Baled Hay: A Drier Book than Walt Whitman's "Leaves o' Grass"Nye, Bill
General
Baled Hay: A Drier Book than Walt Whitman's "Leaves o' Grass"
Nye, Bill
American wit and humor
|I DO not, as a rule, thirst for the blood of my fellow-man. I am
willing that the law should in all ordinary cases take its course, but
when we begin to discuss the man who breaks into a conversation and
ruins it with his own irrelevant ideas, regardless of the feelings
of humanity, I am not a law and order man. The spirit of the "Red
Vigilanter" is roused in my breast and I hunger for the blood of that
man.
Interrupters are of two classes: First, the common plug who thinks
aloud, and whose conversation wanders with his so-called mind. He breaks
into the saddest and sweetest of sentiment, and the choicest and
most tearful of pathos, with the remorseless ignorance that marks a
stump-tail cow in a dahlia bed. He is the bull in my china shop,
the wormwood in my wine, and the kerosene in my maple syrup. I am shy in
conversation, and my unfettered flights of poesy and sentiment are rare,
but this man is always near to mar all with a remark, or a marginal
note, or a story or a bit of politics, ready to bust my beautiful dream
and make me wish that his name might be carved on a marble slab in some
quiet cemetery, far away.
Dear reader, did you ever meet this man--or his wife? Did you ever
strike some beautiful thought and begin to reel it off to your friends
only to be shut off in the middle of a sentence by this choice and
banner idiot of conversation? If so, come and sit by me, and you may
pour your woes into my ear, and I in turn will pour a few gallons into
your listening ear.
I do not care to talk more than my share of the time, but I would be
glad to arrive at a conclusion just to see how it would seem. I would be
so pleased and so joyous to follow up an anecdote till I had reached the
"nub," as it were, to chase argument home to conviction, and to clinch
assertion with authority and evidence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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