Bumps have a great deal to answer for. Of course we refer to
phrenological bumps, from which, possibly, the powerful adjective
"bumptious" is derived, it being applicable to a person whose
conflicting bumps keep him continually on the rampage.
Of all such persons, the one with microscopes in his bumps for eyes is
the most bumptious. He is continually detecting pernicious particles in
everything that he eats and drinks. One such will seize a pepper-castor,
invert it over his mashed turnips, spank it as if it were a child, and
then, peering at the dark particles with which the succulent heap of
vegetable matter is dusted, proceed to deliver a lecture upon the
poisons that we swallow with our daily food. He sees iron-filings in the
pepper. Also particles of the tail-feathers of Spanish flies. He will
tell you that if you continue to use pepper like that for a long
duration--say seventy or eighty years--you will have iron enough in your
stomach, from the filings, to make a ten-pound dumb-bell, and blistering
stuff sufficient from the Spanish fly to draw all the interest of the
National Debt. If the pepper happens to belong to the Cayenne
persuasion, he magnifies it into a hod of bricks. It is his hod way of
accounting for it. Keep using it daily for half-a-century, says he, and
see if you don't wake up some fine morning and find yourself a brick
chimney stuck up on the roof of a house for bats to live in. It will be
a just judgment on you; and small will be to you the consolation should
some poetical friend pen an epigrammatical threnody to your memory,
telling in "In Memoriam" stanzas how you "went up like a thousand of
bricks."
"Beef?" says the microscopic man, probing the meat with a pencil of
light that beams from his right eye (the other being closed for
concentration purposes), "Beef, sir?--not a bit of the _bos taurus_
about it, sir. Horse, donkey, mule, zebra--what you will, but not a
single fibre of ox. Did you ever see the fibres of beef run in a
direction due north and south, like these? If you did I should like to
know it, sir. I inspected this meat raw, sir, to-day, on the butcher's
stall, and the minute _ova_ perceptible in it were those of the horse
gad-fly, not the ox gad-fly, sir. Yes, begad, sir, and I'm prepared to
maintain the fact upon oath, sir."
Porter and other malt liquors are favorite subjects for the analysis of
the microscopic man. As you are placidly enjoying your pint of
GUINNESS'S brown stout, he will look at you for minutes with a
compassionate smile. Then, suddenly plunging into his favorite horror
knee-deep, he will ask you if you know what becomes of all the ends of
smoked-out cigars. Of course you submit that little boys pick them up
and smoke them to everlasting annihilation. "Pshaw! sir," exclaims the
microscopic person; "there is a man in the City of Dublin, sir--I
believe he is a baronet now, but will not force that as a fact--and he
made an enormous fortune by going about the streets at early dawn and
picking up all the cigar-stumps he could find, and they were not few, as
you may suppose, in that smokingest of cities. He used to furnish these
by the ton to old GUINNESS, who used them for giving color and body to
his famous 'Stout.' Body?--I should think so rather!--but only think
where the body came from! Just recall to mind the filthiest gutter that
ever you saw in your life, with the numerous ends of cigars that you
perfectly remember having observed sweltering in it, and then take
another pull at your GUINNESS, sir, and I wish you joy of it, sir!"
Once we remember to have heard the subject of the possibility of lizards
snakes, frogs, and other cheerful reptiles having resided for indefinite
periods in the stomachs of human subjects, discussed in the presence of
the microscopic man. A lady of the party was skeptical on the subject,
dwelling especially upon the impossibility of any person swallowing a
reptile unawares. "Observe those water-cresses of which you have been
partaking so freely, madam," said the microscopic man. "Beneath each
leaf I discern _ova_ of things that it might horrify you to enumerate in
full. Suffice it to say, then, for the present, that on the leaves of
this small sprig culled by me at random from the cluster, are to be
detected the germs of the _trigonocephalus contortrix_, than which, when
fully developed, no more deadly reptile wriggles upon earth. See this
minute agglomeration of yellowish specks on the stalk of the cress.
These are the eggs of the _lacerta horrida_, a lizard that within the
large warts with which its epidermis is studded secretes a poison of the
most virulent character. Others, too, I discern, but they are too
disagreeable to dwell upon--not to speak of one having _them_ dwell
inside one, instead--ha! ha! Now, remember that all these germs are
hatched by gentle warmth. No degree of temperature that we know of is
more gentle than that of the human stom--"
At this point the lady fainted, and the microscopic man was thrown
promptly out of the window by her husband, who has since been presented
by a committee of grateful citizens with a gold-mounted cane, as a mark
of consideration for his services in ridding the world of a monster.
* * * * *
"GREEK MEETS GREEK."
Oh, lovers of your lager beer,
Drinkers of wine and ale,
Ye editors and ministers,
Come listen to my tale,
And learn the very slight basis
Characters are built on,
By reading of the fight between
FULTON and friend TILTON.
In New York City, Broadway street,
Friend FULTON took his way,
Squinting in ev'ry restaurant,
For it was then mid-day;
He saw a bottle on a stand,
With words all in gilt on,
While right before that awful stand
Guzzling wine sat TILTON.
On Sunday night, while walking down
Bow'ry to the ferry,
TILTON did spy a lager shop
Where the folks were merry,
And saw a sight that op'd his eyes,
For, in that beery vat,
Nine lagers foaming by his side,
Reverend FULTON sat.
With spirit sword bound at his side,
And his hand the hilt on,
Brave FULTON smote at hip and thigh
Of our little TILTON;
Then TILTON took a mighty quill,
Called FULTON a liar,
FULTON took that to his church,
Will he take it higher?
Now TILTON says that FULTON lies,
FULTON says 'tis TILTON;
I wish this epic was told by
HOMER or by MILTON.
_I_ cannot tell which yarn is true,
Nor what each is built on,
But surely there's been lying by
FULTON or else TILTON.
* * * * *