The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 4Poe, Edgar Allan
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The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 4
Poe, Edgar Allan
American fiction -- 19th century; Fantasy fiction; Horror tales, American; Short stories
In fulfilment of the awful threat thus darkly intimated rather
than decidedly enunciated, the great Bullet-head, turning a deaf
ear to all entreaties for ‘copy,’ and simply requesting his
foreman to ‘go to the d——l,’ when he (the foreman) assured him
(the ‘Tea-Pot’!) that it was high time to ‘go to press’: turning
a deaf ear to everything, I say, the great Bullet-head sat up
until day-break, consuming the midnight oil, and absorbed in the
composition of the really unparalleled paragraph, which follows:—
‘So ho, John! how now? Told you so, you know. Don’t crow, another
time, before you’re out of the woods! Does your mother know
you’re out? Oh, no, no!—so go home at once, now, John, to your
odious old woods of Concord! Go home to your woods, old owl—go!
You won’t! Oh, poh, poh, John don’t do so! You’ve _got_ to go,
you know! So go at once, and don’t go slow, for nobody owns you
here, you know! Oh! John, John, if you don’t go you’re no
homo—no! You’re only a fowl, an owl; a cow, a sow; a doll, a
poll; a poor, old, good-for-nothing-to-nobody, log, dog, hog, or
frog, come out of a Concord bog. Cool, now—cool! Do be cool, you
fool! None of your crowing, old cock! Don’t frown so—don’t! Don’t
hollo, nor howl nor growl, nor bow-wow-wow! Good Lord, John, how
you do look! Told you so, you know—but stop rolling your goose of
an old poll about so, and go and drown your sorrows in a bowl!’
Exhausted, very naturally, by so stupendous an effort, the great
Touch-and-go could attend to nothing farther that night. Firmly,
composedly, yet with an air of conscious power, he handed his MS.
to the devil in waiting, and then, walking leisurely home,
retired, with ineffable dignity to bed.
Meantime the devil, to whom the copy was entrusted, ran up stairs
to his ‘case,’ in an unutterable hurry, and forthwith made a
commencement at ‘setting’ the MS. ‘up.’
In the first place, of course,—as the opening word was ‘So,’—he
made a plunge into the capital S hole and came out in triumph
with a capital S. Elated by this success, he immediately threw
himself upon the little-o box with a blindfold impetuosity—but
who shall describe his horror when his fingers came up without
the anticipated letter in their clutch? who shall paint his
astonishment and rage at perceiving, as he rubbed his knuckles,
that he had been only thumping them to no purpose, against the
bottom of an empty box. Not a single little-o was in the little-o
hole; and, glancing fearfully at the capital-O partition, he
found _that_, to his extreme terror, in a precisely similar
predicament. Awe-stricken, his first impulse was to rush to the
foreman.
‘Sir!’ said he, gasping for breath, ‘I can’t never set up nothing
without no o’s.’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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