Delphi complete works of.., p.272
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 272
And all the old stories are the same! Consider Jack the Giant-Killer. What a conglomeration of weeping and wailing, of people shut into low dungeons, of murder, of sudden death, of blood, and of horror! Jack, having inveigled an enormous giant into eating an enormous quantity of porridge, then rips him up the stomach with a huge sword! What a mess!
But it doesn’t disturb Jack or his young readers one iota. In fact, Jack is off again at once with his young readers trailing eagerly after him, in order to cut off at one blow the three huge heads of a three-headed giant and make a worse mess still.
From the fairy stories and the giant stories the children presently pass on, — quite unscathed as I see it, — to the higher range of the blood-and-thunder stories of the pirates and the battles. Here again the reality, for the grown-up mind that can see it, is terrible and gruesome; but never so for the boys and girls who see in it only the pleasant adventure and bright diversity.
Take, for instance, this familiar scene as it appears and reappears in the history of Jack Dare-devil, or Ned Fear-nothing, or any of those noble boys who go to sea, in books, at the age of fourteen and retire, as admirals, at twenty-two.
“The fire from both ships was now becoming warm. A round shot tearing across the deck swept off four of our fellows. ‘Ha! ha!’ said Jack, as he turned towards Ned on the quarterdeck, ‘this bids fair to become lively.’ ”
It certainly did. In fact, it would be lively already if one stopped to think of the literal and anatomical meaning of a round shot, — twenty-five pounds of red-hot iron, — tearing through the vitals of four men. But the boy reader never gets it this way. What is said is, that four of our fellows were “swept off,” — just that; merely “swept off” and that’s the way the child reader takes it. And when the pirates “leap on deck,” Jack himself “cuts down” four of them and Ned “cuts down” three. That’s all they do,— “they cut them down,” they just “shorten them” so to speak.
Very similar in scope and method was the good old “half-dime novel,” written of the days of the “Prairie,” and the mountain trail, the Feathered Indian and the Leathered Scout. In these, unsuspecting strangers got scalped in what is now the main street of Denver, — where they get skinned.
These stories used to open with a rush and kept in rapid oscillation all the time. In fact they began with the concussion of firearms.
“ ’Bang! Bang! Bang!’ Three shots rang out over the prairie and three feathered Indians bit the dust.”
It seemed always to be a favorite pastime of the Indians “biting dust.”
In grim reality, — to the grown-up mind, — these were stories of terror, — of midnight attack, of stealthy murder with a knife from without the folds of the tent, of sudden death in dark caverns, of pitiless enemies, and of cruel torture.
But not so to the youthful mind. He followed it all through quite gayly, sharing the high courage of his hero, — Dick Danger the Dauntless. “I must say,” whispered Dick to Ned (this was when the Indians had them tied to a tree and were piling grass and sticks round it so as to burn them alive), “I must say, old man, things begin to look critical. Unless we can think of some way out of this fix, we are lost.”
Notice, please, this word “lost”: in reality they would be worse than lost. They’d be cooked. But in this class of literature the word “lost” is used to cover up a multitude of things. And, of course, Dick does think of a way out. It occurs to him that by moving his hands he can slip off the thongs that bind him, set Ned free, leap from the tree to the back of a horse, of two horses, and then by jumping over the edge of a chasm into the forest a thousand feet below, they can find themselves in what is called “comparative safety.” After which the story goes calmly on, oblivious of the horrible scene that nearly brought it to an end.
But as the modern parent and the modern teacher have grown alarmed, the art of story-telling for children has got to be softened down. There must be no more horror and blood and violent death. Away with the giants and the ogres! Let us have instead the stories of the animal kingdom in which Wee-Wee the Mouse has tea on a broad leaf with Goo-Goo the Caterpillar, and in which Fuzzy the Skunk gives talks on animal life that would do for Zoölogy Class I at Harvard.
But do we, — do they, — can we escape after all from the cruel environment that makes up the life in which we live? Are the animals after all so much softer than the ogres, so much kinder than the pirates? When Slick the Cat crackles up the bones of Wee-Wee the Mouse, how does that stand! And when Old Mr. Hawk hovers in the air watching for Cheep-Cheep the chicken who tries in vain to hide under the grass, and calls for its lost mother, — how is that for terror! To my thinking the timorous and imaginative child can get more real terror from the pictured anguish of a hunted animal than from the deaths of all the Welsh giants that ever lived on Plynlimmon.
The tears of childhood fall fast and easily, and evil be to him who makes them flow.
How easily a child will cry over the story of a little boy lost, how easily at the tale of poverty and want, how inconsolably at death. Touch but ever so lightly these real springs of anguish and the ready tears will come. But at Red Riding Hood’s grandmother! Never! She didn’t die! She was merely eaten. And the sailors, and the pirates, and the Apache Indians! They don’t die, not in any real sense to the child. They are merely “swept off,” and “mowed down,” — in fact, scattered like the pieces on an upset chessboard.
The moral of all which is, don’t worry about the apparent terror and bloodshed in the children’s books, the real children’s books. There is none there. It only represents the way in which little children, from generation to generation, learn in ways as painless as can be followed, the stern environment of life and death.
