SCENE II.--_A pavilion, with view of the sea. Forenoon.

_Enter_ WHETSTONE, BLUEGRASS, and SCYTHE.

SCYTHE.

Who knows but, in the chemistry of Heaven, we, this noble race of men, are but parasites feeding in space upon a crust of earth encompassing a fiery particle!

BLUEGRASS.

What a glorious thing is one of our ordinary mundane cycles of time! ’Tis only a day; and yet it is a legacy too great for the richest man to put in his will. Let no one be so brazen as to attempt to belittle this magnificent star of ours.

WHETSTONE.

Hold! Professor Scythe, is that the so-called sea?

SCYTHE [_examining it with his glass_].

Yonder liquid and corrugated mass is the rumpled outskirts of the sea. In our scientific formula, it is the correlation of a mighty power.

WHETSTONE [_taking glass and examining_].

I can believe you.

BLUEGRASS.

Hercules Whetstone, patron of the arts and sciences, founder and president of the Cornville Academy as a paying investment, and nourisher of its infant civilization, proprietor of the Cornville Eagle--

WHETSTONE.

One moment, Major Bluegrass: that will do for the home market, but not among strangers. I’ve given you both a summer vacation, so that you may enjoy yourselves, and work harder when you return. Now, look around, store up knowledge, and--I won’t deduct the time from your salaries. That’s business. But you must be more particular about my titles. Always speak of me to strangers as the Honorable Mayor Hercules Whetstone, the Merchant Prince of Cornville, near the capital of Illinois,--called Hercules after his grand-uncle Hercules, who drove the Indians down the Mississippi. Do you follow me?

BLUEGRASS, SCYTHE.

We do.

BLUEGRASS.

Oh, why was I so long pent up in the heart of a continent? I can remain on land no longer.

SCYTHE [_taking out his note-book and writing_].

Item,--this is important. Major Bluegrass, long pent up in the heart of the American continent, upon his first sight of the sea wishes to swim. This is of great scientific value, as it shows the recurrence, after long deprivation, of an inherited pre-Adamite instinct; for we read that Adam walked, but never that he swam, therefore are we driven to the waters for evidence. It proves the origin of man from the oyster, or some more ancient inhabitant of the sea.

BLUEGRASS.

I am no fish, nor ever was. I’d rather spring from a rainbow than a pond.

SCYTHE.

A pond is your rainbow come to earth.

BLUEGRASS.

I must swim. Oh, Mayor Whetstone, let us all swim!

SCYTHE [_writing in his note-book_].

The pre-Adamite instinct in the presence of its primary environment manifests increasing ratio.

BLUEGRASS.

Professor, take your increasing ratio and slide down to the imponderable roots of the sea. I must get out of this prison of clothes, and into the water.

WHETSTONE.

Major, try to feel comfortable with your clothes on, for you’d soon be imprisoned without them.

BLUEGRASS.

No dungeon of clothes can hold me! What a lofty repose comes over me as I survey yon glittering expanse of water, like a blue field of undulating velvet! A tear of joy I give to thee, O mighty sea!

SCYTHE [_writing in his note-book_].

Item,--he returns a saline tear to the sea, in memory of his pre-Adamite ancestor. This is the pre-Raphaelism of natural selection.

WHETSTONE.

You are my scientist, my threefold Professor of three chairs,--natural science, hygiene, and agriculture,--in my Cornville Academy. Now, to create a money-making hunger for science at the Academy we must popularize it. Therefore, give me the scientific facts about the sea in a popular sort of way, so that all may understand and enjoy them.

SCYTHE.

Its remote abysses are inhabited by the mammoths of natural history and evolutionary philosophy; and vast herds of sea-cattle graze upon its marine meadows, like buffaloes upon the prairies. In fact, our prairies were once the bottom of the sea, and the buffaloes were supposed to have been left when the waters receded.

BLUEGRASS.

Your marine buffaloes must wear anchors around their necks, instead of cow-bells.

SCYTHE.

Not so. Nature always provides for her creatures; for, as birds soaring above the mountain-tops have great wings of feathers, so, on the other hand, these cattle have immense hoofs, of a substance resembling lead, but much heavier than the lead of commerce.

WHETSTONE.

That adds to their commercial value. Major Bluegrass, you’re my private secretary, and editor of my Cornville Eagle: what do you know about the sea?

BLUEGRASS.

I only know what I want to see: I want to see the sport the mermaids see down in their prismatic sea homes, drinking out of beautiful sea-shells, while pearls drop at their iridescent feet. Oh, Hercules Whetstone, you are rich! Get me a diving-bell. I’ll interview the mermaids for the benefit of the Eagle, scoop our rival, the Hawkeye Observer, and send up the Eagle’s circulation ten thousand.

