Political Economy - (3)

One day an individual stranger at the camp him arrested with his box and him said:
    “What is this that you have them shut up there within?”
    Smiley said, with an air indifferent:
    “That could be a paroquet, or a syringe (ou un serin), but this no is nothing of such, it not is but a frog.”
    The individual it took, it regarded with care, it turned from one side and from the other, then he said:
    “Tiens! in effect!--At what is she good?”
    “My God!” respond Smiley, always with an air disengaged, “she is good for one thing, to my notice (à mon avis), she can batter in jumping (elle peut battre en sautant) all frogs of the county of Calaveras.”
    The individual retook the box, it examined of new longly, and it rendered to Smiley in saying with an air deliberate:
    “Eh bien! I no saw not that that frog had nothing of better than each frog.”  (Je ne vois pas que cette grenouille ait rien de mieux qu'aucune grenouille.) [If that isn't grammar gone to seed, then I count myself no judge.--M.  T.]
    “Possible that you not it saw not,” said Smiley, “possible that you--you comprehend frogs; possible that you not you there comprehend nothing; possible that you had of the experience, and possible that you not be but an amateur.  Of all manner (De toute manière) I bet forty dollars that she batter in jumping no matter which frog of the county of Calaveras.”
    The individual reflected a second, and said like sad:
    “I not am but a stranger here, I no have not a frog; but if I of it had one, I would embrace the bet.”
    “Strong well!” respond Smiley; “nothing of more facility.  If you will hold my box a minute, I go you to search a frog (j'irai vous chercher).”
    Behold, then, the individual, who guards the box, who puts his forty dollars upon those of Smiley, and who attends (et qui attend).  He attended enough long times, reflecting all solely.  And figure you that he takes Daniel, him opens the mouth by force and with a teaspoon him fills with shot of the hunt, even him fills just to the chin, then he him puts by the earth.  Smiley during these times was at slopping in a swamp. Finally he trapped (attrape) a frog, him carried to that individual, and said:
    “Now if you be ready, put him all against Daniel with their before feet upon the same line, and I give the signal”--then he added: “One, two, three--advance!”
    Him and the individual touched their frogs by behind, and the frog new put to jump smartly, but Daniel himself lifted ponderously, exalted the shoulders thus, like a Frenchman--to what good? he not could budge, he is planted solid like a church, he not advance no more than if one him had put at the anchor.
    Smiley was surprised and disgusted, but he no himself doubted not of the turn being intended (mais il ne se doutait pas du tour, bien entendu). The individual empocketed the silver, himself with it went, and of it himself in going is it that he no gives not a jerk of thumb over the shoulder--like that--at the poor Daniel, in saying with his air deliberate--(L'individu empoche l'argent, s'en va et en s'en allant est-ce qu'il ne donne pas un coup de pouce par-dessus l'épaule, comme ça, au pauvre Daniel, en disant de son air délibéré):
    “Eh bien! I no see not that that frog has nothing of better than another.”
    Smiley himself scratched longtimes the head, the eyes fixed upon Daniel, until that which at last he said:
    “I me demand how the devil it makes itself that this beast has refused. Is it that she had something?  One would believe that she is stuffed.”
    He grasped Daniel by the skin of the neck, him lifted and said:
    “The wolf me bite if he no weigh not five pounds:”
    He him reversed and the unhappy belched two handfuls of shot (et le malheureux, etc.).  When Smiley recognized how it was, he was like mad. He deposited his frog by the earth and ran after that individual, but he not him caught never.
    Such is the Jumping Frog, to the distorted French eye.  I claim that I never put together such an odious mixture of bad grammar and delirium tremens in my life.  And what has a poor foreigner like me done, to be abused and misrepresented like this?  When I say, “Well, I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog,” is it kind, is it just, for this Frenchman to try to make it appear that I said, “Eh bien! I no saw not that that frog had nothing of better than each frog”? I have no heart to write more.  I never felt so about anything before.
    HARTFORD, March, 1875.
