Chapter V: Part 5

"No, sir. But perhaps they may have it in the upholstery department, in the sixth story."

So I got in the elevator and went up to the top of the house.

"Have you any red stuff like this?" I said to a young man.

"Red stuff? Upholstery department,--other end of this floor."

I went to the other end of the floor.

"I want some red calico," I said to a man.

"Furniture goods?" he asked.

"Yes," said I.

"Fourth counter to the left."

I went to the fourth counter to the left, and showed my sample to a salesman. He looked at it, and said:

"You'll get this down on the first floor--calico department."

I turned on my heel, descended in the elevator, and went out on Broadway. I was thoroughly sick of red calico. But I determined to make one more trial. My wife had bought her red calico not long before, and there must be some to be had somewhere. I ought to have asked her where she bought it, but I thought a simple little thing like that could be bought anywhere.

I went into another large dry-goods store. As I entered the door a sudden tremor seized me. I could not bear to take out that piece of red calico. If I had had any other kind of a rag about me--a pen-wiper or any thing of the sort--I think I would have asked them if they could match that.

But I stepped up to a young woman and presented my sample, with the usual question.

"Back room, counter on the left," she said.

I went there.

"Have you any red calico like this?" I asked of the lady behind the counter.

"No, sir," she said, "but we have it in Turkey-red."

Turkey-red again! I surrendered.

"All right," I said, "give me Turkey-red."

"How much, sir?" she asked.

"I don't know--say five yards."

The lady looked at me rather strangely, but measured off five yards of Turkey-red calico. Then she rapped on the counter and called out "cash!" A little girl, with yellow hair in two long plaits, came slowly up. The lady wrote the number of yards, the name of the goods, her own number, the price, the amount of the bank-note I handed her, and some other matters, probably the color of my eyes, and the direction and velocity of the wind, on a slip of paper. She then copied all this in a little book which she kept by her. Then she handed the slip of paper, the money, and the Turkey-red to the yellow-haired girl. This young girl copied the slip in a little book she carried, and then she went away with the calico, the paper slip, and the money.

After a very long time,--during which the little girl probably took the goods, the money, and the slip to some central desk, where the note was received, its amount and number entered in a book, change given to the girl, a copy of the slip made and entered, girl's entry examined and approved, goods wrapped up, girl registered, plaits counted and entered on a slip of paper and copied by the girl in her book, girl taken to a hydrant and washed, number of towel entered on a paper slip and copied by the girl in her book, value of my note and amount of change branded somewhere on the child, and said process noted on a slip of paper and copied in her book,--the girl came to me, bringing my change and the package of Turkey-red calico.

I had time for but very little work at the office that afternoon, and when I reached home, I handed the package of calico to my wife She unrolled it and exclaimed:

"Why, this don't match the piece I gave you!"

"Match it!" I cried. "Oh, no! it don't match it. You didn't want that matched. You were mistaken. What you wanted was Turkey-red--third counter to the left. I mean, Turkey-red is what they use."

My wife looked at me in amazement, and then I detailed to her my troubles.

"Well," said she, "this Turkey-red is a great deal prettier than what I had, and you've got so much of it that I needn't use the other at all. I wish I had thought of Turkey-red before."

"I wish from my heart you had," said I.

ANDREW SCOGGIN.

--_The Lady or the Tiger, and other stories._

HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD.

(BORN, 1835.)

* * * * *

AUNT PEN'S FUNERAL.

Poor Aunt Pen! I am sorry to say it, but for a person alive and well--tolerably well and very much alive, that is--she did use to make the greatest business of dying! Alive! why, when she was stretched out on the sofa, after an agony of asthma, or indigestion, or whatever, and had called us all about her with faltering and tears, and was apparently at her last gasp, she would suddenly rise, like her own ghost, at the sound of a second ringing of the door-bell, which our little renegade Israel had failed to answer, and declare if she could only once lay hands on Israel she would box his ears till they heard!

