Herodotus (who practised what he preached) said, “When telling a lie will be profitable, let it be told!”--“He may lie,” said Plato, “who knows _how_ to do it in a suitable time.” So thought John Tomkins! who hoping to frighten his unwelcome customers into an omnibus, and drive home Uncle Timothy in capital style, so aggravated the possible kickings, plungings, takings fright, and runnings away of that terrible left-wheeler, that the accommodating middle-aged gentleman was easily persuaded by the ladies to lighten the weight and diminish the danger, by returning to town by some other conveyance. And it was highly entertaining to mark the glum looks of John when he doggedly put the horses to, and how he mischievously laid his whipcord into the sensitive flanks of the “shying left-wheeler,” that honoured every draft on his fetlocks, and confirmed the terrifying anticipations and multiplications of the veracious John Tomkins! “Song sweetens toil, however rude the sound,”--and John sweetened his by humming the following, in which he encored himself several times, as he drove Mrs. Flumgarten and family, to town. Dash along! splash along! hi, gee ho! Four-and-twenty periwigs all of a row! Save me from a tough yarn twice over told-- Save me from a Jerry Sneak, and save me from a scold. A horse is not a mare, and a cow is not a calf; A woman that talks all day long has too much tongue by half. To the music of the fiddle I like to figure in; But off I cut a caper from the music of the chin! When Madam's in her tantrums, and Madam'gins to cry; If you want to give her change, hold an ingun to your eye; But if she shakes her pretty fist, and longs to come to blows, You may slip through her fingers, if you only soap your nose! Dash along! splash along! hi, gee ho! No horse so fast can gallop as a woman's tongue can go. “Needs must,” I've heard my granny say, “when the devil drives.” I wish he drove, instead of _me_, this brace of scolding wives! CHAPTER X. |Give me a woman as old as Hecuba, or as ugly as Caifacaratadaddera, rather than Mrs. Flumgarten! Were the annoyance confined to _herself_, I should cry, 'Content,'--for she who sows nettles and thorns is entitled to reap a stinging and prickly harvest. Ill temper should ride quarantine, and have a _billet de santé_, before it is let loose upon society.”