    JOURNALISM IN TENNESSEE--[Written about 1871.]
    The editor of the Memphis Avalanche swoops thus mildly down upon a correspondent who posted him as a Radical:--“While he was writing the first word, the middle, dotting his i's, crossing his t's, and punching his period, he knew he was concocting a sentence that was saturated with infamy and reeking with falsehood.”--Exchange.
    I was told by the physician that a Southern climate would improve my health, and so I went down to Tennessee, and got a berth on the Morning Glory and Johnson County War-Whoop as associate editor.  When I went on duty I found the chief editor sitting tilted back in a three-legged chair with his feet on a pine table.  There was another pine table in the room and another afflicted chair, and both were half buried under newspapers and scraps and sheets of manuscript.  There was a wooden box of sand, sprinkled with cigar stubs and “old soldiers,” and a stove with a door hanging by its upper hinge.  The chief editor had a long-tailed black cloth frock-coat on, and white linen pants.  His boots were small and neatly blacked.  He wore a ruffled shirt, a large seal-ring, a standing collar of obsolete pattern, and a checkered neckerchief with the ends hanging down.  Date of costume about 1848.  He was smoking a cigar, and trying to think of a word, and in pawing his hair he had rumpled his locks a good deal.  He was scowling fearfully, and I judged that he was concocting a particularly knotty editorial.  He told me to take the exchanges and skim through them and write up the “Spirit of the Tennessee Press,” condensing into the article all of their contents that seemed of interest.
    I wrote as follows:
    SPIRIT OF THE TENNESSEE PRESS
    The editors of the Semi-Weekly Earthquake evidently labor under a misapprehension with regard to the Ballyhack railroad.  It is not the object of the company to leave Buzzardville off to one side. On the contrary, they consider it one of the most important points along the line, and consequently can have no desire to slight it. The gentlemen of the Earthquake will, of course, take pleasure in making the correction.
    John W. Blossom, Esq., the able editor of the Higginsville Thunderbolt and Battle Cry of Freedom, arrived in the city yesterday.  He is stopping at the Van Buren House.
    We observe that our contemporary of the Mud Springs Morning Howl has fallen into the error of supposing that the election of Van Werter is not an established fact, but he will have discovered his mistake before this reminder reaches him, no doubt.  He was doubtless misled by incomplete election returns.
    It is pleasant to note that the city of Blathersville is endeavoring to contract with some New York gentlemen to pave its well-nigh impassable streets with the Nicholson pavement.  The Daily Hurrah urges the measure with ability, and seems confident of ultimate success.
    I passed my manuscript over to the chief editor for acceptance, alteration, or destruction.  He glanced at it and his face clouded.  He ran his eye down the pages, and his countenance grew portentous.  It was easy to see that something was wrong.  Presently he sprang up and said:
    “Thunder and lightning! Do you suppose I am going to speak of those cattle that way?  Do you suppose my subscribers are going to stand such gruel as that?  Give me the pen!”
    I never saw a pen scrape and scratch its way so viciously, or plow through another man's verbs and adjectives so relentlessly.  While he was in the midst of his work, somebody shot at him through the open window, and marred the symmetry of my ear.
    “Ah,” said he, “that is that scoundrel Smith, of the Moral Volcano--he was due yesterday.”  And he snatched a navy revolver from his belt and fired--Smith dropped, shot in the thigh.  The shot spoiled Smith's aim, who was just taking a second chance and he crippled a stranger.  It was me.  Merely a finger shot off.
    Then the chief editor went on with his erasure; and interlineations. Just as he finished them a hand grenade came down the stove-pipe, and the explosion shivered the stove into a thousand fragments.  However, it did no further damage, except that a vagrant piece knocked a couple of my teeth out.
    “That stove is utterly ruined,” said the chief editor.
    I said I believed it was.
    “Well, no matter--don't want it this kind of weather.  I know the man that did it.  I'll get him.  Now, here is the way this stuff ought to be written.”