For the door-bell was, perhaps, among many, one of Aunt Pen's weakest points. She knew everybody in town, as you might say. She was exceedingly entertaining to everybody outside the family. She was a great favorite with everybody. Countless gossips came to see her, tinkling at the door-bell, and hated individually by Israel, brought her all the news, heard all the previous ones had brought, admired her, praised her, pitied her, listened to her, and went away leaving her in such satisfied mood that she did not die any more that day. And as they went away they always paused at the door to say to some one of us what a cheerful invalid Aunt Pen had made herself, and what a nest of sunbeams her room always was, and what a lesson her patience and endurance ought to be. But, oh dear me, how very little they knew about it all!

We all lived together, as it happened; for when we children were left alone with but a small income, Aunt Pen--who was also alone, and only five years my senior--wrote word that we might as well come to her house in the city, for it wouldn't make expenses more, and might make them less if we divided them; and then, too, she said she would always be sure of one out of three bright and reasonable nurses. Poor Aunt Pen! perhaps she didn't find us either so bright or so reasonable as she had expected; for we used to think that in her less degree she went on the same principle with the crazy man who declared all the rest of the world except himself insane.

In honest truth, as doctor after doctor was turned away by the impatient and distempered woman up-stairs, each one took occasion to say to us down-stairs that our aunt's illness was of that nature that all the physic it required was to have her fancies humored, and that we never need give ourselves any uneasiness, for she would doubtless live to a good old age, unless some acute disease should intervene, as there was nothing at all the matter with her except a slight nervous sensitiveness, that never destroyed anybody. I suppose we were a set of young heathen, for really there were times, if you will believe it, when that was not the most reassuring statement in the world.

However. Sometimes Aunt Pen found a doctor, or a medicine, or a course of diet, or something, that gave her great sensations of relief, and then she would come down, and go about the house, and praise our administration, and say every thing went twice as far as it used to go before we came, and tell us delightful stories, of our mother's housewifely skill, and be quite herself again; and she would make the table ring with laughing, and give charming little tea-parties; and then we all did wish that Aunt Pen would live forever--and be down-stairs. But probably the next day, after one of the tea-parties, oysters, or claret punch, or hot cakes, or all together, had wrought their diablerie, and the doctor was sent for, and the warming-pan was brought out, and there was another six weeks' siege, in which, obeyed by every one, and physicked by herself, and sympathized with to her heart's content by callers, and shut up in a hot room with the windows full of flowering plants, and somebody reading endless novels to her with the lights burning all night long--if she wasn't ill she had every inducement to be, and nothing but an indomitable constitution hindered it. It was perfectly idle for us to tell her she was hurting herself; it only made her very indignant with us, and more determined than ever to persist in doing so.

Of course, then, the longer Aunt Pen staid in her own room the worse she really did get, and her nerves, with confinement and worry and relaxation, would by-and-by be in a condition for any sort of an outburst if we attempted the least reasoning with her. She would become, for one thing, as sleepless as an owl; then she was thoroughly sure she was going to be insane, and down would go the hydrate of chloral till the doctor forbade it on pain of death. After the chloral, too, such horrid eyes as she had! the eyes, you know, that chloral always leaves--inflamed, purple, swollen, heavy, crying, and good for any thing but seeing. Immediately then Aunt Pen went into a new tantrum; she was going to be stone-blind, and dependent on three heartless hussies for all her mercies in this life; but no, thank goodness! she had friends that would see she did not go absolutely to the wall, and would never suffer her to be imposed on by a parcel of girls who didn't care whether she lived or died--who perhaps would rather she did die--who stood open-handed for her bequests; she would leave her money to the almshouse, and if we wanted it we could go and get it there! And after that, to be sure, Aunt Pen would have a fit of remorse for her words, and confess her sin chokingly, and have us all come separately and forgive her, and would say she was the wretchedest woman on the face of the earth, that she should live undesired until her friends were all tired, and then die unlamented; and would burst into tears and cry herself into a tearing headache, and have ice on her head and a blister on the back of her neck, and be quite confident that now she was really going off with congestion of the brain.

After that, for a day or two, she would be in a heavenly frame of mind with the blister and cabbage leaves and simple cerate, and a couple of mirrors by which to examine the rise and fall of the blister; and, having had a hint of real illness, she would consent quite smilingly to the act of convalescence, and a descent to the healthy region of the parlors once more.

