Chapter 5

A bloated toad, studded with dermal excrescences, was boasting that she was the wartiest creature alive.

"Perhaps you are," said her auditor, emerging from the soil; "but it is a barren and superficial honour. Look at me: I am one solid mole!"

CXII.

"It is very difficult getting on in the world," sighed a weary snail; "very difficult indeed, with such high rents!"

"You don't mean to say you pay anything for that old rookery!" said a slug, who was characteristically insinuating himself between the stems of the celery intended for dinner. "A miserable old shanty like that, without stables, grounds, or any modern conveniences!"

"Pay!" said the snail, contemptuously; "I'd like to see you get a semi-detatched villa like this at a nominal rate!"

"Why don't you let your upper apartments to a respectable single party?" urged the slug.

The answer is not recorded.

CXIII.

A hare, pursued by a dog, sought sanctuary in the den of a wolf. It being after business hours, the latter was at home to him.

"Ah!" panted the hare; "how very fortunate! I feel quite safe here, for you dislike dogs quite as much as I do."

"Your security, my small friend," replied the wolf, "depends not upon those points in which you and I agree, but upon those in which I and the dog differ."

"Then you mean to eat me?" inquired the timorous puss.

"No-o-o," drawled the wolf, reflectively, "I should not like to promise _that_; I mean to eat a part of you. There may be a tuft of fur, and a toe-nail or two, left for you to go on with. I am hungry, but I am not hoggish."

"The distinction is too fine for me," said the hare, scratching her head.

"That, my friend, is because you have not made a practice of hare-splitting. I have."

CXIV.

"Oyster at home?" inquired a monkey, rapping at the closed shell.

There was no reply. Dropping the knocker, he laid hold of the bell-handle, ringing a loud peal, but without effect.

"Hum, hum!" he mused, with a look of disappointment, "gone to the sea side, I suppose."

So he turned away, thinking he would call again later in the season; but he had not proceeded far before he conceived a brilliant idea. Perhaps there had been a suicide!--or a murder! He would go back and force the door. By way of doing so he obtained a large stone, and smashed in the roof. There had been no murder to justify such audacity, so he committed one.

The funeral was gorgeous. There were mute oysters with wands, drunken oysters with scarves and hat-bands, a sable hearse with hearth-dusters on it, a swindling undertaker's bill, and all the accessories of a first-rate churchyard circus--everything necessary but the corpse. That had been disposed of by the monkey, and the undertaker meanly withheld the use of his own.

MORAL.--A lamb foaled in March makes the best pork when his horns have attained the length of an inch.

CXV.

"Pray walk into my parlour," said the spider to the fly. "That is not quite original," the latter made reply. "If that's the way you plagiarize, your fame will be a fib-- But I'll walk into your parlour, while I pitch into your crib. But before I cross your threshold, sir, if I may make so free, Pray let me introduce to you my friend, 'the wicked flea.'" "How do you?" says the spider, as his welcome he extends; "'How doth the busy little bee,' and all our other friends?" "Quite well, I think, and quite unchanged," the flea said; "though I learn, In certain quarters well informed, 'tis feared 'the worm will turn.'" "Humph!" said the fly; "I do not understand this talk--not I!" "It is 'classical allusion,'" said the spider to the fly.

CXVI.

A polar bear navigating the mid-sea upon the mortal part of a late lamented walrus, soliloquized, in substance, as follows:

"Such liberty of action as I am afflicted with is enough to embarrass any bear that ever bore. I can remain passive, and starve; or I can devour my ship, and drown. I am really unable to decide."

So he sat down to think it over. He considered the question in all its aspects, until he grew quite thin; turned it over and over in his mind until he was too weak to sit up; meditated upon it with a constantly decreasing pulse, a rapidly failing respiration. But he could not make up his mind, and finally expired without having come to a decision.

It appears to me he might almost as well have chosen starvation, at a venture.

CXVII.

A sword-fish having penetrated seven or eight feet into the bottom of a ship, under the impression that he was quarrelling with a whale, was unable to draw out of the fight. The sailors annoyed him a good deal, by pounding with handspikes upon that portion of his horn inside; but he bore it as bravely as he could, putting the best possible face upon the matter, until he saw a shark swimming by, of whom he inquired the probable destination of the ship.

