Curious Republic Of Gondour, And Other Curious Whimsical Sketches Read online

  friends what had become of him. Mrs. Murphy jumped to the conclusion

  that it would only cost two or three dollars to embalm her dead husband,

  and so she telegraphed "Yes." It was at the "wake" that the bill for

  embalming arrived and was presented to the widow. She uttered a wild,

  sad wail, that pierced every heart, and said: "Sivinty-foive dollars for

  stoofhn' Dan, blister their sowls! Did thim divils suppose I was goin'

  to stairt a Museim, that I'd be dalin' in such expinsive curiassities!"

  The banker's clerk said there was not a dry eye in the house.

  THE "TOURNAMENT" IN A. D. 1870

  Lately there appeared an item to this effect, and the same went the

  customary universal round of the press:

  A telegraph station has just been established upon the traditional

  site of the Garden of Eden.

  As a companion to that, nothing fits so aptly and so perfectly as this:

  Brooklyn has revived the knightly tournament of the Middle Ages.

  It is hard to tell which is the most startling, the idea of that highest

  achievement of human genius and intelligence, the telegraph, prating away

  about the practical concerns of the world's daily life in the heart and

  home of ancient indolence, ignorance, and savagery, or the idea of that

  happiest expression of the brag, vanity, and mock-heroics of our

  ancestors, the "tournament," coming out of its grave to flaunt its tinsel

  trumpery and perform its "chivalrous" absurdities in the high noon of the

  nineteenth century, and under the patronage of a great, broad-awake city

  and an advanced civilisation.

  A "tournament" in Lynchburg is a thing easily within the comprehension of

  the average mind; but no commonly gifted person can conceive of such a

  spectacle in Brooklyn without straining his powers. Brooklyn is part and

  parcel of the city of New York, and there is hardly romance enough in the

  entire metropolis to re-supply a Virginia "knight" with "chivalry," in

  case he happened to run out of it. Let the reader calmly and

  dispassionately picture to himself "lists" in Brooklyn; heralds,

  pursuivants, pages, garter king-at-arms--in Brooklyn; the marshalling of

  the fantastic hosts of "chivalry" in slashed doublets, velvet trunks,

  ruffles, and plumes--in Brooklyn; mounted on omnibus and livery-stable

  patriarchs, promoted, and referred to in cold blood as "steeds,"

  "destriers," and "chargers," and divested of their friendly, humble names

  these meek old "Jims" and "Bobs" and "Charleys," and renamed "Mohammed,"

  "Bucephalus," and "Saladin"--in Brooklyn; mounted thus, and armed with

  swords and shields and wooden lances, and cased in paste board hauberks,

  morions, greaves, and gauntlets, and addressed as "Sir" Smith, and "Sir"

  Jones, and bearing such titled grandeurs as "The Disinherited Knight,"

  the "Knight of Shenandoah," the "Knight of the Blue Ridge," the "Knight

  of Maryland," and the "Knight of the Secret Sorrow"--in Brooklyn; and at

  the toot of the horn charging fiercely upon a helpless ring hung on a

  post, and prodding at it in trepidly with their wooden sticks, and by and

  by skewering it and cavorting back to the judges' stand covered with

  glory this in Brooklyn; and each noble success like this duly and

  promptly announced by an applauding toot from the herald's horn, and "the

  band playing three bars of an old circus tune"--all in Brooklyn, in broad

  daylight. And let the reader remember, and also add to his picture, as

  follows, to wit: when the show was all over, the party who had shed the

  most blood and overturned and hacked to pieces the most knights, or at

  least had prodded the most muffin-rings, was accorded the ancient

  privilege of naming and crowning the Queen of Love and Beauty--which

  naming had in reality been done for, him by the "cut-and-dried" process,

  and long in advance, by a committee of ladies, but the crowning he did in

  person, though suffering from loss of blood, and then was taken to the

  county hospital on a shutter to have his wounds dressed--these curious

  things all occurring in Brooklyn, and no longer ago than one or two

  yesterdays. It seems impossible, and yet it is true.

  This was doubtless the first appearance of the "tournament" up here among

  the rolling-mills and factories, and will probably be the last. It will

  be well to let it retire permanently to the rural districts of Virginia,

  where, it is said, the fine mailed and plumed, noble-natured, maiden-

  rescuing, wrong-redressing, adventure-seeking knight of romance is

  accepted and believed in by the peasantry with pleasing simplicity, while

  they reject with scorn the plain, unpolished verdict whereby history

  exposes him as a braggart, a ruffian, a fantastic vagabond; and an

  ignoramus.

