“There I do not entirely agree with you,” rejoined the young man,
composing his body upon a stump for a philosophical argument. “I don’t
neither,” added the old one, absently, screwing about on the edge of
the barrel and constructing a painful grimace. There was no argument,
but a silence instead. Suddenly the aged party sprang off that barrel
with exceeding great haste, as of one who has made up his mind to do a
thing and is impatient of delay. The seat of his trousers was steaming
grandly, the barrel upset, and there was a great wash of hot water,
leaving a deposit of spotted pig. In life that pig had belonged to Mr.
Scolliver the younger! Mr. Scolliver the younger was angry, but
remembering Jefferson’s maxim, he rattled off the number ten, finishing
up with “You—thief!” Then perceiving himself _very_ angry, he began all
over again and ran up to one hundred, as a monkey scampers up a ladder.
As the last syllable shot from his lips he planted a dreadful blow
between the old man’s eyes, with a shriek that sounded like—“You son of
a sea-cook!”
Mr. Scolliver the elder went down like a stricken beef, and his son
often afterward explained that if he had not counted a hundred, and so
given himself time to get thoroughly mad, he did not believe he could
ever have licked the old man.
Mr. Hunker’s Mourner
Strolling through Lone Mountain cemetery one day my attention was
arrested by the inconsolable grief of a granite angel bewailing the
loss of “Jacob Hunker, aged 67.” The attitude of utter dejection, the
look of matchless misery upon that angel’s face sank into my heart like
water into a sponge. I was about to offer some words of condolence when
another man, similarly affected, got in before me, and laying a rather
unsteady hand upon the celestial shoulder tipped back a very senile
hat, and pointing to the name on the stone remarked with the most exact
care and scrupulous accent: “Friend of yours, perhaps; been dead long?”
There was no reply; he continued: “Very worthy man, that Jake; knew him
up in Tuolumne. Good feller—Jake.” No response: the gentleman settled
his hat still farther back, and continued with a trifle less exactness
of speech: “I say, young wom’n, Jake was my pard in the mines. Goo’
fell’r I ’bserved!”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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