Time moved on and spring came.
Still the girl baffled the poet.
"I thought to pass away before," she would say with a mocking grin, "but
yet alive I am, Alfred, alive I am."
Tennyson was fast losing hope.
Worn out with early rising, they engaged a retired Pullman-car porter to
take up his quarters, and being a negro his presence added a touch of
colour to their life.
The poet also engaged a neighbouring divine at fifty cents an evening to
read to the child the best hundred books, with explanations. The May
Queen tolerated him, and used to like to play with his silver hair, but
protested that he was prosy.
At the end of his resources the poet resolved upon desperate measures.
He chose an evening when the cottager and his wife were out at a
dinner-party.
At nightfall Tennyson and his accomplices entered the girl's room.
She defended herself savagely with her brick, but was overpowered.
The negro seated himself upon her chest, while the clergyman hastily
read a few verses about the comfort of early rising at the last day.
As he concluded, the poet drove his pen into her eye.
"Last call!" cried the negro porter triumphantly.
III.--OLD MR. LONGFELLOW ON BOARD THE HESPERUS.
"It was the schooner Hesperus that sailed the wintry sea,
And the skipper had taken his little daughter to bear him
company."--LONGFELLOW.
There were but three people in the cabin party of the Hesperus: old Mr.
Longfellow, the skipper, and the skipper's daughter.
The skipper was much attached to the child, owing to the singular
whiteness of her skin and the exceptionally limpid blue of her eyes; she
had hitherto remained on shore to fill lucrative engagements as albino
lady in a circus.
This time, however, her father had taken her with him for company. The
girl was an endless source of amusement to the skipper and the crew. She
constantly got up games of puss-in-the-corner, forfeits, and Dumb Crambo
with her father and Mr. Longfellow, and made Scripture puzzles and
geographical acrostics for the men.
Old Mr. Longfellow was taking the voyage to restore his shattered
nerves. From the first the captain disliked Henry. He was utterly unused
to the sea and was nervous and fidgety in the extreme. He complained
that at sea his genius had not a sufficient degree of latitude. Which
was unparalleled presumption.
On the evening of the storm there had been a little jar between
Longfellow and the captain at dinner. The captain had emptied it several
times, and was consequently in a reckless, quarrelsome humour.
"I confess I feel somewhat apprehensive," said old Henry nervously, "of
the state of the weather. I have had some conversation about it with an
old gentleman on deck who professed to have sailed the Spanish main. He
says you ought to put into yonder port."
"I have," hiccoughed the skipper, eyeing the bottle, and added with a
brutal laugh that "he could weather the roughest gale that ever wind did
blow." A whole Gaelic society, he said, wouldn't fizz on him.
Draining a final glass of grog, he rose from his chair, said grace, and
staggered on deck.
All the time the wind blew colder and louder.
The billows frothed like yeast. It was a yeast wind.
The evening wore on.
Old Henry shuffled about the cabin in nervous misery.
The skipper's daughter sat quietly at the table selecting verses from a
Biblical clock to amuse the ship's bosun, who was suffering from
toothache.
At about ten Longfellow went to his bunk, requesting the girl to remain
up in his cabin.
For half an hour all was quiet, save the roaring of the winter wind.
Then the girl heard the old gentleman start up in bed.
"What's that bell, what's that bell?" he gasped.
A minute later he emerged from his cabin wearing a cork jacket and
trousers over his pyjamas.
"Sissy," he said, "go up and ask your pop who rang that bell."
The obedient child returned.
"Please, Mr. Longfellow," she said, "pa says there weren't no bell."
The old man sank into a chair and remained with his head buried in his
hands.
"Say," he exclaimed presently, "someone's firing guns and there's a
glimmering light somewhere. You'd better go upstairs again."
Again the child returned.
"The crew are guessing at an acrostic, and occasionally they get a
glimmering of it."
Meantime the fury of the storm increased.
The skipper had the hatches battered down.
Presently Longfellow put his head out of a porthole and called out,
"Look here, you may not care, but the cruel rocks are goring the sides
of this boat like the horns of an angry bull."
The brutal skipper heaved the log at him. A knot in it struck a plank
and it glanced off.
Too frightened to remain below, the poet raised one of the hatches by
picking out the cotton batting and made his way on deck. He crawled to
the wheel-house.
The skipper stood lashed to the helm all stiff and stark. He bowed
stiffly to the poet. The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow on
his fixed and glassy eyes. The man was hopelessly intoxicated.
All the crew had disappeared. When the missile thrown by the captain had
glanced off into the sea, they glanced after it and were lost.
At this moment the final crash came.
Something hit something. There was an awful click followed by a peculiar
grating sound, and in less time than it takes to write it
(unfortunately), the whole wreck was over.