The Everlasting Angler
THE FISHING SEASON is now well under way. Will soon be with us. For lovers of fishing this remark is true all the year round. It has seemed to me that it might be of use to set down a few of the more familiar fish stories that are needed by any one wanting to qualify as an angler. There is no copyright on these stories, since Methuselah first told them, and anybody who wishes may learn them by heart and make free use of them.
I will begin with the simplest and best known. Everybody who goes fishing has heard it, and told it a thousand times. It is called: —
I
THE STORY OF THE FISH THAT WAS LOST
The circumstances under which the story is best told are these. The fisherman returns after his day’s outing with his two friends whom he has taken out for the day, to his summer cottage. They carry with them their rods, their landing net and the paraphernalia of their profession. The fisherman carries also on a string a dirty looking collection of little fish, called by courtesy the “Catch.” None of these little fish really measures more than about seven and a half inches long and four inches round the chest. The fisherman’s wife and his wife’s sister and the young lady who is staying with them come running to meet the fishing party, giving cries of admiration as they get a sight of the catch. In reality they would refuse to buy those fish from a butcher at a cent and a half a pound. But they fall into ecstasies and they cry, “Oh, aren’t they beauties! Look at this big one!” The “big one” is about eight inches long. It looked good when they caught it but it has been shrinking ever since and it looks now as if it had died of consumption. Then it is that the fisherman says, in a voice in which regret is mingled with animation:
“Yes, but say, you ought to have seen the one that we lost. We had hardly let down our lines—”
It may be interjected here that all fishermen ought to realize that the moment of danger is just when you let down your line. That is the moment when the fish will put up all kinds of games on you, such as rushing at you in a compact mass so fast that you can’t take them in, or selecting the largest of their number to snatch away one of your rods.
“We had hardly let down our lines,” says the fishermen, “when Tom got a perfect monster. That fish would have weighed five pounds, wouldn’t it, Tom?”
“Easily,” says Tom.
“Well, Tom started to haul him in and he yelled to Ted and me to get the landing net ready and we had him right up to the boat, right up to the very boat,” “Right up to the very boat,” repeat Tom and Edward sadly. “When the damn line broke and biff! away he went. Say! he must have been two feet long, easily two feet!”
“Did you see him?” asks the young lady who is staying with them. This of course she has no right to ask. It’s not a fair question. Among people who go fishing it is ruled out. You may ask if a fish pulled hard, and how much it weighed but you must not ask whether anybody saw the fish.
“We could see where he was,” says Tom.
Then they go on up to the house carrying the “string” or “catch” and all three saying at intervals, “Say, if we had only landed that big fellow!”
By the time this anecdote has ripened for winter use, the fish will have been drawn actually into the boat (thus settling all question of seeing it) and will there have knocked Edward senseless, and then leaped over the gunwale.
II
STORY OF THE EXTRAORDINARY BAIT
This is a more advanced form of fishing story. It is told by fishermen for fishermen. It is the sort of thing they relate to one another when fishing out of a motor boat on a lake, when there has been a slight pause in their activity and when the fish for a little while, — say for two hours, have stopped biting. So the fishermen talk and discuss the ways and means of their craft. Somebody says that grasshoppers make good bait: and somebody else asks whether any of them have ever tried Lake Erie soft shell crabs as bait, and then one, — whoever is lucky enough to get in first, — tells the good old bait story.
“The queerest bait I ever saw used,” he says, shifting his pipe to the other side of his mouth, “was one day when I was fishing up in one of the lakes back in Maine. We’d got to the spot and got all ready when we suddenly discovered that we’d forgotten the bait—”
At this point any one of the listeners is entitled by custom to put in the old joke about not forgetting the whiskey.
“Well, there was no use going ashore. We couldn’t have got any worms. It was too early for frogs, and it was ten miles to row back home. We tried chunks of meat from our lunch, but nothing doing! Well, then, just for fun I cut a white bone button off my pants and put it on the hook. Say! you ought to have seen those fish go for it. We caught, oh, easily twenty, yes, thirty, in about half an hour. We only quit after we’d cut off all our buttons and our pants were falling off us! Say, hold on, boys, I believe I’ve got a nibble! Sit steady!”
Getting a nibble of course will set up an excitement in any fishing party that puts an end to all story telling. After they have got straight again and the nibble has turned out to be “the bottom” as all nibbles are, — the moment would be fitting for anyone of them to tell the famous story called:
III
BEGINNER’S LUCK, OR THE WONDERFUL CATCH MADE BY THE NARRATOR’S WIFE’S LADY FRIEND
“Talking of that big catch that you made with the pants button,” says another of the anglers, who really means that he is going to talk of something else, “reminds me of a queer thing I saw myself. We’d gone out fishing for pickerel, ‘dorés,’ they call them up there in the lake of Two Mountains. We had a couple of big row boats and we’d taken my wife and the ladies along, — I think there were eight of us, or nine perhaps. Anyway it doesn’t matter. Well, there was a young lady there from Dayton, Ohio, and she’d never fished before. In fact she’d never been in a boat before. I don’t believe she’d ever been near the water before.”
