My father was a deodorizer of dead dogs, my mother kept the only shop
for the sale of cats'-meat in my native city. They did not live happily;
the difference in social rank was a chasm which could not be bridged by
the vows of marriage. It was indeed an ill-assorted and most unlucky
alliance; and as might have been foreseen it ended in disaster. One
morning after the customary squabbles at breakfast, my father rose from
the table, quivering and pale with wrath, and proceeding to the
parsonage thrashed the clergyman who had performed the marriage
ceremony. The act was generally condemned and public feeling ran so high
against the offender that people would permit dead dogs to lie on their
property until the fragrance was deafening rather than employ him; and
the municipal authorities suffered one bloated old mastiff to utter
itself from a public square in so clamorous an exhalation that passing
strangers supposed themselves to be in the vicinity of a saw-mill. My
father was indeed unpopular. During these dark days the family's sole
dependence was on my mother's emporium for cats'-meat.
The business was profitable. In that city, which was the oldest in the
world, the cat was an object of veneration. Its worship was the religion
of the country. The multiplication and addition of cats were a perpetual
instruction in arithmetic. Naturally, any inattention to the wants of a
cat was punished with great severity in this world and the next; so my
good mother numbered her patrons by the hundred. Still, with an
unproductive husband and seventeen children she had some difficulty in
making both ends cats'-meat; and at last the necessity of increasing the
discrepancy between the cost price and the selling price of her carnal
wares drove her to an expedient which proved eminently disastrous: she
conceived the unlucky notion of retaliating by refusing to sell
cats'-meat until the boycott was taken off her husband.
On the day when she put this resolution into practice the shop was
thronged with excited customers, and others extended in turbulent and
restless masses up four streets, out of sight. Inside there was nothing
but cursing, crowding, shouting and menace. Intimidation was freely
resorted to--several of my younger brothers and sisters being threatened
with cutting up for the cats--but my mother was as firm as a rock, and
the day was a black one for Sardasa, the ancient and sacred city that
was the scene of these events. The lock-out was vigorously maintained,
and seven hundred and fifty thousand cats went to bed hungry!
The next morning the city was found to have been placarded during the
night with a proclamation of the Federated Union of Old Maids. This
ancient and powerful order averred through its Supreme Executive Head
that the boycotting of my father and the retaliatory lock-out of my
mother were seriously imperiling the interests of religion. The
proclamation went on to state that if arbitration were not adopted by
noon that day all the old maids of the federation would strike--and
strike they did.
The next act of this unhappy drama was an insurrection of cats. These
sacred animals, seeing themselves doomed to starvation, held a
mass-meeting and marched in procession through the streets, swearing and
spitting like fiends. This revolt of the gods produced such
consternation that many pious persons died of fright and all business
was suspended to bury them and pass terrifying resolutions.
Matters were now about as bad as it seemed possible for them to be.
Meetings among representatives of the hostile interests were held, but
no understanding was arrived at that would hold. Every agreement was
broken as soon as made, and each element of the discord was frantically
appealing to the people. A new horror was in store.
It will be remembered that my father was a deodorizer of dead dogs, but
was unable to practice his useful and humble profession because no one
would employ him. The dead dogs in consequence reeked rascally. Then
they struck! From every vacant lot and public dumping ground, from every
hedge and ditch and gutter and cistern, every crystal rill and the
clabbered waters of all the canals and estuaries--from all the places,
in short, which from time immemorial have been preëmpted by dead dogs
and consecrated to the uses of them and their heirs and successors
forever--they trooped innumerous, a ghastly crew! Their procession was a
mile in length. Midway of the town it met the procession of cats in full
song. The cats instantly exalted their backs and magnified their tails;
the dead dogs uncovered their teeth as in life, and erected such of
their bristles as still adhered to the skin.
The carnage that ensued was too awful for relation! The light of the sun
was obscured by flying fur, and the battle was waged in the darkness,
blindly and regardless. The swearing of the cats was audible miles away,
while the fragrance of the dead dogs desolated seven provinces.
How the battle might have resulted it is impossible to say, but when it
was at its fiercest the Federated Union of Old Maids came running down a
side street and sprang into the thickest of the fray. A moment later my
mother herself bore down upon the warring hosts, brandishing a cleaver,
and laid about her with great freedom and impartiality. My father joined
the fight, the municipal authorities engaged, and the general public,
converging on the battle-field from all points of the compass, consumed
itself in the center as it pressed in from the circumference. Last of
all, the dead held a meeting in the cemetery and resolving on a general
strike, began to destroy vaults, tombs, monuments, headstones, willows,
angels and young sheep in marble--everything they could lay their hands
on. By nightfall the living and the dead were alike exterminated, and
where the ancient and sacred city of Sardasa had stood nothing remained
but an excavation filled with dead bodies and building materials, shreds
of cat and blue patches of decayed dog. The place is now a vast pool of
stagnant water in the center of a desert.
The stirring events of those few days constituted my industrial
education, and so well have I improved my advantages that I am now Chief
of Misrule to the Dukes of Disorder, an organization numbering thirteen
million American workingmen.