But no sooner were we all gay and happy in the house again, running out as we pleased, beginning to think of parties and drives and theatres and all enjoyment--and rather unobservant, as young folks are apt to be unobservant of Aunt Pen's slight habitual pensiveness in the absence of guests or excitement, and of her ways generally--than Aunt Pen would challenge some lobster-salad to mortal combat, and, of course, come out floored by the colic. A little whiskey then; and as a little gave so much ease, she would try a great deal. The result always was a precipitate retreat up-stairs, a howling hysteric, bilious cramps, the doctor, a subcutaneous injection of morphine in her arm; then chattering like a magpie, relapsed into awful silence, and, convinced that the morphine had been carried straight to her heart, a composing of her hands and feet, an injured dismissal of every soul from the room, with the assurance that we should find her straight and stiff and stone-dead in the morning.

We never did. For, as we seldom had opportunity of an undisturbed night's rest, we usually took her at her word if any access of ill temper, or despair, or drowsiness occasioned banishment from the presence. Not that we had always been so calm about it; there was a time when we were excited with every alarm, thrown into flurries and panics quite to Aunt Pen's mind, running after the doctor at two o'clock of the morning, building a fire in the range ourselves at midnight to make gruel for her, rubbing her till we rubbed the skin off our hands, combing her hair till we went to sleep standing; but Aunt Pen had cried wolf so long, and the doctors had all declared so stoutly that there was no wolf, that our once soft hearts had become quite hard and concrete.

When at last Aunt Pen had had an alarm from nearly every illness for which the pharmacopoeia prescribes, and she knew that neither we nor the doctors would listen to the probability of their recurrence; she had an attack of "sinking." No, there was no particular disease, she used to say, only sinking; she had been pulled down to an extent from which she had no strength to recuperate; she was only sinking, a little weaker to-day than she was yesterday--only sinking. But Aunt Pen ate a very good breakfast of broiled birds and toast and coffee; a very good lunch of cold meats and dainties, and a great goblet of thick cream; a very good dinner of soup and roast and vegetables and dessert, and perhaps a chicken bone at eleven o'clock in the evening. And when the saucy little Israel, who carried up her tray, heard her say she was sinking, he remarked that it was because of the load on her stomach.

One day, I remember, Aunt Pen was very much worse than usual. We were all in her room, a sunshiny place which she had connected with the adjoining one by sliding-doors, so that it might be big enough for us all to bring our work on occasion, and make it lively for her. She had on a white-cashmere dressing-gown trimmed with swan's-down, and she lay among the luxurious cushions of a blue lounge, with a paler blue blanket, which she had had one of us tricot for her, lying over her feet, and altogether she looked very ideal and ethereal; for Aunt Pen always did have such an eye to picturesque effect that I don't know how she could ever consent to the idea of mouldering away into dust like common clay.

She had sent Maria down for Mel and me to come up-stairs with whatever occupied us, for she was convinced that she was failing fast, and knew we should regret it if we did not have the last of her. As we had received the same message nearly every other day during the last three or four weeks, we did not feel extraordinarily alarmed, but composedly took our baskets and scissors, and trudged along after Maria.

"I am sure I ought to be glad that I've succeeded in training my nieces into such industrious habits," said Aunt Pen, after a little while, looking at Mel; "but I should think that when a near relative approached the point of death, the fact might throw needle and thread into the background for a time." Then she paused for Maria to fan a little more breath into her. "It's different with Helen," soon she said; "the white silk shawl she is netting for me may be needed at any moment to lay me out in."

"Dear me, Aunt Pen!" cried Mel; "what a picture you'd be, laid out in a white net shawl!" For the doctor had told us to laugh at these whims all we might.

"Oh, you heartless girl!" said Aunt Pen. "To think of pictures at such a time!" And she closed her eyes as if weary of the world.

"I never saw anybody who liked to revel in the ghastly the way you do, Aunt Pen."

"Mel!" said Aunt Pen, with quite a show of color in her cheek; "I shall send you down stairs."

