Country life; London (England) -- Description and travel; Natural history -- Outdoor books
out of his waistcoat pocket. This gentleman positively walked into me,
pushed me-literally pushed me aside and took my place, a place valuable
to me at that moment for one special aspect, and having shoved me
aside, gazed about him through his eyeglass, I suppose to discover what
it was interested me. He was a genuine, thoroughbred jogger. The vast
galleries of the Louvre had not room enough for him. He was one of the
most successful joggers in the world, I feel sure; any family might be
proud of him. While I am thus digressing, the bathers have gone over
thrice.
The individual who had sat himself down by me produced a little box and
offered me a lozenge. I did not accept it; he took one himself in token
that they were harmless. Then he took a second, and a third, and began
to tell me of their virtues; they cured this and they alleviated that,
they were the greatest discovery of the age; this universal lozenge was
health in the waistcoat pocket, a medicine-chest between finger and
thumb; the secret had been extracted at last, and nature had given up
the ghost as it were of her hidden physic. His eloquence conjured up in
my mind a vision of the rocks beside the Hudson river papered over with
acres of advertising posters. But no; by his further conversation I
found that I had mentally slandered him; he was not a proprietor of
patent medicine; he was a man of education and private means; he
belonged to a much higher profession, in fact he was a "jogger"
travelling about from place to place--"globetrotting" from capital city
to watering-place--all over the world in the exercise of his function.
I had wondered if his accent was American (petroleum-American), or
German, or Italian, or Russian, or what. Now I wondered no longer, for
the jogger is cosmopolitan. When he had exhausted his lozenge he told
me how many times the screw of the steamer revolved while carrying him
across the Pacific from Yokohama to San Francisco. I nearly suggested
that it was about equal to the number of times his tongue had vibrated
in the last ten minutes. The bathers went over twice more. I was
anxious to take note of their bravery, and turned aside, leaning over
the iron back of the seat. He went on just the same; a hint was no more
to him than a feather bed to an ironclad.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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