"Italy, I think," said the other, grinning. "I have private reasons for believing her cargo consists mainly of consumptives."

"Ah!" exclaimed the captive; "Italy, delightful clime of the cerulean orange--the rosy olive! Land of the night-blooming Jesuit, and the fragrant _laszarone_! It would be heavenly to run down gondolas in the streets of Venice! I _must_ go to Italy."

"Indeed you must," said the shark, darting suddenly aft, where he had caught the gleam of shotted canvas through the blue waters.

But it was fated to be otherwise: some days afterwards the ship and fish passed over a sunken rock which almost grazed the keel. Then the two parted company, with mutual expressions of tender regard, and a report which could be traced by those on board to no trustworthy source.

The foregoing fable shows that a man of good behaviour need not care for money, and _vice versâ_.

CXVIII.

A facetious old cat seeing her kitten sleeping in a bath tub, went down into the cellar and turned on the hot water. (For the convenience of the bathers the bath was arranged in that way; you had to undress, and then go down to the cellar to let on the wet.) No sooner did the kitten remark the unfamiliar sensation, than he departed thence with a willingness quite creditable in one who was not a professional acrobat, and met his mother on the kitchen stairs.

"Aha! my steaming hearty!" cried the elder grimalkin; "I coveted you when I saw the cook put you in the dinner-pot. If I have a weakness, it is hare--hare nicely dressed, and partially boiled."

Whereupon she made a banquet of her suffering offspring.[A]

Adversity works a stupendous change in tender youth; many a young man is never recognized by his parents after having been in hot water.

[Footnote A: Here should have followed the appropriate and obvious classical allusion. It is known our fabulist was classically educated. Why, then, this disgraceful omission?--TRANSLATOR.]

CXIX.

"It is a waste of valour for us to do battle," said a lame ostrich to a negro who had suddenly come upon her in the desert; "let us cast lots to see who shall be considered the victor, and then go about our business."

To this proposition the negro readily assented. They cast lots: the negro cast lots of stones, and the ostrich cast lots of feathers. Then the former went about his business, which consisted of skinning the bird.

MORAL.--There is nothing like the arbitrament of chance. That form of it known as _trile-bi-joorie_ is perhaps as good as any.

CXX.

An author who had wrought a book of fables (the merit whereof transcended expression) was peacefully sleeping atop of the modest eminence to which he had attained, when he was rudely awakened by a throng of critics, emitting adverse judgment upon the tales he had builded.

"Apparently," said he, "I have been guilty of some small grains of unconsidered wisdom, and the same have proven a bitterness to these excellent folk, the which they will not abide. Ah, well! those who produce the Strasburg _pâté_ and the feather-pillow are prone to regard _us_ as rival creators. I presume it is in course of nature for him who grows the pen to censure the manner of its use."

So speaking, he executed a smile a hand's-breath in extent, and resumed his airy dream of dropping ducats.

CXXI.

For many years an opossum had anointed his tail with bear's oil, but it remained stubbornly bald-headed. At last his patience was exhausted, and he appealed to Bruin himself, accusing him of breaking faith, and calling him a quack.

"Why, you insolent marsupial!" retorted the bear in a rage; "you expect my oil to give you hair upon your tail, when it will not give me even a tail. Why don't you try under-draining, or top-dressing with light compost?"

They said and did a good deal more before the opossum withdrew his cold and barren member from consideration; but the judicious fabulist does not encumber his tale with extraneous matter, lest it be pointless.

CXXII.

"So disreputable a lot as you are I never saw!" said a sleepy rat to the casks in a wine-cellar. "Always making night hideous with your hoops and hollows, and disfiguring the day with your bunged-up appearance. There is no sleeping when once the wine has got into your heads. I'll report you to the butler!"

"The sneaking tale-bearer," said the casks. "Let us beat him with our staves."

"_Requiescat in pace_," muttered a learned cobweb, sententiously.

"Requires a cat in the place, does it?" shrieked the rat. "Then I'm off!"

To explain all the wisdom imparted by this fable would require the pen of a pig, and volumes of smoke.

CXXIII.

A giraffe having trodden upon the tail of a poodle, that animal flew into a blind rage, and wrestled valorously with the invading foot.