"Do," said Mel; "where I can cut out my gown in peace."

"Cutting a gown at the bedside of the dying! Are you cold-blooded, or are you insensible?"

"Aunt Pen," said Mel, leaning on the point of her scissors, "you know very well that I have to make my own dresses or go without them. And you have kept me running your idle errands, up and down two flights of stairs, to the doctor's and the druggist's, and goodness knows where and all, till I haven't a thread of any thing that is fit to be seen. You've been posturing this grand finale of yours, too, all the last three weeks, and it's time you had it perfect now; and you must let me alone till I get my gown done."

"It will do to wear at my funeral," said Aunt Pen bitterly, as she concluded.

"No, it won't," said Mel, doggedly; "it's red."

"Red!" cried Aunt Pen, suddenly opening her eyes, and half raising on one hand. "What in wonder have you bought a red dress for? You are quite aware that I can't bear the least intimation of the color. My nerves are in such a state that a shred of red makes me--"

"You won't see it, you know," said Mel in what did seem to me an unfeeling manner.

"No," said Aunt Pen. "Very true. I sha'n't see it. But what," added she presently snapping open her eyes, "considered as a mere piece of economy, you bought a red dress for when you are immediately going into black, passes common-sense to conjecture! You had better send it down and have it dyed at once before you cut it, for the shrinkage will spoil it forever if you don't."

"Much black I shall go into," said Mel.

Maria laughed. Aunt Pen cried.

"Aunt Pen," said the cruel Mel, "if you were going to die you wouldn't be crying. Dying people have no tears to shed, the doctors say."

"Somebody ought to cry," said poor Aunt Pen, witheringly. "Don't talk to me about doctors," she continued, after a silence interrupted only by the snipping of the scissors. "They are a set of quacks. They know nothing. I will have all the doctors in town at my funeral for pall-bearers. It will be a satire too delicate for them to appreciate, though. Speaking of that occasion, Helen," she went on, turning to me as a possible ally, "I have so many friends that I suppose the house will be full."

"Wouldn't you enjoy it more from church, auntie?" said I.

"Oh, you hard and wicked girls!" she cried. "You're all alike. Listen to me! If you won't hear my wishes, you must take my commands. Now, in the first place, I want the parlors to be overflowing with flowers, literally lined with flowers. I don't care how much money it takes; there'll be enough left for you--more than you deserve. And I want you to be very sure that I'm not to be exposed unless I look exactly as I'd like to look. You're to put on my white silk that I was to have been married in, and my veil, and the false orange blossoms. They're all in the third drawer of the press, and the key's on my chatelaine. And if--if--well," said Aunt Pen, more to herself than us, "if he comes, he'll understand. The Bride of Death."

After that she did not say any more for some minutes, and we were all silent and sorry, and Mel was fidgeting in a riot of repentance; we had never, either of us, heard a word of any romance of Aunt Pen's before. We began to imagine that there might be some excuse for the overthrow of Aunt Pen's nervous system, some reality in the overthrow. "You will leave this ring on my finger;" said she; by-and-by. "If Chauncey Read comes, and wants it, he will take it off. It will fit his finger as well now, I suppose, as it did when he wore it before he gave it to me." Then Aunt Pen bit her lip and shut her eyes, and seemed to be slipping off into a gentle sleep.

"By-the-way!" said she, suddenly, sitting upright on the lounge, "I won't have the horses from Brown's livery--

"The what, auntie?"

"The horses for the cortege. You know Brown puts that magnificent span of his in the hearse on account of their handsome action. I'm sure Mrs. Gaylard would have been frightened to death if she could only have seen the way they pranced at her funeral last fall. I was determined then that they should never draw me;" and Aunt Pen shivered for herself beforehand. "And I can't have them from Timlin's, for the same reason," said she. "All his animals are skittish; and you remember when a pair of them took fright and dashed away from the procession and ran straight to the river, and there'd have been four other funerals if the schooner at the wharf hadn't stopped the runaways. And Timlins has a way, too, of letting white horses follow the hearse with the first mourning-coach, and it's very bad luck, very--an ill omen; a prophecy of Death and the Pale Horse again, you know. And I won't have them from Shust's, either," said Aunt Pen, "for he is simply the greatest extortioner since old Isaac the Jew."