As the vessel sank, Longfellow's senses left him. When he reopened his
eyes he was in his own bed at home, and the editor of his local paper
was bending over him.
"You have made a first-rate poem of it, Mr. Longfellow," he was saying,
unbending somewhat as he spoke, "and I am very happy to give you our
cheque for a dollar and a quarter for it."
"Your kindness checks my utterance," murmured Henry feebly, very feebly.
_A, B, and C_
THE HUMAN ELEMENT IN MATHEMATICS
The student of arithmetic who has mastered the first four rules of his
art, and successfully striven with money sums and fractions, finds
himself confronted by an unbroken expanse of questions known as
problems. These are short stories of adventure and industry with the end
omitted, and though betraying a strong family resemblance, are not
without a certain element of romance.
The characters in the plot of a problem are three people called A, B,
and C. The form of the question is generally of this sort:
"A, B, and C do a certain piece of work. A can do as much work in one
hour as B in two, or C in four. Find how long they work at it."
Or thus:
"A, B, and C are employed to dig a ditch. A can dig as much in one hour
as B can dig in two, and B can dig twice as fast as C. Find how long,
etc. etc."
Or after this wise:
"A lays a wager that he can walk faster than B or C. A can walk half as
fast again as B, and C is only an indifferent walker. Find how far, and
so forth."
The occupations of A, B, and C are many and varied. In the older
arithmetics they contented themselves with doing "a certain piece of
work." This statement of the case however, was found too sly and
mysterious, or possibly lacking in romantic charm. It became the fashion
to define the job more clearly and to set them at walking matches,
ditch-digging, regattas, and piling cord wood. At times, they became
commercial and entered into partnership, having with their old mystery a
"certain" capital. Above all they revel in motion. When they tire of
walking-matches--A rides on horseback, or borrows a bicycle and competes
with his weaker-minded associates on foot. Now they race on locomotives;
now they row; or again they become historical and engage stage-coaches;
or at times they are aquatic and swim. If their occupation is actual
work they prefer to pump water into cisterns, two of which leak through
holes in the bottom and one of which is water-tight. A, of course, has
the good one; he also takes the bicycle, and the best locomotive, and
the right of swimming with the current. Whatever they do they put money
on it, being all three sports. A always wins.
In the early chapters of the arithmetic, their identity is concealed
under the names John, William, and Henry, and they wrangle over the
division of marbles. In algebra they are often called X, Y, Z. But these
are only their Christian names, and they are really the same people.
Now to one who has followed the history of these men through countless
pages of problems, watched them in their leisure hours dallying with
cord wood, and seen their panting sides heave in the full frenzy of
filling a cistern with a leak in it, they become something more than
mere symbols. They appear as creatures of flesh and blood, living men
with their own passions, ambitions, and aspirations like the rest of us.
Let us view them in turn. A is a full-blooded blustering fellow, of
energetic temperament, hot-headed and strong-willed. It is he who
proposes everything, challenges B to work, makes the bets, and bends the
others to his will. He is a man of great physical strength and
phenomenal endurance. He has been known to walk forty-eight hours at a
stretch, and to pump ninety-six. His life is arduous and full of peril.
A mistake in the working of a sum may keep him digging a fortnight
without sleep. A repeating decimal in the answer might kill him.
B is a quiet, easy-going fellow, afraid of A and bullied by him, but
very gentle and brotherly to little C, the weakling. He is quite in A's
power, having lost all his money in bets.
Poor C is an undersized, frail man, with a plaintive face. Constant
walking, digging, and pumping has broken his health and ruined his
nervous system. His joyless life has driven him to drink and smoke more
than is good for him, and his hand often shakes as he digs ditches. He
has not the strength to work as the others can, in fact, as Hamlin Smith
has said, "A can do more work in one hour than C in four."
The first time that ever I saw these men was one evening after a
regatta. They had all been rowing in it, and it had transpired that A
could row as much in one hour as B in two, or C in four. B and C had
come in dead fagged and C was coughing badly. "Never mind, old fellow,"
I heard B say, "I'll fix you up on the sofa and get you some hot tea."
Just then A came blustering in and shouted, "I say, you fellows, Hamlin
Smith has shown me three cisterns in his garden and he says we can pump
them until to-morrow night. I bet I can beat you both. Come on. You can
pump in your rowing things, you know. Your cistern leaks a little, I
think, C." I heard B growl that it was a dirty shame and that C was used
up now, but they went, and presently I could tell from the sound of the
water that A was pumping four times as fast as C.
For years after that I used to see them constantly about town and always
busy. I never heard of any of them eating or sleeping. Then owing to a
long absence from home, I lost sight of them. On my return I was
surprised to no longer find A, B, and C at their accustomed tasks; on
inquiry I heard that work in this line was now done by N, M, and O, and
that some people were employing for algebraical jobs four foreigners
called Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta.
Now it chanced one day that I stumbled upon old D, in the little garden
in front of his cottage, hoeing in the sun. D is an aged labouring man
who used occasionally to be called in to help A, B, and C. "Did I know
'em, sir?" he answered, "why, I knowed 'em ever since they was little
fellows in brackets. Master A, he were a fine lad, sir, though I always
said, give me Master B for kind-heartedness-like. Many's the job as
we've been on together, sir, though I never did no racing nor aught of
that, but just the plain labour, as you might say. I'm getting a bit too
old and stiff for it nowadays, sir--just scratch about in the garden
here and grow a bit of a logarithm, or raise a common denominator or
two. But Mr. Euclid he use me still for them propositions, he do."
From the garrulous old man I learned the melancholy end of my former
acquaintances. Soon after I left town, he told me, C had been taken ill.
It seems that A and B had been rowing on the river for a wager, and C
had been running on the bank and then sat in a draught. Of course the
bank had refused the draught and C was taken ill. A and B came home and
found C lying helpless in bed. A shook him roughly and said, "Get up, C,
we're going to pile wood." C looked so worn and pitiful that B said,
"Look here, A, I won't stand this, he isn't fit to pile wood to-night."
C smiled feebly and said, "Perhaps I might pile a little if I sat up in
bed." Then B, thoroughly alarmed, said, "See here, A, I'm going to fetch
a doctor; he's dying." A flared up and answered, "You've no money to
fetch a doctor." "I'll reduce him to his lowest terms," B said firmly,
"that'll fetch him." C's life might even then have been saved but they
made a mistake about the medicine. It stood at the head of the bed on a
bracket, and the nurse accidentally removed it from the bracket without
changing the sign. After the fatal blunder C seems to have sunk rapidly.
On the evening of the next day, as the shadows deepened in the little
room, it was clear to all that the end was near. I think that even A was
affected at the last as he stood with bowed head, aimlessly offering to
bet with the doctor on C's laboured breathing. "A," whispered C, "I
think I'm going fast." "How fast do you think you'll go, old man?"
murmured A. "I don't know," said C, "but I'm going at any rate."--The
end came soon after that. C rallied for a moment and asked for a certain
piece of work that he had left downstairs. A put it in his arms and he
expired. As his soul sped heavenward A watched its flight with
melancholy admiration. B burst into a passionate flood of tears and
sobbed, "Put away his little cistern and the rowing clothes he used to
wear, I feel as if I could hardly ever dig again."--The funeral was
plain and unostentatious. It differed in nothing from the ordinary,
except that out of deference to sporting men and mathematicians, A
engaged two hearses. Both vehicles started at the same time, B driving
the one which bore the sable parallelopiped containing the last remains
of his ill-fated friend. A on the box of the empty hearse generously
consented to a handicap of a hundred yards, but arrived first at the
cemetery by driving four times as fast as B. (Find the distance to the
cemetery.) As the sarcophagus was lowered, the grave was surrounded by
the broken figures of the first book of Euclid.--It was noticed that
after the death of C, A became a changed man. He lost interest in racing
with B, and dug but languidly. He finally gave up his work and settled
down to live on the interest of his bets.--B never recovered from the
shock of C's death; his grief preyed upon his intellect and it became
deranged. He grew moody and spoke only in monosyllables. His disease
became rapidly aggravated, and he presently spoke only in words whose
spelling was regular and which presented no difficulty to the beginner.
Realizing his precarious condition he voluntarily submitted to be
incarcerated in an asylum, where he abjured mathematics and devoted
himself to writing the History of the Swiss Family Robinson in words of
one syllable.
_Acknowledgments_
Many of the sketches which form the present volume have already appeared
in print. Others of them are new. Of the re-printed pieces, "Melpomenus
Jones," "Policeman Hogan," "A Lesson in Fiction," and many others were
contributions by the author to the New York Truth. The "Boarding-House
Geometry" first appeared in Truth, and was subsequently republished in
the London Punch, and in a great many other journals. The sketches
called the "Life of John Smith," "Society Chit-Chat," and "Aristocratic
Education" appeared in Puck. "The New Pathology" was first printed in
the Toronto Saturday Night, and was subsequently republished by the
London Lancet, and by various German periodicals in the form of a
translation. The story called "Number Fifty-Six" is taken from the
Detroit Free Press. "My Financial Career" was originally contributed to
the New York Life, and has been frequently reprinted. The Articles "How
to Make a Million Dollars" and "How to Avoid Getting Married," etc. are
reproduced by permission of the Publishers' Press Syndicate. The wide
circulation which some of the above sketches have enjoyed has encouraged
the author to prepare the present collection.
The author desires to express his sense of obligation to the proprietors
of the above journals who have kindly permitted him to republish the
contributions which appeared in their columns.