"Hullo, sonny!" said the giraffe, looking down, "what are you doing there?"

"I am fighting!" was the proud reply; "but I don't know that it is any of your business."

"Oh, I have no desire to mix in," said the good-natured giraffe. "I never take sides in terrestrial strife. Still, as that is my foot, I think--"

"Eh!" cried the poodle, backing some distance away and gazing upward, shading his eyes with his paw. "You don't mean to say--by Jove it's a fact! Well, that beats _me_! A beast of such enormous length--such preposterous duration, as it were--I wouldn't have believed it! Of course I can't quarrel with a non-resident; but why don't you have a local agent on the ground?"

The reply was probably the wisest ever made; but it has not descended to this generation. It had so very far to descend.

CXXIV.

A dog having got upon the scent of a deer which a hunter had been dragging home, set off with extraordinary zeal. After measuring off a few leagues, he paused.

"My running gear is all right," said he; "but I seem to have lost my voice."

Suddenly his ear was assailed by a succession of eager barks, as of another dog in pursuit of him. It then began to dawn upon him that he was a particularly rapid dog: instead of having lost his voice, his voice had lost him, and was just now arriving. Full of his discovery, he sought his master, and struck for better food and more comfortable housing.

"Why, you miserable example of perverted powers!" said his master; "I never intended you for the chase, but for the road. You are to be a draught-dog--to pull baby about in a cart. You will perceive that speed is an objection. Sir, you must be toned down; you will be at once assigned to a house with modern conveniences, and will dine at a French restaurant. If that system do not reduce your own, I'm an 'Ebrew Jew!"

The journals next morning had racy and appetizing accounts of a canine suicide.

CXXV.

A gosling, who had not yet begun to blanch, was accosted by a chicken just out of the shell:

"Whither away so fast, fair maid?" inquired the chick.

"Wither away yourself," was the contemptuous reply; "you are already in the sere and yellow leaf; while I seem to have a green old age before me."

CXXVI.

A famishing traveller who had run down a salamander, made a fire, and laid him alive upon the hot coals to cook. Wearied with the pursuit which had preceded his capture, the animal at once composed himself, and fell into a refreshing sleep. At the end of a half-hour, the man, stirred him with a stick, remarking:

"I say!--wake up and begin toasting, will you? How long do you mean to keep dinner waiting, eh?"

"Oh, I beg you will not wait for me," was the yawning reply. "If you are going to stand upon ceremony, everything will get cold. Besides, I have dined. I wish, by-the-way, you would put on some more fuel; I think we shall have snow."

"Yes," said the man, "the weather is like yourself--raw, and exasperatingly cool. Perhaps this will warm you." And he rolled a ponderous pine log atop of that provoking reptile, who flattened out, and "handed in his checks."

The moral thus doth glibly run-- A cause its opposite may brew; The sun-shade is unlike the sun, The plum unlike the plumber, too. A salamander underdone His impudence may overdo.

CXXVII.

A humming-bird invited a vulture to dine with her. He accepted, but took the precaution to have an emetic along with him; and immediately after dinner, which consisted mainly of dew, spices, honey, and similar slops, he swallowed his corrective, and tumbled the distasteful viands out. He then went away, and made a good wholesome meal with his friend the ghoul. He has been heard to remark, that the taste for humming-bird fare is "too artificial for _him_." He says, a simple and natural diet, with agreeable companions, cheerful surroundings, and a struggling moon, is best for the health, and most agreeable to the normal palate.

People with vitiated tastes may derive much profit from this opinion. _Crede experto._

CXXVIII.

A certain terrier, of a dogmatic turn, asked a kitten her opinion of rats, demanding a categorical answer. The opinion, as given, did not possess the merit of coinciding with his own; whereupon he fell upon the heretic and bit her--bit her until his teeth were much worn and her body much elongated--bit her good! Having thus vindicated the correctness of his own view, he felt so amiable a satisfaction that he announced his willingness to adopt the opinion of which he had demonstrated the harmlessness. So he begged his enfeebled antagonist to re-state it, which she incautiously did. No sooner, however, had the superior debater heard it for the second time than he resumed his intolerance, and made an end of that unhappy cat.