"Well, auntie," said Mel, forgetful of her late repentance, "I don't see but you'll have to go with Shank's mare."

Even Aunt Pen laughed then. "Don't you really think you are going to lose me, girls?" asked she.

"No, auntie," replied Maria. "We all think you are a hypo."

"A hypo?"

"Not a hypocrite," said Mel, "but a hypochondriac."

"I wish I were," sighed Aunt Pen; "I wish I were. I should have some hope of myself then," said the poor inconsistent innocent. "Oh no, no; I feel it only too well; I am going fast. You will all regret your disbelief when I am gone;" and she lay back among her pillows. "That reminds me," she murmured, presently. "About my monument."

"Oh, Aunt Pen, do be still," said Mel.

"No," said Aunt Pen, firmly; "it may be a disagreeable duty, but that is all the better reason for me to bring my mind to it. And if I don't attend to it now, it never will be attended to. I know what relatives are. They put down a slab of slate with a skull and cross-bones scratched on it, and think they've done their duty. Not that I mean any reflections on you; you're all well-meaning, but you're giddy. I shall haunt you if you do any thing of the kind! No; you may send Mr. Mason up here this afternoon, and I will go over his designs with him. I am going to have carved Carrara marble, set in a base of polished Scotch granite, and the inscription is--Girls!" cried Aunt Pen, rising and clasping her knees with unexpected energy, "I expressly forbid my age being printed in the paper, or on the lid, or on the stone! I won't gratify every gossip in town, that I won't! I shall take real pleasure in baffling their curiosity. And another thing, while I am about it, don't you ask Tom Maltby to my funeral, or let him come in, if he comes himself, on any account whatever. I should rise in my shroud if he approached me. Yes, I should! Tom Maltby may be all very well; I dare say he is; and I hope I die at peace with him and all mankind, as a good Christian should. I forgive him; yes, certainly, I forgive him; but it doesn't follow that I need forget him; and, so long as I remember him, the way he conducted in buying the pew over my head I can't get over, dead or alive. And if I only do get well we shall have a reckoning that will make his hair stand on end--that he may rely on!" And here Aunt Pen took the fan from Maria, and moved it actively, till she remembered herself, when she resigned it. "One thing more," she said. "Whatever happens, Helen, don't let me be kept over Sunday. There'll certainly be another death in the family within the year if you do. If I die on Saturday, there's no help for it. Common decency won't let you shove me into the ground at once, and so you will have to make up your minds for a second summons." And Aunt Pen, contemplating the suttee of some one of us with great philosophy, lay down and closed her eyes again. "You might have it by torchlight on Sunday night, though," said she, half opening them. "That would be very pretty." And then she dropped off to sleep with such a satisfied expression of countenance that we judged her to be welcoming in imagination the guests at her last rites herself.

Whatever the dream was, she was rudely roused from it by the wreched little Israel, who came bounding up the stairs, and, without word or warning, burst into the room, almost white with horror. Why Israel was afraid I can't conjecture, but, at any rate, a permanent fright would have been of great personal advantage to him. "Oh, ma'am! oh, miss! dere's a pusson down stairs, a cullud woman, wid der small-pox!" he almost whistled in his alarm.

"With the small-pox!" cried Aunt Pen, springing into the middle of the floor, regardless of her late repose _in articulo mortis_. "Go away, Israel! Have you been near her? Put her out immediately! How on earth did she get there?"

"You allus telled me to let everybody in," chattered Israel.

"Put her out! put her out!" cried Aunt Pen, half dancing with impatience.

"We can't get her out. She's right acrost der door-step. We's feared ter tech her."

But Aunt Pen's head was out of the window, and she was shouting: "Police! fire! murder! thieves!" possibly in the order of importance of the four calamities, but quite as if she had a plenty of breath left; and, for a wonder, the police came to the rescue, and directly afterward an ambulance took the poor victim of the frightful epidemic to the hospital. I believe it turned out to be only measles after all, though.

