His Majesty Baby and Some Common PeopleMaclaren, Ian
General
His Majesty Baby and Some Common People
Maclaren, Ian
Fiction; Short stories
interest in the sea through recent storm and shipwrecks, he also, this
man of many trials and many journeys, has been saved with difficulty
from the waves and lost his little all. If he calls upon a priest, he is
careful to call him “Father,” and to pose as a faithful Catholic; and if
he be an Irishman, his brogue then becomes a fortune, but if he drops
in upon a Minister of the Kirk he recalls the good which he got when
sitting in the West Kirk of Paisley; and if he be so fortunate as to be
really Scots in blood, and therefore acquainted with theology, he will
not only deceive that minister, but even the elect themselves, I mean
the Caledonian Society. When the vagabond comes upon a home of simple
lay piety, he allows it to be understood that he has led a life of
fearful wickedness but is now a genuine penitent, asking only for the
means of gaining an honest livelihood. He is fertile in devices and
brilliant in execution, without any prejudices against the past
or present, but ever bringing forth from his treasury of unabashed
falsehood and ingenious impudence things new and old.
Our savage has also got, what I believe the Red Indians have not,
an agreeable sense of humour, which no doubt is limited by practical
details, but is in its way very captivating. What a stroke of delightful
irony it was for a pair of our savages to take a long street between
them, the man begging down the right-hand side, and the woman the left,
while the man told a mournful tale of his wife's death, and asked money
to get her a coffin that she might be respectably buried--he being poor
(but proud) and a broken-hearted widower--as well as to clothe their two
mourning little ones in black for the funerals, and for the woman to tell
exactly the same story as she went down the opposite side of the street,
except that it was her husband she was burying, and she poor (but proud)
and a broken-hearted widow. They took no notice of one another across
the street, and none when they completed their work at the further
end, but a few minutes later they were sitting in the same public-house
together, both wonderfully comforted and affording a remarkable
illustration of the dead burying their dead.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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