Noah’s Personally Conducted Excursion to Earth.
All the Stygian colony was thrown into a state of unusual excitement
one hot December morning by the following posters replacing the
campaign lithographs of Nero and Alexander:
LAST CHANCE TO COOL OFF!
UNSURPASSED FUNSEEKING
EXCURSION
TO THE MIRTH-PROVOKING REGION OF
EARTH
ON SATURDAY, DECEMBER 18.
(Next day Sunday, giving ample time to get back—also
to recover and look sober)
BASEBALL AT THE BATTERY.
The committee guarantees the game, not the quality of the playing.
Umpire Shylock promises to make the score as close as his nature will
permit. This is the line-up:
Count Ercolo Antonio Matthioli—Mask Wearers—Louis Duc de Vermandois.
Ananias—Fancy Twirlers—Munchausen.
Napoleon—First Sack—Louis XIV.
Boswell—Middleman—Sancho Panza.
Herr Bismark—Where the Keg Is—Rip Van Winkle.
Tweed—Hole in the Wall—Quay.
Nero—All Out—Alexander.
Beau Brummel—Centre of Attraction—Ward McAllister.
Bobbie Burns—Where the Daisies Droop Their Heads—Longfellow.
N. B.—Only dead-head tickets accepted. Get pasteboards from the
committee. Reception. R. s. v. p.
NOAH, _Chairman_,
P. T. BARNUM,
CAPTAIN KANE.
All that week Noah’s personally-conducted excursion to earth was
the one topic of conversation. The Stygianites ceased to watch the
thermometer and even forgot to stone the clerk of the weather bureau.
It was the burning question of the hour in Hades and smouldered for
several days.
Two days after it had been posted, I joined the group reading the
circular for the ’steenth time.
“Is Noah capable of being at the helm?” asked Napoleon. “His record
indicates that all he knows could be printed on a postage stamp without
cancelling the stamp.”
“He may be behind the times,” volunteered Methuselah, “but at least you
must give Noah credit for knowing enough to come in out of the rain,
which is more than could be said of most of the people of his day and
generation.”
“To my knowledge,” quoth Alexander, “there are but two instances
recorded of our good friend _Populi_ going wrong; first, when he
refused to follow Noah into the Ark before I was born; second, when he
failed to elect yours truly as custodian of the keys to the hall of
fame.”
“What mean the mystic letters ‘R. s. v. p.’?” asked Columbus,
re-reading the circular.
“Being an Italian, you Ought to know Greek,” I rejoined, becoming first
Ade to the injured Dooleyism, who didn’t Seem to get My Dust. Some
Pagan Spaniards can’t see an American joke without Housetop Comment in
Capital Letters. But I had gone Too Far to Ring Off, so I spoke in a
Tone like an English check: “It’s a Foreign Phrase used by Americans in
inviting People They Don’t Want. Translated into United States R. s. v.
p. reads: Rush in; shake hands; Victual up; Pull Out. Moral: Don’t be
Inquisitive, for if I read History and the Zodiac aright, it’s a Cinch
that you’ll have to hide your Elongated Flappers by Retreating to the
Shadows of the Tall Cedars.”
“_Revenons a nos moutons, redacteur_,” protested Napoleon, who abhorred
slang and preferred his followers and his fables without any morals.
To be called an editor made me quite willing to come back to the
subject—even reporters are susceptible to flattery.
“Anything that will distract one’s attention from the thermometer is
welcome,” said young Lochinvar. “Can you wonder that a lover sighs like
a furnace in this heated season when one sizzles by degrees? Alas!
there are no summer girls in Hades, for they exist only in the shadow
of an ice cream parlor. But I object to the company of Jonah on the
excursion. He would hoodoo the whole trip and some of us wouldn’t get
back to the Styx alive!”
Just then Izaak Walton joined the group.
“I wonder,” he said, “what Jonah’s mother-in-law said when he returned
home and told that story of the whale as his excuse for remaining out
three nights. Other men tell variations of the same story, but they
make them less fishy.”
“By the bye,” I put in, “it seems to me the Morman has the biggest kick
coming against his wives’ mothers, yet I’ve never heard a word of
complaint from any of them. How do you account for that, prophet?”