  All romance aside, what shape would our admiration of the heroes of Ashby

  de la Zouch be likely to take, in this practical age, if those worthies

  were to rise up and come here and perform again the chivalrous deeds of

  that famous passage of arms? Nothing but a New York jury and the

  insanity plea could save them from hanging, from the amiable Bois-

  Guilbert and the pleasant Front-de-Boeuf clear down to the nameless

  ruffians that entered the riot with unpictured shields and did their

  first murder and acquired their first claim to respect that day. The

  doings of the so-called "chivalry" of the Middle Ages were absurd enough,

  even when they were brutally and bloodily in earnest, and when their

  surroundings of castles and donjons, savage landscapes and half-savage

  peoples, were in keeping; but those doings gravely reproduced with tinsel

  decorations and mock pageantry, by bucolic gentlemen with broomstick

  lances, and with muffin-rings to represent the foe, and all in the midst

  of the refinement and dignity of a carefully-developed modern

  civilisation, is absurdity gone crazy.

  Now, for next exhibition, let us have a fine representation of one of

  those chivalrous wholesale butcheries and burnings of Jewish women and

  children, which the crusading heroes of romance used to indulge in in

  their European homes, just before starting to the Holy Land, to seize and

  take to their protection the Sepulchre and defend it from "pollution."

  CURIOUS RELIC FOR SALE

  "For sale, for the benefit of the Fund for the Relief of the Widows

  and Orphans of Deceased Firemen, a Curious Ancient Bedouin Pipe,

  procured at the city of Endor in Palestine, and believed to have

  once belonged to the justly-renowned Witch of Endor. Parties

  desiring to examine this singular relic with a view to purchasing,

  can do so by calling upon Daniel S.. 119 and 121 William street, New

  York"

  As per advertisement in the "Herald." A curious old relic indeed, as I

  had a good personal right to know. In a single instant of time, a long

  drawn panorama of sights and scenes in the Holy Land flashed through my

  memory--town and grove, desert, camp, and caravan clattering after each

  other and disappearing, leaping me with a little of the surprised and

  dizzy feeling which I have experienced at sundry times when a long

  express train has overtaken me at some quiet curve and gone whizzi
ng, car

  by car, around the corner and out of sight. In that prolific instant I

  saw again all the country from the Sea of Galilee and Nazareth clear to

  Jerusalem, and thence over the hills of Judea and through the Vale of

  Sharon to Joppa, down by the ocean. Leaving out unimportant stretches of

  country and details of incident, I saw and experienced the following-

  described matters and things. Immediately three years fell away from my

  age, and a vanished time was restored to me September, 1867. It was a

  flaming Oriental day--this one that had come up out of the past and

  brought along its actors, its stage-properties, and scenic effects--and

  our party had just ridden through the squalid hive of human vermin which

  still holds the ancient Biblical name of Endor; I was bringing up the

  rear on my grave four-dollar steed, who was about beginning to compose

  himself for his usual noon nap. My! only fifteen minutes before how the

  black, mangy, nine-tenths naked, ten-tenths filthy, ignorant, bigoted,

  besotted, hungry, lazy, malignant, screeching, crowding, struggling,

  wailing, begging, cursing, hateful spawn of the original Witch had

  swarmed out of the caves in the rocks and the holes and crevices in the

  earth, and blocked our horses' way, besieged us, threw themselves in the

  animals' path, clung to their manes, saddle-furniture, and tails, asking,

  beseeching, demanding "bucksheesh! bucksheesh! BUCKSHEESH!" We had

  rained small copper Turkish coins among them, as fugitives fling coats

  and hats to pursuing wolves, and then had spurred our way through as they

  stopped to scramble for the largess. I was fervently thankful when we

  had gotten well up on the desolate hillside and outstripped them and left

  them jawing and gesticulating in the rear. What a tempest had seemingly

  gone roaring and crashing by me and left its dull thunders pulsing in my

  ears!

  I was in the rear, as I was saying. Our pack-mules and Arabs were far

  ahead, and Dan, Jack, Moult, Davis, Denny, Church, and Birch (these names

  will do as well as any to represent the boys) were following close after

  them. As my horse nodded to rest, I heard a sort of panting behind me,

  and turned and saw that a tawny youth from the village had overtaken me

  --a true remnant and representative of his ancestress the Witch--a

  galvanised scurvy, wrought into the human shape and garnished with

  ophthalmia and leprous scars--an airy creature with an invisible shirt-

  front that reached below the pit of his stomach, and no other clothing to

  speak of except a tobacco-pouch, an ammunition-pocket, and a venerable

  gun, which was long enough to club any game with that came within

  shooting distance, but far from efficient as an article of dress.