WHETSTONE.

Blue thunder, Major, be calm! Ever since we arrived here you’ve been as excited as if you expected to see a drove of fairies and hobgoblins jump out of every bush and dance in the air.

SCYTHE.

He may have caught the infection of the season: for it is now the so-called fairies’ season of drolleries and bewitchments. It was a delusion of the ancients, and yet it had some scientific basis,--for science shows that this full summer tide heightens and ripens the natural dispositions of men, so that what is most natural in them often seems most strange.

WHETSTONE.

Professor, examine his hygiene, and see if he needs any medicine.

SCYTHE [_feeling his pulse_].

What’s this? Why, this pulse beneath my finger is the alarm-bell of a disordered system! Open wide your eyes. [_Looking into his eye._] What a distended foresight have we here! The pupil of the eye is dilated like an owl’s.

BLUEGRASS.

The owl stands for wisdom.

SCYTHE.

Silence! Hold out your tongue! [_He opens his mouth._] It has an overcoat with a high color. [_Taking out a thermometer._] The temperature is seventy-two outside [_taking the temperature under his tongue_], and inside, under the shade of the tongue, it is ninety-nine and nine-tenths. Why, we are approaching spontaneous combustion! [_Feeling his forehead._] And your forehead is as hot as a volcano. Mayor Whetstone, you may in a few hours lose your private secretary.

WHETSTONE.

I cannot afford to lose him yet; save him, Professor, save him!

SCYTHE.

I will obey. The unimpeachable symptoms indicate hypothetical impoverishment of the blood, complicated by a highly inflamed excitation of the nerve-tissues. We must at once build up an iron constitution.

WHETSTONE.

Build him up, Professor, he’s too sensitive; make an ironclad man of him, like myself. Give him ribs of iron.

SCYTHE [_presenting two pills_].

Here are two pills of iron. I’m an Eclectic. This in my right hand is the mammoth shell of the Allopathic school, and this in my left, balanced upon a point of my little finger, and no larger than a solitary grain of mustard-seed, is a fine shot of the Homœopathic school.

BLUEGRASS.

I don’t choose either of your schools. I belong to the Hydropathic school.

WHETSTONE.

He who will not swallow a school of medicine to save his life, must be made to do so. Here, Professor, while I hold him, give him a schooling.

[_They try to give_ BLUEGRASS _an iron pill_.

BLUEGRASS.

Friends, have you no philopena? Give me no pill of iron. May you ne’er sleep with down within your pillow! Oh! put me in a pillory, but put no pill in me. Oh! [_They succeed in giving him a pill._] I’m pilled; the iron has entered my system; how very hard I’ll soon lie down upon my little pillow. And thou, hard Whetstone, thus to sharpen Scythe to mow me down! Cæsar was stabbed by the iron daggers of the conspirators, but I am slugged by an iron bolus from the hands of my friends. This is ironical. Alas! I am a pundit; for as a typical representative of the pun, e’en while the iron was in my heart I have doubly punn’d it.

SCYTHE.

The iron that enters your blood gives life, not death. Thus does modern science show her supremacy over ancient passion.

BLUEGRASS.

You speak well. I’m better now. I acquit you both, and greet you as my friends. [_They all shake hands._] What a weird place for a marine poem! Would that a seamaid I might be made to see!

WHETSTONE.

Hold on; I have it.

SCYTHE.

What?

WHETSTONE.

Sea-cattle, Professor: they live?

SCYTHE.

Most profoundly! Among wild cattle are the sea-lion, sea-elephant, sea-unicorn--

WHETSTONE.

Stop! We must get a so-called unicorn for the Cornville Aquarium.

SCYTHE.

Among domestic cattle, vast droves of sea-pigs--in our inland nomenclature called porpoises--appear upon its surface when the sea boils, before a storm; and sea-calves, sea-cows, and sea-oxen roam its salt sea pastures.

BLUEGRASS.

This is the romance of science.

WHETSTONE.

We must land them!

SCYTHE.

What do you purpose to do with the porpoises and other sea-cattle?

WHETSTONE.

How little you know of the grand possibilities of business! Why, I’ll build up a new industry on these shores. I am the Merchant Prince of Cornville. Here I’ll be a sea-cattle king; I’ll make a fresh fortune in my gigantic monster emporium for salted sea-cattle. And now to the Dolphin Inn, where I’m to meet Northlake. Then for business by the sea.

[_Exeunt._

Act the Second.