Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns)Riley, James Whitcomb
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Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns)
Riley, James Whitcomb
American wit and humor
For gentlemen, a dark, four-button cutaway coat, with neat,
loose-fitting, white panties, will generally scare a fox into
convulsions, so that he may be easily killed with a club. A
short-waisted plug hat may be worn also, in order to distinguish the
hunter from the whipper-in, who wears a baseball cap. The only
fox-hunting I have ever done was on board an impetuous, tough-bitted,
fore-and-aft horse that had emotional insanity. I was dressed in a
swallow-tail coat, waistcoat of Scotch plaid Turkish toweling, and a
pair of close-fitting breeches of etiquette tucked into my boot-tops.
As I was away from home at the time and could not reach my own steed I
was obliged to mount a spirited steed with high, intellectual hips, one
white eye and a big red nostril that you could set a Shanghai hen in.
This horse, as soon as the pack broke into full cry, climbed over a
fence that had wrought-iron briers on it, lit in a corn field, stabbed
his hind leg through a sere and yellow pumpkin, which he wore the rest
of the day, with seven yards of pumpkin vine streaming out behind, and
away we dashed 'cross country. I remained mounted not because I enjoyed
it, for I did not, but because I dreaded to dismount. I hated to get off
in pieces. If I can't get off a horse's back as a whole, I would rather
adhere to the horse. I will adhere that I did so.
We did not see the fox, but we saw almost everything else. I remember,
among other things, of riding through a hothouse, and how I enjoyed it.
A morning scamper through a conservatory when the syringas and Jonquils
and Jack roses lie cuddled up together in their little beds, is a thing
to remember and look back to and pay for. To stand knee-deep in glass
and gladiolas, to smell the mashed and mussed up mignonette and the last
fragrant sigh of the scrunched heliotrope beneath the hoof of your
horse, while far away the deep-mouthed baying of the hoarse hounds,
hotly hugging the reeking trail of the aniseseed bag, calls on the
gorgeously caparisoned hills to give back their merry music or fork it
over to other answering hills, is joy to the huntsman's heart.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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