"Heresy," said he, wiping his mouth, "may be endured in the vigorous and lusty; but in a person lying at the very point of death such hardihood is intolerable."

It is always intolerable.

CXXIX.

A tortoise and an armadillo quarrelled, and agreed to fight it out. Repairing to a secluded valley, they put themselves into hostile array.

"Now come on!" shouted the tortoise, shrinking into the inmost recesses of his shell.

"All right," shrieked the armadillo, coiling up tightly in his coat of mail; "I am ready for you!"

And thus these heroes waged the awful fray from morn till dewy eve, at less than a yard's distance. There has never been anything like it; their endurance was something marvellous! During the night each combatant sneaked silently away; and the historian of the period obscurely alludes to the battle as "the naval engagement of the future."

CXXX.

Two hedgehogs having conceived a dislike to a hare, conspired for his extinction. It was agreed between them that the lighter and more agile of the two should beat him up, surround him, run him into a ditch, and drive him upon the thorns of the more gouty and unwieldy conspirator. It was not a very hopeful scheme, but it was the best they could devise. There was a chance of success if the hare should prove willing, and, gambler-like, they decided to take that chance, instead of trusting to the remote certainty of their victim's death from natural cause. The doomed animal performed his part as well as could be reasonably expected of him: every time the enemy's flying detachment pressed him hard, he fled playfully toward the main body, and lightly vaulted over, about eight feet above the spines. And this prickly blockhead had not the practical sagacity to get upon a wall seven feet and six inches high!

This fable is designed to show that the most desperate chances are comparatively safe.

CXXXI.

A young eel inhabiting the mouth of a river in India, determined to travel. Being a fresh-water eel, he was somewhat restricted in his choice of a route, but he set out with a cheerful heart and very little luggage. Before he had proceeded very far up-stream he found the current too strong to be overcome without a ruinous consumption of coals. He decided to anchor his tail where it then was, and _grow_ up. For the first hundred miles it was tolerably tedious work, but when he had learned to tame his impatience, he found this method of progress rather pleasant than otherwise. But when he began to be caught at widely separate points by the fishermen of eight or ten different nations, he did not think it so fine.

This fable teaches that when you extend your residence you multiply your experiences. A local eel can know but little of angling.

CXXXII.

Some of the lower animals held a convention to settle for ever the unspeakably important question, What is Life?

"Life," squeaked the poet, blinking and folding his filmy wings, "is--." His kind having been already very numerously heard from upon the subject, he was choked off.

"Life," said the scientist, in a voice smothered by the earth he was throwing up into small hills, "is the harmonious action of heterogeneous but related faculties, operating in accordance with certain natural laws."

"Ah!" chattered the lover, "but that thawt of thing is vewy gweat blith in the thothiety of one'th thweetheart." And curling his tail about a branch, he swung himself heavenward and had a spasm.

"It is _vita_!" grunted the sententious scholar, pausing in his mastication of a Chaldaic root.

"It is a thistle," brayed the warrior: "very nice thing to take!"

"Life, my friends," croaked the philosopher from his hollow tree, dropping the lids over his cattish eyes, "is a disease. We are all symptoms."

"Pooh!" ejaculated the physician, uncoiling and springing his rattle. "How then does it happen that when _we_ remove the symptoms, the disease is gone?"

"I would give something to know that," replied the philosopher, musingly; "but I suspect that in most cases the inflammation remains, and is intensified."

Draw your own moral inference, "in your own jugs."

CXXXIII.

A heedless boy having flung a pebble in the direction of a basking lizard, that reptile's tail disengaged itself, and flew some distance away. One of the properties of a lizard's camp-follower is to leave the main body at the slightest intimation of danger.

"There goes that vexatious narrative again," exclaimed the lizard, pettishly; "I never had such a tail in my life! Its restless tendency to divorce upon insufficient grounds is enough to harrow the reptilian soul! Now," he continued, backing up to the fugitive part, "perhaps you will be good enough to resume your connection with the parent establishment."

No sooner was the splice effected, than an astronomer passing that way casually remarked to a friend that he had just sighted a comet. Supposing itself menaced, the timorous member again sprang away, coming down plump before the horny nose of a sparrow. Here its career terminated.

We sometimes escape from an imaginary danger, only to find some real persecutor has a little bill against us.