    I took the manuscript.  It was scarred with erasures and interlineations till its mother wouldn't have known it if it had had one.  It now read as follows:
    SPIRIT OF THE TENNESSEE PRESS
    The inveterate liars of the Semi-Weekly Earthquake are evidently endeavoring to palm off upon a noble and chivalrous people another of their vile and brutal falsehoods with regard to that most glorious conception of the nineteenth century, the Ballyhack railroad.  The idea that Buzzardville was to be left off at one side originated in their own fulsome brains--or rather in the settlings which they regard as brains.  They had better swallow this lie if they want to save their abandoned reptile carcasses the cowhiding they so richly deserve.
    That ass, Blossom, of the Higginsville Thunderbolt and Battle Cry of Freedom, is down here again sponging at the Van Buren.
    We observe that the besotted blackguard of the Mud Springs Morning Howl is giving out, with his usual propensity for lying, that Van Werter is not elected.  The heaven-born mission of journalism is to disseminate truth; to eradicate error; to educate, refine, and elevate the tone of public morals and manners, and make all men more gentle, more virtuous, more charitable, and in all ways better, and holier, and happier; and yet this blackhearted scoundrel degrades his great office persistently to the dissemination of falsehood, calumny, vituperation, and vulgarity.
    Blathersville wants a Nicholson pavement--it wants a jail and a poorhouse more.  The idea of a pavement in a one-horse town composed of two gin-mills, a blacksmith shop, and that mustard-plaster of a newspaper, the Daily Hurrah!  The crawling insect, Buckner, who edits the Hurrah, is braying about his business with his customary imbecility, and imagining that he is talking sense.
    “Now that is the way to write--peppery and to the point.  Mush-and-milk journalism gives me the fan-tods.”
    About this time a brick came through the window with a splintering crash, and gave me a considerable of a jolt in the back.  I moved out of range --I began to feel in the way.
    The chief said, “That was the Colonel, likely.  I've been expecting him for two days.  He will be up now right away.”
    He was correct.  The Colonel appeared in the door a moment afterward with a dragoon revolver in his hand.
    He said, “Sir, have I the honor of addressing the poltroon who edits this mangy sheet?”
    “You have.  Be seated, sir.  Be careful of the chair, one of its legs is gone.  I believe I have the honor of addressing the putrid liar, Colonel Blatherskite Tecumseh?”
    “Right, Sir.  I have a little account to settle with you.  If you are at leisure we will begin.”
    “I have an article on the 'Encouraging Progress of Moral and Intellectual Development in America' to finish, but there is no hurry.  Begin.”
    Both pistols rang out their fierce clamor at the same instant.  The chief lost a lock of his hair, and the Colonel's bullet ended its career in the fleshy part of my thigh.  The Colonel's left shoulder was clipped a little.  They fired again.  Both missed their men this time, but I got my share, a shot in the arm.  At the third fire both gentlemen were wounded slightly, and I had a knuckle chipped.  I then said, I believed I would go out and take a walk, as this was a private matter, and I had a delicacy about participating in it further.  But both gentlemen begged me to keep my seat, and assured me that I was not in the way.
    They then talked about the elections and the crops while they reloaded, and I fell to tying up my wounds.  But presently they opened fire again with animation, and every shot took effect--but it is proper to remark that five out of the six fell to my share.  The sixth one mortally wounded the Colonel, who remarked, with fine humor, that he would have to say good morning now, as he had business uptown.  He then inquired the way to the undertaker's and left.
    The chief turned to me and said, “I am expecting company to dinner, and shall have to get ready.  It will be a favor to me if you will read proof and attend to the customers.”
    I winced a little at the idea of attending to the customers, but I was too bewildered by the fusillade that was still ringing in my ears to think of anything to say.
    He continued, “Jones will be here at three--cowhide him.  Gillespie will call earlier, perhaps--throw him out of the window.  Ferguson will be along about four--kill him.  That is all for today, I believe.  If you have any odd time, you may write a blistering article on the police--give the chief inspector rats.  The cowhides are under the table; weapons in the drawer--ammunition there in the corner--lint and bandages up there in the pigeonholes.  In case of accident, go to Lancet, the surgeon, downstairs.  He advertises--we take it out in trade.”