"Run, Israel!" screamed Aunt Pen then; "run instantly and bring home a couple of pounds of roll-brimstone, and tell the maids to riddle the furnace fire and make it as bright and hot as possible, and to light fires in the parlor grates, and in the old Latrobe, and in every room in the house, without losing a minute. We'll make this house too warm for it!"

And, to our amazement, as soon as Israel came darting back with the impish material, Aunt Pen took a piece in each hand, directed us to do the same, and wrapping the blue afghan round her shoulders, descended to the lower rooms three steps at a time, sent for the doctor to come and vaccinate us, and having set a chair precisely over the register where a red-hot stream of air was pouring up, she placed herself upon it and issued her orders.

Every window was closed, every grate from basement to attic had a fire lighted in it, and little pans of brimstone were burning in every room and hall in the house, while we, astonished, indignant, frightened, and amused, sat enduring the torments of vapor and sulphur baths to the point of suffocation.

"I can't bear this another moment," wheezed Mel.

"It's the only way," replied Aunt Pen, serenely, with a rivulet trickling down her nose. "You kill the germs by heat, and since we can't bake ourselves quite to death, we make sure of the work by the fumes."

And as she sat there, her face rubicund, her swan's-down straight, drops on her cheeks, her chin, her forehead, and wherever drops could cling, her eyes watering, her curls limp, and an atmosphere of unbearable odor enveloping her in its cloud, the front door opened, and a footstep rung on the tiles.

"Jess you keep out o' yer!" yelled Israel to the intruder, seeing it wasn't the doctor. "We's got der small-pox, and am a-killing de gemmens--"

"Pen!" cried a man's voice through the smoke--a deep, melodious voice.

"What!" exclaimed Aunt Pen, starting up, and then pausing as if she fancied the horrid fumes might have befogged her brain.

"Pen!" the voice cried again.

"Chauncey! Chauncey Read!" she shrieked. "Where do you come from? Am I dreaming?"

"From the North Pacific," answered the voice; and we dimly discerned its owner groping his way forward. "From the five years' whaling voyage into which I was gagged and dragged--shanghaied, they call it. O, Pen, I didn't dare to hope I should find--"

"Oh, Chauncey, is it you?" she cried, and fell fainting at his feet.

The draught from the open door after him was blowing away the smoke, and we saw what a great, sunburned, handsome fellow it was that had caught her in his arms, and was bearing her out to the back balcony and the fresh air there, used in the course of his whaling voyage, perhaps, to odors no more belonging to Araby the Blest than those of burning brimstone do; and, seeing the movement, we divined that he knew as much about the resources of the house as we did, and so we discreetly withdrew, Israel's head being twisted behind him as he went to such extent that you might have supposed he had had his neck wrung.

Well, we put the white silk and the tulle on Aunt Pen after all; yellow as it was, she would have no other--only fresh, natural orange blossoms in place of the false wreath. And if we had not so often had her word for it in past times, we never should have taken her for any thing but the gayest bride, the most alive and happy woman in the world. They returned to the old house from their wedding journey, and we all live together in great peace and pleasantness. But though three years are passed and gone since Chauncey Read came home and brought a new atmosphere with him into our lives, Aunt Pen has never had a sick day yet; and we find that any allusion to her funeral gives her such a superstitious trembling that we are pleased to believe it indefinitely postponed, and by tacit and mutual consent we never say any thing about it.--_Harper's Magazine_, June, 1872.

SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS.

("MARK TWAIN.")

(BORN, 1835.)

* * * * *

THE CELEBRATED JUMPING FROG OF CALAVERAS COUNTY.

In compliance with the request of a friend of mine, who wrote me from the East, I called on good-natured, garrulous old Simon Wheeler, and inquired after my friend's friend, _Leonidas W._ Smiley, as requested to do, and I hereunto append the result. I have a lurking suspicion that _Leonidas W._ Smiley is a myth; that my friend never knew such a personage; and that he only conjectured that, if I asked old Wheeler about him, it would remind him of his infamous _Jim_ Smiley, and he would go to work and bore me nearly to death with some infernal reminiscence of him as long and tedious as it should be useless for me. If that was the design, it certainly succeeded.