“Speaking from experience, I would say that one mother-in-law is
quite enough to have in a family unless a man is fond of excitement,”
answered Joe Smith.
“Boswell, what have I said on that subject,” asked Dr. Johnson. “I hate
to repeat myself, but having said everything that’s worth saying, it’s
up to Boswell.”
“If every Johnson had his Boswell, Washington might come into his own,”
said that general. “But I suppose I ought to be satisfied, for am I not
the father of my country?”
“You seem to think you are the father of the whole world,” snapped
Adam, who was jealous of the American. “That distinction belonged to
me when your country was still shrouded in the mists of the unknown.
I have talked with all the historians and as far as I can learn, you
are the father of no one and certainly not of your country. You aren’t
even a Pilgrim Father and if all Americans followed in the footsteps of
their first president, vital statistics would be less satisfactory to
Roosevelt than they are. Now, when I was a boy—”
“Listen to the oldest inhabitant,” jeered Washington. “Adam recalls his
boyhood days with extraordinary vividness for a man who never had any.”
“You may have been first at banquets and first in the hearts of your
countrymen,” continued Adam, “but you weren’t first in the heart of
your wife. As you married a widow, some man must have been ahead of you
there.”
“Then there’s that old cherry tree fable which ought to have been
uprooted from the school-books long ago,” said Ananias, who also had an
axe to grind. “It’s unfortunate for the perpetuation of truthfulness
that the only offspring of the father of his country is a chestnutty
cherry tree, with a few chips lying on the ground.”
Baron Munchausen gave George Washington a resounding slap on the back.
“You ought to give up being a pattern of veracity and take to writing
fiction,” he said. “An historical novel by General Washington would
be the Great American Novel which publishers have announced for the
last hundred years and which many authors have thought themselves
bald-headed trying to produce.”
“I understand that after the ball game, Tennyson will write ‘The Charge
of the Eleven.’”
“Isn’t he wrong in his numeral? Baseball is a nine, which is somewhat
of a discrepancy.”
“Oh, that’s poetic license!”
“May I be Shakespearean a moment?” asked Lord Bacon.
“You cannot, even for a moment,” declared the Bard of Avon. “I allow no
infringements on my copyright.”
“Don’t get excited,” returned milord. “All shades look alike to me
and it would be a poor expert who couldn’t prove you were somebody
else by your signature. Besides, who is Shakespeare anyway? The
sweets of notoriety are not for you. You have never been interviewed,
your picture does not figure in any patent-medicine advertisement,
and no phonograph record repeats your blankety-blank verse without
variation. Why, Bill, in these days you couldn’t pass an examination
in Shakespeare without the assistance of half a dozen books of notes,
a glossary, and five professors to tell you what you meant. To be the
writer of a coon song is to be famous; to pen ‘Hamlet’ is simply to
provide food for bookworms.”
“Let’s arbitrate,” suggested Æsop.
“None of your fables for mine,” said Shakespeare, slangily. “You would
designate two dogs; I would select two cats; they would call in a fox
for the odd. The arbitrators would come to talk it over. I would smile
and rub the cats’ fur the right way. You would fill the dogs with
porterhouse steak rare, broiled till the air for miles around would be
rich with the odor, and served with butter gravy. I would cram the cats
with liver and cream. You would turn the fox loose in the chicken yard
and give him the run of the goose pasture. Oh, I know how arbitrations
are run, whether they be conducted by cats or by capital!”
“This is no occasion for petty jealousies,” remonstrated Izaak Walton.
“I would rather cull flowers just now from the banks of a trout stream
than train for a prize fight. Hip! hip! hip! for the Hippodrome! Have
you forgotten that you are going to exchange Hades for New York, where
you can pull the sky over you for cover, use the moon in place of an
incandescent light, the four points of the compass for bed posts and a
morning shower for an alarm clock? We are going to find rest near the
heart of Nature, where bookmakers are unknown and politicians have no
higher ambition than to sit on a rail fence and dream of whittling down
the salaries of the school teachers when they get a place on the board
of education.”
“Boss” Tweed smiled for the first time since his election as janitor of
the hall of fame.
“Noah may have a map of the road to the millennium,” he said, “but he
has gotten side-tracked if he thinks New York is one of the stations
along that route!”
THE MAN WITH THE MEGAPHONE.