Frontier Humor in Verse, Prose and PictureCox, Palmer
General
Frontier Humor in Verse, Prose and Picture
Cox, Palmer
Canadian wit and humor
The virtues of that fowl live in my memory yet. It was good. If you
could meet an old lady that was a passenger in that car—not the one with
the bunion on her left foot and the crockery teeth, who mistook me for a
minister, but the mild old lady with glasses that sat opposite me—she
would tell you the same. _She_ knows. Bless her gentle heart! If she
doesn’t, I would like to know who does. She partook of the fowl. I saw
her looking wistfully upon it as I dismembered it, and, though I say it
myself, I am not greedy, by any means, so I offered her the juicy neck.
Did she take it? Ask, rather, if a cat that had fasted a week would take
a mouse if she got between him and his hole? As old Shylock said, “Are
you answered?” She was no novice at picking the neck of a fowl, either.
She manipulated it in a manner that proved to me clearly she had a
perfect knowledge of its construction. It was not long—perhaps ten
seconds—before she had it picked as bare as a corkscrew. She did it with
such ease, too; and that’s what got me. She kept it revolving as rapidly
as a squirrel does the cylinder in his cage. She had but one front tooth
left in her upper jaw. The intelligent mind will no doubt immediately
picture forth a _long_ tooth; and the intelligent mind, in so doing,
portrays the incisor correctly. It was, indeed, a long tooth, but it was
just the thing she needed for the business before her. It seemed to be
specially made for it, as it fitted into every depression or notch in
the neck as nicely as a key into a lock. It ran around between the
vertebræ like a turner’s chisel, throwing the small particles of
nutriment far back against the roof of her mouth. It did me good to see
her play around that fowl’s neck. I grew young again while beholding the
busy scene, and actually regretted that a chicken did not have two
necks, as well as two legs, that I might repeat the generous donation,
and see the pleasing scene enacted again. As it was, I won golden
opinions from the old lady.
[Illustration: NECK TO NECK.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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