At the door I met the sociable Wheeler returning, and he buttonholed me
and recommenced:
"Well, this-yer Smiley had a yaller one-eyed cow that didn't have no
tail, only just a short stump like a bannanner, and--"
"Oh, hang Smiley and his afflicted cow!" I muttered, good-naturedly, and
bidding the old gentleman good-day, I departed.
FITZ HUGH LUDLOW. (BORN, 1836--DIED, 1870.)
* * * * *
BEN THIRLWALL'S SCHOOLDAYS.
My name is Ben Thirlwall, and I am the son of rich but honest parents. I
never had a wish ungratified until I was twelve years of age. My wish
then was to stay on a two-year-old colt which had never been broken. He
did not coincide with me, and a vast revelation of the resistances to
individual will of which the universe is capable, also of a terrestrial
horizon, bottom upward, burst upon me during the brief space which I
spent in flying over his head. Picked up senseless, I was carried to the
bosom of my family on a wheelbarrow, and awoke to the consciousness that
my parents had decided on sending me to a boarding-school,--a remedy to
this day sovereign in the opinion of all well-regulated parents for all
tangential aberrations from the back of a colt or the laws of society.
The principal's name was Barker; and my only clue to his character
consisted in overhearing that he was an excellent disciplinarian. I was
afraid to ask what that meant, but on reflection concluded it to be a
geographical distinction, and, associating him with Mesopotamia or
Beloochistan, expected to find him a person of mild manners, who shaved
his head, wore a tall hat of dyed sheep's wool, and did a large business
in spices with people who visited him on camels in a front-yard
surrounded by sheds, and having a fountain that played in the middle.
Having read several books of travels, I was corroborated in my view when
I learned that Mr. Barker lived at the east, and still further, when on
going around point Judith on the steamboat with my father, I became very
sick at the stomach, as all the travellers had done in their first
chapter.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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