CXXXIV.

A jackal who had pursued a deer all day with unflagging industry, was about to seize him, when an earthquake, which was doing a little civil engineering in that part of the country, opened a broad chasm between him and his prey.

"Now, here," said he, "is a distinct interference with the laws of nature. But if we are to tolerate miracles, there is an end of all progress."

So speaking, he endeavoured to cross the abyss at two jumps. His fate would serve the purpose of an impressive warning if it might be clearly ascertained; but the earth having immediately pinched together again, the research of the moral investigator is baffled.

CXXXV.

"Ah!" sighed a three-legged stool, "if I had only been a quadruped, I should have been happy as the day is long--which, on the twenty-first of June, would be considerable felicity for a stool."

"Ha! look at me!" said a toadstool; "consider my superior privation, and be content with your comparatively happy lot."

"I don't discern," replied the first, "how the contemplation of unipedal misery tends to alleviate tripedal wretchedness."

"You don't, eh!" sneered the toadstool. "You mean, do you, to fly in the face of all the moral and social philosophers?"

"Not unless some benefactor of his race shall impel me."

"H'm! I think Zambri the Parsee is the man for that kindly office, my dear."

This final fable teaches that he is.

BRIEF SEASONS OF INTELLECTUAL DISSIPATION.

I.

FOOL.--I have a question for you.

PHILOSOPHER.--I have a number of them for myself. Do you happen to have heard that a fool can ask more questions in a breath than a philosopher can answer in a life?

F.--I happen to have heard that in such a case the one is as great a fool as the other.

PH.--Then there is no distinction between folly and philosophy?

F.--Don't lay the flattering unction to your soul. The province of folly is to ask unanswerable questions. It is the function of philosophy to answer them.

PH.--Admirable fool!

F.--Am I? Pray tell me the meaning of "a fool."

PH.--Commonly he has none.

F.--I mean--

PH.--Then in this case he has one.

F.--I lick thy boots! But what does Solomon indicate by the word fool? That is what I mean.

PH.--Let us then congratulate Solomon upon the agreement between the views of you two. However, I twig your intent: he means a wicked sinner; and of all forms of folly there is none so great as wicked sinning. For goodness is, in the end, more conducive to personal happiness--which is the sole aim of man.

F.--Hath virtue no better excuse than this?

PH.--Possibly; philosophy is not omniscience.

F.--Instructed I sit at thy feet!

PH.--Unwilling to instruct, I stand on my head.

* * * * *

FOOL.--You say personal happiness is the sole aim of man.

PHILOSOPHER.--Then it is.

F.--But this is much disputed.

PH.--There is much personal happiness in disputation.

F.--Socrates--

PH.--Hold! I detest foreigners.

F.--Wisdom, they say, is of no country.

PH.--Of none that I have seen.

* * * * *

FOOL.--Let us return to our subject--the sole aim of mankind. Crack me these nuts. (1) The man, never weary of well-doing, who endures a life of privation for the good of his fellow-creatures?

PHILOSOPHER.--Does he feel remorse in so doing? or does the rascal rather like it?

F.--(2) He, then, who, famishing himself, parts his loaf with a beggar?

PH.--There are people who prefer benevolence to bread.

F.--Ah! _De gustibus_--

PH.--Shut up!

F.--Well, (3) how of him who goes joyfully to martyrdom?

PH.--He goes joyfully.

F.--And yet--

PH.--Did you ever converse with a good man going to the stake?

F.--I never saw a good man going to the stake.

PH.--Unhappy pupil! you were born some centuries too early.

* * * * *

FOOL.--You say you detest foreigners. Why?

PHILOSOPHER.--Because I am human.

F.--But so are they.

PH.--Excellent fool! I thank thee for the better reason.

* * * * *

PHILOSOPHER.--I have been thinking of the _pocopo_.

FOOL.--Is it open to the public?

PH.--The pocopo is a small animal of North America, chiefly remarkable for singularity of diet. It subsists solely upon a single article of food.

F.--What is that?

PH.--Other pocopos. Unable to obtain this, their natural sustenance, a great number of pocopos die annually of starvation. Their death leaves fewer mouths to feed, and by consequence their race is rapidly multiplying.