    He was gone.  I shuddered.  At the end of the next three hours I had been through perils so awful that all peace of mind and all cheerfulness were gone from me.  Gillespie had called and thrown me out of the window. Jones arrived promptly, and when I got ready to do the cowhiding he took the job off my hands.  In an encounter with a stranger, not in the bill of fare, I had lost my scalp.  Another stranger, by the name of Thompson, left me a mere wreck and ruin of chaotic rags.  And at last, at bay in the corner, and beset by an infuriated mob of editors, blacklegs, politicians, and desperadoes, who raved and swore and flourished their weapons about my head till the air shimmered with glancing flashes of steel, I was in the act of resigning my berth on the paper when the chief arrived, and with him a rabble of charmed and enthusiastic friends.  Then ensued a scene of riot and carnage such as no human pen, or steel one either, could describe.  People were shot, probed, dismembered, blown up, thrown out of the window.  There was a brief tornado of murky blasphemy, with a confused and frantic war-dance glimmering through it, and then all was over.  In five minutes there was silence, and the gory chief and I sat alone and surveyed the sanguinary ruin that strewed the floor around us.
    He said, “You'll like this place when you get used to it.”
    I said, “I'll have to get you to excuse me; I think maybe I might write to suit you after a while; as soon as I had had some practice and learned the language I am confident I could.  But, to speak the plain truth, that sort of energy of expression has its inconveniences, and a man is liable to interruption.
    “You see that yourself.  Vigorous writing is calculated to elevate the public, no doubt, but then I do not like to attract so much attention as it calls forth.  I can't write with comfort when I am interrupted so much as I have been to-day.  I like this berth well enough, but I don't like to be left here to wait on the customers.  The experiences are novel, I grant you, and entertaining, too, after a fashion, but they are not judiciously distributed.  A gentleman shoots at you through the window and cripples me; a bombshell comes down the stove-pipe for your gratification and sends the stove door down my throat; a friend drops in to swap compliments with you, and freckles me with bullet-holes till my skin won't hold my principles; you go to dinner, and Jones comes with his cowhide, Gillespie throws me out of the window, Thompson tears all my clothes off, and an entire stranger takes my scalp with the easy freedom of an old acquaintance; and in less than five minutes all the blackguards in the country arrive in their war-paint, and proceed to scare the rest of me to death with their tomahawks.  Take it altogether, I never had such a spirited time in all my life as I have had to-day.  No; I like you, and I like your calm unruffled way of explaining things to the customers, but you see I am not used to it.  The Southern heart is too impulsive; Southern hospitality is too lavish with the stranger.  The paragraphs which I have written to-day, and into whose cold sentences your masterly hand has infused the fervent spirit of Tennesseean journalism, will wake up another nest of hornets.  All that mob of editors will come--and they will come hungry, too, and want somebody for breakfast.  I shall have to bid you adieu.  I decline to be present at these festivities.  I came South for my health, I will go back on the same errand, and suddenly.  Tennesseean journalism is too stirring for me.”
    After which we parted with mutual regret, and I took apartments at the hospital.
    THE STORY OF THE BAD LITTLE BOY--[Written about 1865]
    Once there was a bad little boy whose name was Jim--though, if you will notice, you will find that bad little boys are nearly always called James in your Sunday-school books.  It was strange, but still it was true, that this one was called Jim.
    He didn't have any sick mother, either--a sick mother who was pious and had the consumption, and would be glad to lie down in the grave and be at rest but for the strong love she bore her boy, and the anxiety she felt that the world might be harsh and cold toward him when she was gone. Most bad boys in the Sunday books are named James, and have sick mothers, who teach them to say, “Now, I lay me down,” etc., and sing them to sleep with sweet, plaintive voices, and then kiss them good night, and kneel down by the bedside and weep.  But it was different with this fellow. He was named Jim, and there wasn't anything the matter with his mother --no consumption, nor anything of that kind.  She was rather stout than otherwise, and she was not pious; moreover, she was not anxious on Jim's account.  She said if he were to break his neck it wouldn't be much loss. She always spanked Jim to sleep, and she never kissed him good night; on the contrary, she boxed his ears when she was ready to leave him.