  I thought to myself, "Now this disease with a human heart in it is going

  to shoot me." I smiled in derision at the idea of a Bedouin daring to

  touch off his great-grandfather's rusty gun and getting his head blown

  off for his pains. But then it occurred to me, in simple school-boy

  language, "Suppose he should take deliberate aim and 'haul off' and fetch

  me with the butt-end of it?" There was wisdom in that view of it, and I

  stopped to parley. I found he was only a friendly villain who wanted a

  trifle of bucksheesh, and after begging what he could get in that way,

  was perfectly willing to trade off everything he had for more. I believe

  he would have parted with his last shirt for bucksheesh if he had had

  one. He was smoking the "humbliest" pipe I ever saw--a dingy, funnel-

  shaped, red-clay thing, streaked and grimed with oil and tears of

  tobacco, and with all the different kinds of dirt there are, and thirty

  per cent. of them peculiar and indigenous to Endor and perdition. And

  rank? I never smelt anything like it. It withered a cactus that stood

  lifting its prickly hands aloft beside the trail. It even woke up my

  horse. I said I would take that. It cost me a franc, a Russian kopek,

  a brass button, and a slate pencil; and my spendthrift lavishness so won

  upon the son of the desert that he passed over his pouch of most

  unspeakably villainous tobacco to me as a free gift. What a pipe it was,

  to be sure! It had a rude brass-wire cover to it, and a little coarse

  iron chain suspended from the bowl, with an iron splinter attached to

  loosen up the tobacco and pick your teeth with. The stem looked like the

  half of a slender walking-stick with the bark on.

  I felt that this pipe had belonged to the original Witch of Endor as soon

  as I saw it; and as soon as I smelt it, I knew it. Moreover, I asked the

  Arab cub in good English if it was not so, and he answered in good Arabic

  that it was. I woke up my horse and went my way, smoking. And presently

  I said to myself reflectively, "If there is anything that could make a

  man deliberately assault a dying cripple, I reckon may be an unexpected

  whiff from this pipe would do it." I smoked along till I found I was

  beginning to lie, and project murder, and steal my own things out of one

  pocket and hide them in another; and then I put up my treasure, took off

  my spurs and put them under my horse's tail, and shortly came tearing

  through our caravan like a hurricane.

  From that time forward, going to Jerusalem, the Dead Sea, and the Jordan,

  Bethany, Bethlehem, and everywhere, I loafed contentedly in the rear and

  enjoyed my infamous pipe and revelled in imaginary villany. But at the

  end of two weeks we turned our faces toward the sea and journeyed over

  the Judean hills, and through rocky defiles, and among the scenes that

  Samson knew in his youth, and by and by we touched level ground just at

  night, and trotted off cheerily over the plain of Sharon. It was

  perfectly jolly for three hours, and we whites crowded along together,

  close after the chief Arab muleteer (all the pack-animals and the other

  Arabs were miles in the rear), and we laughed, and chatted, and argued

  hotly about Samson, and whether suicide was a sin or not, since Paul

  speaks of Samson distinctly as being saved and in heaven. But by and by

  the night air, and the duskiness, and the weariness of eight hours in the

  saddle, began to tell, and conversation flagged and finally died out

  utterly. The squeak-squeaking of the saddles grew very distinct;

  occasionally somebody sighed, or started to hum a tune and gave it up;

  now and then a horse sneezed. These things only emphasised the solemnity

  and the stillness. Everybody got so listless that for once I and my

  dreamer found ourselves in the lead. It was a glad, new sensation, and

  I longed to keep the place forevermore. Every little stir in the dingy

  cavalcade behind made me nervous. Davis and I were riding side by side,

  right after the Arab. About 11 o'clock it had become really chilly, and

  the dozing boys roused up and began to inquire how far it was to Ramlah

  yet, and to demand that the Arab hurry along faster. I gave it up then,

  and my heart sank within me, because of course they would come up to

  scold the Arab. I knew I had to take the rear again. In my sorrow I

  unconsciously took to my pipe, my only comfort. As I touched the match

  to it the w
hole company came lumbering up and crowding my horse's rump

  and flanks. A whiff of smoke drifted back over my shoulder, and--

  "The suffering Moses!"

  "Whew!"

  "By George, who opened that graveyard?"

  "Boys, that Arab's been swallowing something dead!"

  Right away there was a gap behind us. Whiff after whiff sailed airily

  back, and each one widened the breach. Within fifteen seconds the

  barking, and gasping, and sneezing, and coughing of the boys, and their

  angry abuse of the Arab guide, had dwindled to a murmur, and Davis and I

  were alone with the leader. Davis did not know what the matter was, and

  don't to this day. Occasionally he caught a faint film of the smoke and

  fell to scolding at the Arab and wondering how long he had been decaying

  in that way. Our boys kept on dropping back further and further, till at

  last they were only in hearing, not in sight. And every time they

  started gingerly forward to reconnoitre or shoot the Arab, as they

  proposed to do--I let them get within good fair range of my relic (she

  would carry seventy yards with wonderful precision), and then wafted a

  whiff among them that sent them gasping and strangling to the rear again.

  I kept my gun well charged and ready, and twice within the hour I decoyed

  the boys right up to my horse's tail, and then with one malarious blast

  emptied the saddles, almost. I never heard an Arab abused so in my life.

  He really owed his preservation to me, because for one entire hour I

  stood between him and certain death. The boys would have killed him if

  they could have got by me.

  By and by, when the company were far in the rear, I put away my pipe--

  I was getting fearfully dry and crisp about the gills and rather blown

  with good diligent work--and spurred my animated trance up alongside the

  Arab and stopped him and asked for water. He unslung his little gourd-

  shaped earthenware jug, and I put it under my moustache and took a long,

  glorious, satisfying draught. I was going to scour the mouth of the jug