Dealings with the Dead, Volume 2 (of 2)Sargent, Lucius M. (Lucius Manlius)
History
Dealings with the Dead, Volume 2 (of 2)
Sargent, Lucius M. (Lucius Manlius)
Death; Funeral rites and ceremonies; Funeral rites and ceremonies -- United States
There seems to have existed a strange, political hallucination, in regard
to Bull and Jonathan. We are clearly, all of us, of one and the same
family--a Bull-begotten people; and have a great deal of pleasure, in
believing, that old madam Bull was the mother of us all. A goodly number
of highly respectable Bulls came over the water, of old, and were well
contented with the green pastures of the New World. They differed, upon
some points, from the Bulls they had left behind. They did not believe,
that there was a power or right, to bellow louder than the rest, vested in
any particular Bull, which power came down from Bull to Bull, in unbroken
succession, from the Bull of Bashan. Such a belief, in their opinion,
would have been a terrible Bull. Well; all at once, the trans-atlantic
Bulls began to call the cis-atlantic Bulls--_Jonathans_. A very good name
it was--a great deal better than _Bulls_. There could be no objection to
the name, in the abstract.
But, unfortunately, it was bestowed, as a diminutive, and in derision; and
the old Bulls, ere long, began to beat their flanks with their tails, and
paw up the earth, and look unutterable things, about Jonathan's cowardice;
and they came over the water in droves, and began to roar awfully; and
tore up the earth, under our very noses: and, after doing all, in our
power to spare the world the miserable spectacle of a conflict, among
Bulls, that were brothers, of the whole blood, we went to work, _ex
necessitate_, with hoofs and horns; and tossed up such a terrible dust, at
Lexington, and Concord, and Bunker's Hill, and Long Island, and White
Plains, and upon the Lakes, and at Sheensborough, and Albany, and
Brandywine, and Saratoga, and Bennington, and Germantown, and Rhode
Island, and Briar's Creek, and Camden, and Broad River, and Guilford, and
Hobkirk's Hill, and the Eutaw Springs, and York Town, and at fifty places
beside, that the old Bulls were perfectly astonished; and so very severely
gored withal, that their roaring sunk, at last, into something like
Snug's, when he became fearful of frightening the ladies. The old
Bulls--those that survived--went _back again_, like Sawney, out of the
peach orchard; and the mammoth Bull, in London, publicly acknowledged,
that we were as independent a set of Bulls, as ever he saw, or heard of.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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