    Once this little bad boy stole the key of the pantry, and slipped in there and helped himself to some jam, and filled up the vessel with tar, so that his mother would never know the difference; but all at once a terrible feeling didn't come over him, and something didn't seem to whisper to him, “Is it right to disobey my mother?  Isn't it sinful to do this?  Where do bad little boys go who gobble up their good kind mother's jam?” and then he didn't kneel down all alone and promise never to be wicked any more, and rise up with a light, happy heart, and go and tell his mother all about it, and beg her forgiveness, and be blessed by her with tears of pride and thankfulness in her eyes.  No; that is the way with all other bad boys in the books; but it happened otherwise with this Jim, strangely enough.  He ate that jam, and said it was bully, in his sinful, vulgar way; and he put in the tar, and said that was bully also, and laughed, and observed “that the old woman would get up and snort” when she found it out; and when she did find it out, he denied knowing anything about it, and she whipped him severely, and he did the crying himself.  Everything about this boy was curious--everything turned out differently with him from the way it does to the bad Jameses in the books.
    Once he climbed up in Farmer Acorn's apple tree to steal apples, and the limb didn't break, and he didn't fall and break his arm, and get torn by the farmer's great dog, and then languish on a sickbed for weeks, and repent and become good.  Oh, no; he stole as many apples as he wanted and came down all right; and he was all ready for the dog, too, and knocked him endways with a brick when he came to tear him.  It was very strange --nothing like it ever happened in those mild little books with marbled backs, and with pictures in them of men with swallow-tailed coats and bell-crowned hats, and pantaloons that are short in the legs, and women with the waists of their dresses under their arms, and no hoops on. Nothing like it in any of the Sunday-school books.
    Once he stole the teacher's penknife, and, when he was afraid it would be found out and he would get whipped, he slipped it into George Wilson's cap--poor Widow Wilson's son, the moral boy, the good little boy of the village, who always obeyed his mother, and never told an untruth, and was fond of his lessons, and infatuated with Sunday-school.  And when the knife dropped from the cap, and poor George hung his head and blushed, as if in conscious guilt, and the grieved teacher charged the theft upon him, and was just in the very act of bringing the switch down upon his trembling shoulders, a white-haired, improbable justice of the peace did not suddenly appear in their midst, and strike an attitude and say, “Spare this noble boy--there stands the cowering culprit!  I was passing the school door at recess, and, unseen myself, I saw the theft committed!”  And then Jim didn't get whaled, and the venerable justice didn't read the tearful school a homily, and take George by the hand and say such a boy deserved to be exalted, and then tell him to come and make his home with him, and sweep out the office, and make fires, and run errands, and chop wood, and study law, and help his wife do household labors, and have all the balance of the time to play, and get forty cents a month, and be happy.  No; it would have happened that way in the books, but didn't happen that way to Jim.  No meddling old clam of a justice dropped in to make trouble, and so the model boy George got thrashed, and Jim was glad of it because, you know, Jim hated moral boys.  Jim said he was “down on them milksops.”  Such was the coarse language of this bad, neglected boy.
    But the strangest thing that ever happened to Jim was the time he went boating on Sunday, and didn't get drowned, and that other time that he got caught out in the storm when he was fishing on Sunday, and didn't get struck by lightning.  Why, you might look, and look, all through the Sunday-school books from now till next Christmas, and you would never come across anything like this.  Oh, no; you would find that all the bad boys who go boating on Sunday invariably get drowned; and all the bad boys who get caught out in storms when they are fishing on Sunday infallibly get struck by lightning.  Boats with bad boys in them always upset on Sunday, and it always storms when bad boys go fishing on the Sabbath.  How this Jim ever escaped is a mystery to me.