All experienced listeners know now what is coming. They realize the geographical position of Dayton, Ohio, far from the water and shut in everywhere by land. Any prudent fish would make a sneak for shelter if he knew that a young lady from Dayton, Ohio, was after him.
“Well, this girl got an idea that she’d like to fish and we’d rigged up a line for her, just tied on to a cedar pole that we’d cut in the bush. Do you know you’d hardly believe that that girl had hardly got her line into the water when she got a monster. We yelled to her to play it or she’d lose it, but she just heaved it up into the air and right into the boat. She caught seventeen, or twenty-seven, I forget which, one after the other, while the rest of us got nothing. And the fun of it was she didn’t know anything about fishing; she just threw the fish up into the air and into the boat. Next day we got her a decent rod with a reel and gave her a lesson or two and then she didn’t catch any.”
I may say with truth that I have heard this particular story told not only about a girl from Dayton, Ohio, but about a girl from Kansas, a young lady just out from England, about a girl fresh from Paris, and about another girl, not fresh, — the daughter of a minister. In fact if I wished to make sure of a real catch, I would select a girl fresh from Paris or New York and cut off some of my buttons, or hers, and start to fish.
IV
THE STORY OF WHAT WAS FOUND IN THE FISH
The stories, however, do not end with the mere catching of the fish. There is another familiar line of anecdote that comes in when the fish are to be cleaned and cooked. The fishermen have landed on the rocky shore beside the rushing waterfall and are cleaning their fish to cook them for the midday meal. There is an obstinate superstition that fish cooked thus taste better than first class kippered herring put up in a tin in Aberdeen where they know how. They don’t, but it is an honourable fiction and reflects credit on humanity. What is more, all the fishing party compete eagerly for the job of cutting the inside out of the dead fish. In a restaurant they are content to leave that to anybody sunk low enough and unhappy enough to have to do it. But in the woods they fight for the job.
So it happens that presently one of the workers holds up some filthy specimen of something in his hand and says, “Look at that! See what I took out of the trout! Unless I mistake it is part of a deer’s ear. The deer must have stooped over the stream to drink and the trout bit his ear off.”
At which somebody says, — whoever gets it in first, — says:
“It’s amazing what you find in fish. I remember once trolling for trout, the big trout, up in Lake Simcoe and just off Eight Mile Point we caught a regular whopper. We had no scales but he weighed easily twenty pounds. We cut him open on the shore afterwards, and say, would you believe it, that fish had inside him a brass buckle, — the whole of it, — and part of a tennis shoe, and a rain check from a baseball game, and seventy-five cents in change. It seems hard to account for it, unless perhaps he’d been swimming round some summer hotel.”
These stories, I repeat, may now be properly narrated in the summer fishing season. But of course, as all fishermen know, the true time to tell them is round the winter fire, with a glass of something warm within easy reach, at a time when statements cannot be checked, when weights and measures must not be challenged and when fish grow to their full size and their true beauty. It is to such stories as these, whether told in summer or in winter, that the immemorial craft of the angler owes something of its continued charm.
Love Me, Love My Letters
The Use of Ink for the First Inklings of Love
There is a proverb which says a man is known by the company he keeps. There is a saying also that a man is best known by the song he sings. It is claimed, too, that people can always be distinguished by the books that they read, and by the pictures that they admire, and by the clothes that they wear.
All this may be true. But to my thinking, the truest test of character is found in the love letters that people write. Each different type of man or woman — including girls — has his, or her, or perhaps their, own particular way of writing love letters.
As witness to which, let me submit to the reader’s judgment a carefully selected set of love letters present and past. I need hardly say that the letters are not imaginary, but that each of them is an actual sample taken right out of the post office — no, I don’t think I need say it.
I
THE OLD-FASHIONED STYLE
Love letter of the year 1828 sent by messenger from Mr. Ardent Heartful, The Hall, Notts, England, to Miss Angela Blushanburn, The Shrubberies, Hops, Potts, Shrops, England, begging her acceptance of a fish:
“Respected Miss Angela:
“With the consent of your honored father and your esteemed mother, I venture to send to you by the messenger who bears you this, a fish. It has, my respected Miss Angela, for some time been my most ardent desire that I might have the good fortune to present to you as the fruit of my own endeavors, a fish. It was this morning my good fortune to land while angling in the stream that traverses your property, with the consent of your father, a fish.
“In presenting for your consumption, with your parents’ consent, respected Miss Angela, this fish, may I say that the fate of this fish which will thus have the inestimable privilege of languishing upon your table conveys nothing but envy to one who, while what he feels cannot be spoken, still feels as deeply as should feel, if it does feel, this fish.
“With the expression of a perfect esteem for your father and mother, believe me,
“Your devoted,
“Ardent Heartful.”
II
THE NEWER STYLE OF TO-DAY
Love letter composed by Professor Albertus Dignus, senior professor of English rhetoric and diction at the University, and famous as the most brilliant essayist outside of the staff of the London Times, to Miss Maisie Beatit of the chorus of the Follies-in-Transit company at Memphis, Tenn.:
