Back Home: Being the Narrative of Judge Priest and His PeopleCobb, Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury)
General
Back Home: Being the Narrative of Judge Priest and His People
Cobb, Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury)
Kentucky -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Short stories, American
sundry closed cages with beautiful historical paintings on their sides,
suggesting by their very secrecy the presence of marvelous prisoned
creatures; and yet another golden chariot with the Queen of Sheba and
her whole glittering court traveling in imperial pomp atop of it.
That wasn't all--by no means was it all. There succeeded an open den
containing the man-eating Bengal tigers, striped and lank, with the
intrepid spangled shoulders of the trainer showing as he sat with his
back against the bars, holding his terrible charges in dominion by the
power of the human eye, so that for the time being they dared not eat
anybody. And then followed a whole drove of trick ponies drawing the
happy family in its wheeled home, and behind that in turn more cages,
closed, and a fife-and-drum corps of old regimentals in blue and buff,
playing Yankee Doodle with martial spirit, and next the Asiatic camel to
be known by his one hump, and the genuine Bactrian dromedary to be known
by his two, slouching by as though they didn't care whether school kept
or not, flirting their under lips up and down and showing profiles like
Old Testament characters. And then came more knights and ladies and more
horses and more heroes of history and romance, and a veritable herd
of vast and pondrous pachyderm performers, or elephants--for while one
pachyderm, however vast and pachydermic, might not make a herd, perhaps,
or even two yet surely three would, and here were no less than three,
holding one another's tails with their trunks, which was a droll conceit
thought up by these intelligent creatures on the spur of the moment, no
doubt, with the sole idea of giving added pleasure to a little sick boy.
That wasn't all either. There was more of this unapproachable pageant
yet winding by--including such wonders as the glass-walled apartment of
the lady snake-charmer, with the lady snake-charmer sitting right there
in imminent peril of her life amidst her loathsome, coiling and venomous
pets; and also there was Judge Priest's Jeff, hardly to be recognized in
a red-and-yellow livery as he led the far-famed sacred ox of India; and
then the funny old clown in his little blue wagon, shouting out “Whoa,
January” to his mule and dodging back as January kicked up right in his
face, and last of all--a crowning glory to all these other glories--the
steam calliope, whistling and blasting and shrilling and steaming, fit
to split itself wide open!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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