The lobster is honery even in death. He is eccentric and trifling. Those
who know him best are the first to evade him and shun him. Visscher had
failed to straddle the wish bone with his fork properly, and the talented
bird of the deep rolling sea slipped out of the platter, waved itself
across the horizon twice, and buried itself in the bosom of the eminent
and talented young man. The eminent and talented young man took it in his
napkin, put it carefully on the table, and went away.
As he passed out, the head waiter said:
“Mr. Visscher, was there anything the matter with your lobster?”
Visscher is a full-blooded Kentuckian, and answered in the courteous
dialect of the blue-grass country.
“Anything the matter with my lobster, sah? No, sah. The lobster is very
vigorous, sah. If you had asked me how I was, sah, I should have answered
you very differently, sah. I am not well at all, sah. If I were as well,
and as ruddy, and as active as that lobster, sah, I would live forever,
sah. You heah me, sah?
“Why, of course, I am not familiar with the habits of the lobster, sah,
and do not know how to kearve the bosom of the bloomin' peri of the summer
sea, but that's no reason why the inflamed reptile should get up on his
hind feet and nestle up to me, sah, in that earnest and forthwith manner,
sah.
“I love dumb beasts, sah, and they love me, sah; but when they are dead,
sah, and I undertake to kearve them, sah, I desiah, sah, that they should
remain as the undertakah left them, sah. You doubtless heah me, sah!”
Plato.
Plato was a Greek philosopher who flourished about 426 B.C., and kept on
flourishing for eighty-one years after that, when he suddenly ceased do so.
He early took to poetry, but when he found that his poems were rejected by
the Greek papers, he ceased writing poetry and went into the philosophy
business. At that time Greece had no regular philosopher, and so Plato
soon got all he could do.
Plato was a pupil of Socrates, who was himself no slouch of a
philosopher. Many and many a day did Socrates take his little class of
kindergarten philosophers up the shady banks of the Ilissus, and sit all
day discoursing to his pupils on deep and difficult doctrines, while his
unsandaled feet were bathed in the genial tide. Many happy hours were
thus spent. Socrates would take his dinner or tell some wonderful tale
to his class, whereby he would win their dinner himself. Then in the
deep Athenian shade, with his bare, Gothic feet in the clear, calm
waters of the Ilissus, he would eat the Grecian doughnut of his pupils,
and while he spoke in poetic terms of his belief, he would dig his heel
in the mud and heave a heart-broken sigh.
Such was Socrates, the great teacher. He got a small salary, and went
barefoot till after Thanksgiving. He was a great tutor, and boarded
around, teaching in the open air while the mosquitos bit his bare feet.
No tutor ever tuted with a more unselfish purpose or a smaller salary.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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