I found Simon Wheeler dozing comfortably by the bar-room stove of the old, dilapidated tavern in the ancient mining camp of Angel's, and I noticed that he was fat and bald-headed, and had an expression of winning gentleness and simplicity upon his tranquil countenance. He roused up and gave me good-day. I told him a friend of mine had commissioned me to make some inquiries about a cherished companion of his boyhood named _Leonidas W._ Smiley--_Rev. Leonidas W._ Smiley--a young minister of the Gospel, who he had heard was at one time a resident of Angel's Camp. I added that, if Mr. Wheeler could tell me any thing about this Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, I would feel under many obligations to him.

Simon Wheeler backed me into a corner and blockaded me there with his chair, and then sat me down and reeled off the monotonous narrative which follows this paragraph. He never smiled, he never frowned, he never changed his voice from the gentle-flowing key to which he tuned the initial sentence, he never betrayed the slightest suspicion of enthusiasm; but all through the interminable narrative there ran a vein of impressive earnestness and sincerity, which showed me plainly that, so far from his imagining that there was any thing ridiculous or funny about his story, he regarded it as a really important matter, and admired its two heroes as men of transcendent genius in _finesse_. To me, the spectacle of a man drifting serenely along through such a queer yarn without ever smiling, was exquisitely absurd. As I said before, I asked him to tell me what he knew of Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, and he replied as follows. I let him go on in his own way, and never interrupted him once:

There was a feller here once by the name of _Jim_ Smiley, in the winter of '49--or may be it was the spring of '50--I don't recollect exactly, somehow, though what makes me think it was one or the other is because I remember the big flume wasn't finished when he first came to the camp; but any way he was the curiosest man about always betting on any thing that turned up you ever see, if he could get anybody to bet on the other side; and if he couldn't, he'd change sides. Any way that suited the other man would suit him--any way just so's he got a bet, _he_ was satisfied. But still he was lucky, uncommon lucky; he most always come out winner. He was always ready and laying for a chance; there couldn't be no solitry thing mentioned but that feller'd offer to bet on it, and take any side you please, as I was just telling you. If there was a horse-race, you'd find him flush, or you'd find him busted at the end of it; if there was a dog-fight, he'd bet on it; if there was a cat-fight, he'd bet on it; if there was a chicken-fight, he'd bet on it; why, if there was two birds sitting on a fence, he would bet you which one would fly first; or if there was a camp-meeting, he would be there reg'lar, to bet on Parson Walker, which he judged to be the best exhorter about here, and so he was, too, and a good man. If he even seen a straddle-bug start to go anywheres, he would bet you how long it would take him to get wherever he was going to, and if you took him up, he would foller that straddle-bug to Mexico but what he would find out where he was bound for and how long he was on the road. Lots of the boys here has seen that Smiley, and can tell you about him. Why, it never made no difference to _him_--he would bet on _any_ thing--the dangdest feller. Parson Walker's wife laid very sick once, for a good while, and it seemed as if they warn't going to save her; but one morning he come in, and Smiley asked how she was, and he said she was considerable better--thank the Lord for his inf'nit mercy--and coming on so smart that, with the blessing of Prov'dence, she'd get well yet; and Smiley, before he thought, says, "Well, I'll risk two-and-a-half that she don't, any way."

This-yer Smiley had a mare--the boys called her the fifteen-minute nag, but that was only in fun, you know, because, of course, she was faster than that--and he used to win money on that horse, for all she was so slow and always had the asthma, or the distemper, or the consumption, or something of that kind. They used to give her two or three hundred yards start, and then pass her under way; but always at the fag-end of the race she'd get excited and desperate-like, and come cavorting and straddling up, and scattering her legs around limber, sometimes in the air, and sometimes out to one side amongst the fences, and kicking up m-o-r-e dust, and raising m-o-r-e racket with her coughing and sneezing and blowing her nose--and always fetch up at the stand just about a neck ahead, as near as you could cipher it down.

And he had a little small bull pup, that to look at him you'd think he wan't worth a cent, but to set around and look ornery, and lay for a chance to steal something. But as soon as the money was up on him, he was a different dog; his under-jaw'd begin to stick out like the fo'castle of a steamboat, and his teeth would uncover, and shine savage like the furnaces. And a dog might tackle him, and bully-rag him, and bite him, and throw him over his shoulder two or three times, and Andrew Jackson--which was the name of the pup--Andrew Jackson would never let on but what _he_ was satisfied, and hadn't expected nothing else--and the bets being doubled and doubled on the other side all the time, till the money was all up; and then all of a sudden he would grab that other dog jest by the j'int of his hind leg and freeze to it--not chaw, you understand, but only jest grip and hang on till they throwed up the sponge, if it was a year. Smiley always come out winner on that pup, till he harnessed a dog once that didn't have no hind legs, because they'd been sawed off by a circular saw, and when the thing had gone along far enough, and the money was all up, and he come to make a snatch for his pet holt, he saw in a minute how he'd been imposed on, and how the other dog had him in the door, so to speak, and he 'peared surprised, and then he looked sorter discouraged-like, and didn't try no more to win the fight, and so he got shucked out bad. He give Smiley a look, as much as to say his heart was broke, and it was _his_ fault, for putting up a dog that hadn't no hind legs for him to take holt of, which was his main dependence in a fight, and then he limped off a piece and laid down and died. It was a good pup, was that Andrew Jackson, and would have made a name for hisself if he'd lived, for the stuff was in him, and he had genius--I know it, because he hadn't had no opportunities to speak of, and it don't stand to reason that a dog could make such a fight as he could under them circumstances, if he hadn't no talent. It always makes me feel sorry when I think of that last fight of his'n, and the way it turned out.

Well, this-yer Smiley had rat-tarriers, and chicken cocks, and tom-cats, and all them kind of things, till you couldn't rest, and you couldn't fetch nothing for him to bet on but he'd match you. He ketched a frog one day, and took him home, and said he cal'klated to edercate him; and so he never done nothing for three months but set in his back yard and learn that frog to jump. And you bet you he _did_ learn him, too. He'd give him a little punch behind, and the next minute you'd see that frog whirling in the air like a doughnut--see him turn one summerset, or may be a couple, if he got a good start, and come down flat-footed and all right, like a cat. He got him up so in the matter of catching flies, and kept him in practice so constant, that he'd nail a fly every time as far as he could see him. Smiley said all a frog wanted was education, and he could do most any thing--and I believe him. Why, I've seen him set Dan'l Webster down here on this floor--Dan'l Webster was the name of the frog--and sing out, "Flies, Dan'l, flies!" and quicker'n you could wink, he'd spring straight up, and snake a fly off'n the counter there, and flop down on the floor again as solid as a gob of mud, and fall to scratching the side of his head with his hind foot as indifferent as if he hadn't no idea he'd been doin' any more'n any frog might do. You never see a frog so modest and straight-for'ard as he was, for all he was so gifted. And when it come to fair and square jumping on a dead level, he could get over more ground at one straddle than any animal of his breed you ever see. Jumping on a dead level was his strong suit, you understand; and when it come to that, Smiley would ante up money on him as long as he had a red. Smiley was monstrous proud of his frog, and well he might be, for fellers that had travelled and been everywheres, all said he laid over any frog that ever _they_ see.

Well, Smiley kept the beast in a little lattice box, and he used to fetch him down town sometimes and lay for a bet. One day a feller--a stranger in the camp, he was--come across him with his box, and says,

"What might it be that you've got in the box?"

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 anchored 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 buttonholed 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 space 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 principal'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, associating 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 disbursement of half a dime a package. I myself took several violent colds from having the glass 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 asserted Joshua to have driven out the Hivites and the Amorites, and the Canaanites and the Jebusites, and the Hittites and the Perizzites, and the Moabites and the Musquito-bites, for which he was regularly sent to bed on Saturday 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 God, 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 gods; but not even Little Briggs died young from the latter or any other cause, which speaks volumes for his constitution....

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.