William shot into the corner of the room like a shell from a mortar, but in a moment he was seated at his place at the table again, with a broad grin on his face. "Is it down William?" shouted the old man. "Yes, Mr. Haynes, the durned thing's gone,--please pass the ham."

I thought how vividly that old glutton illustrated the fools who, in their effort to gulp down the sensual pleasures of this world, choke the soul, and nothing but the clap-board of hard experience, well laid on, can dislodge the ham, and restore the equilibrium.

PHANTOMS OF THE WINE CUP.

A little below the glutton lies the plane of the drunkard whose visions and dreams are bounded by the horizon of a still tub. "A little wine for the stomach's sake is good," but in the trembling hand of a drunkard, every crimson drop that glows in the cup is crushed from the roses that once bloomed on the cheeks of some helpless woman. Every phantom of beauty that dances in it is a devil; and yet, millions quaff, and with a hideous laugh, go staggering to the grave.

THE MISSING LINK.

A little below the plane of the drunkard is the dude, that missing link between monkey and man, whose dream of happiness is a single eye-glass, a kangaroo strut, and three hours of conversation without a sensible sentence; whose only conception of life is to splurge, and flirt, and spend his father's fortune.

"Out of the fullness of his heart his mouth singeth:"

"I'm a dandy; I'm a swell.
Just from college, can't you tell?
I'm the beau of every belle;
I'm the swellest of the swell.

I'm the King of all the balls,
I'm a Prince in banquet halls.
My daddy's rich, they know it well,
I'm the swellest of the swell."

NIGHTMARE.

Unhappily for us all, in the world of visions and dreams, there is a dark side to human life. Here have been dreamed out all the crimes which have steeped our race in shame since the expulsion from Eden, and all the wars that have cursed mankind since the birth of history. Alexander the Great was a monster whose sword drank the blood of a conquered world. Julius Cæsar marched his invincible armies, like juggernauts, over the necks of fallen nations. Napoleon Bonaparte rose with the morning of the nineteenth century, and stood, like some frightful comet, on its troubled horizon. Distraught with the dream of conquest and empire, he hovered like a god on the verge of battle. Kings and emperors stood aghast. The sun of Austerlitz was the rising sun of his glory and power, but it went down, veiled in the dark clouds of Waterloo, and Napoleon the Great, uncrowned, unthroned, and stunned by the dreadful shock that annihilated the Grand Army and the Old Guard, "wandered aimlessly about on the lost field," in the gloom that palled a fallen empire, as Hugo describes him, "the somnambulist of a vast, shattered dream."

INFIDELITY.

It is in the desert of evil, where virtue trembles to tread, where hope falters, and where faith is crucified, that the infidel dreams. To him, all there is of heaven is bounded by this little span of life; all there is of pleasure and love is circumscribed by a few fleeting years; all there is of beauty is mortal; all there is of intelligence and wisdom is in the human brain; all there is of mystery and infinity is fathomable by human reason, and all there is of virtue is measured by the relations of man to man. To him, all must end in the "tongueless silence of the dreamless dust," and all that lies beyond the grave is a voiceless shore and a starless sky. To him, there are no prints of deathless feet on its echoless sands, no thrill of immortal music in its joyless air.

He has lost his God, and like some fallen seraph flying in rayless night, he gropes his way on flagging pinions, searching for light where darkness reigns, for life where Death is King.

THE DREAM OF GOD.

I have wondered a thousand times, if an infidel ever looked through a telescope. The universe is the dream of God, and the heavens declare His glory. There is our mighty sun, robed in the brightness of his eternal fires, and with his planets forever wheeling around him. Yonder is Mercury, and Venus, and there is Mars, the ruddy globe, whose poles are white with snow, and whose other zones seem dotted with seas and continents. Who knows but that his roseate color is only the blush of his flowers? Who knows but that Mars may now be a paradise inhabited by a blessed race, unsullied by sin, untouched by death? There is the giant orb of Jupiter, the champion of the skies, belted and sashed with vapor and clouds; and Saturn, haloed with bands of light and jeweled with eight ruddy moons; and there is Uranus, another stupendous world, speeding on in the prodigious circle of his tireless journey around the sun. And yet another orbit cuts the outer rim of our system; and on its gloomy pathway, the lonely Neptune walks the cold, dim solitudes of space. In the immeasurable depths beyond appear millions of suns, so distant that their light could not reach us in a thousand years. There, spangling the curtains of the black profound, shine the constellations that sparkle like the crown jewels of God. There are double, and triple, and quadruple suns of different colors, commingling their gorgeous hues and flaming like archangels on the frontier of stellar space. If we look beyond the most distant star, the black walls are flecked with innumerable patches of filmy light like the dewy gossamers of the spider's loom that dot our fields at morn. What beautiful forms we trace among those phantoms of light! circles, and elipses, and crowns, and shields, and spiral wreaths of palest silver. And what are they? Did I say phantoms of light? The telescope resolves them into millions of suns, standing out from the oceans of white hot matter that contain the germs of countless systems yet to be. And so far removed from us are these suns, that the light which comes to us from them to-night has been speeding on its way for more than two million years.

What is that white belt we call the milky way, which spans the heavens and sparkles like a Sahara of diamonds? It is a river of stars: it is a gulf stream of suns; and if each of these suns holds in his grasp a mighty system of planets, as ours does, how many multiplied millions of worlds like our own are now circling in that innumerable concourse?

Oh, where are the bounds of this divine conception! Where ends this dream of God? And is there no life and intelligence in all this throng of spheres? Are there no sails on those far away summer seas, no wings to cleave those crystal airs, no forms divine to walk those radiant fields? Are there no eyes to see those floods of light, no hearts to share with ours that love which holds all these mighty orbs in place?

It cannot be, it cannot be! Surely there is a God! If there is not, life is a dream, human experience is a phantom, and the universe is a flaunting lie!

* * * * *

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End of Project Gutenberg's Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales, by Robert L. Taylor