SCENE I.--_On the seashore. Afternoon.

_Enter_ WHETSTONE, BLUEGRASS, _and_ SCYTHE.

WHETSTONE.

Well, boys, I’ve seen Northlake, and we’ve all had a good dinner. A good dinner is also a good romance. Never despise money. Do you follow me?

BLUEGRASS, SCYTHE.

We do.

WHETSTONE.

Then let us come to business at once. I’ve brought you out here to have a consultation, and to get your opinion on certain things, each in his own department of learning, according to the salaries I pay you. I’ve arranged to do a fine piece of business. I’m a man of business, and I’m a man in love. I’m in love with my business, and I’ll make a business of my love. Professor, how should a man dress to be a so-called lover?

SCYTHE.

That depends; but this is true: He that loves is like a traveller between the north and south poles, and he will need different suits of clothing, and philosophy.

BLUEGRASS.

What an explanation! [_laughing_] ha-ha-ha!

WHETSTONE.

Professor, what is the laugh?

SCYTHE.

My analysis of the laugh is not yet completed, and I am now seeking to produce the missing link. However, the juxtaposition of two incongruous yet contemporaneous images in the mind is simultaneous with contrasting and varying pressures upon the electrically charged nerves. These varying pressures by reflex action cause the pleasurable action of the muscles called the laugh. Let me illustrate. By varying and alternating pressures upon the electrically charged nerves of the eye there is presented to the mind the image of a lover caressing a maiden; and just beyond, the one view overlapping the other, we see a donkey eating the lover’s bouquet, and then [_laughing_] ha--ha--ha!

BLUEGRASS.

The donkey took the bouquet for an offering of beau’s hay.

WHETSTONE.

Be silent. No trifling with science! Professor, analyze me Violet.

BLUEGRASS.

I know! I’m at home in colors.

WHETSTONE.

Attention! We’re now in science.

SCYTHE.

The flower violet is the only organic substance in which science has discovered a trace of gold.

WHETSTONE.

Gold and Violet found together,--good! Why, science is a fortune-teller. Go on!

SCYTHE.

It is the most refrangible of the seven primary colors of the solar spectrum.

WHETSTONE.

What’s refrangible?

BLUEGRASS.

I know!

WHETSTONE.

Steady there, Bluegrass!

SCYTHE.

Let me illustrate. You discover by a violet light a beautiful fish in the water, and you wish to catch it. Now, you must throw your hook, dart, or net, not directly at it, but a considerable space this side, according to the depth.

WHETSTONE.

That’s fishing under difficulties. Do you mean to say that a man can’t see straight in a violet light?

BLUEGRASS.

I know! let me explain.

WHETSTONE.

Listen to the Professor!

SCYTHE.

Violet light passing from one medium into another of a different density becomes most refractory, and turned out of a direct course at an angle: in other words, you must angle for your fish. See my Tables on Molecular Structure, Density, etc., determined by angles of refraction.

WHETSTONE.

So if I get the hang of the angles and depth, I’m all right, am I?

SCYTHE.

In a scientific sense, you are.

WHETSTONE.

Oh, ho! then I’m pretty well posted on Violet. Now for the next point: Professor, what is love?

SCYTHE.

With the passionless precision of science, I say unto you, Mayor Whetstone, though she you love is the most symmetrical duplex pyramidal aggregation of atoms in the human saccharine conglomeration, shun love, and court science; for by spectroscopic analysis of the light proceeding from the eyes of jealous lovers, I have seen their spleen turning a dark green.

WHETSTONE.

I didn’t know it was so bad as that! Major, how do you regard love, from the heights of romance?

BLUEGRASS.

A region of enchantment.

WHETSTONE.

Yonder valley with verdure clothed would be a capital place for my emporium for porpoises, or so-called sea-pigs.

BLUEGRASS.

I implore you, Mayor Whetstone, do not project across my mental line of sight that animal, either in its terrestrial or marine form.

WHETSTONE.

He fills his destiny to the full; and besides, he is the most intelligent of animals. It is a historical fact that he was taught to play whist fifty years before the clever dog.

BLUEGRASS.

He jars on the landscape, and is a discord amidst the dulcet harmony of the waves.

WHETSTONE.

What would you have? The good pig eats all he can while he can; therefore he eats like a pig. Major Bluegrass, let me hear no more of your disparaging comments on the honest and assiduous pig,--the most useful and business-like of all our domestic animals. He can nobly hold up his head and represent corn converted. And while he turns the cornfields into bank-notes, shall we blame him if he does not serenade us with the notes of a silver flute?

SCYTHE.

I wish to make a moral observation upon a physical basis: Major, if the formula of your destiny were identical with the pig’s, you would give rise to more discordant vocalization than even that disgruntled animal.

BLUEGRASS.

He may be the most useful animal upon this magnificent star of ours; but though his good points were as many as his bristles, they could not excuse his shortcomings. The limited geographical prospects of his pen should make him deeply contemplative of the stars; instead of which he roots deeply in the earth. Hence he takes a step backwards, and, instead of increasing his wit, he increases only his weight.

SCYTHE.

Man is like a reversed vegetable that has swallowed its roots and walked off on its branches. Why, what is that at my feet? Let me pick it up tenderly. Hurrah! I’ve got a geologic pebble! See, Mayor Whetstone, what a rare, grand specimen for the prehistoric museum of the Cornville Academy!

WHETSTONE.

What’s it worth?

SCYTHE.

Worth! Mercenary man! Let us reverently take off our hats in its presence. It’s worth more than all the property in Cornville. See, Major, see!

BLUEGRASS.

Put it in your pocket, or some one will claim it.

SCYTHE.

Unfeeling man! No one shall claim it. You saw me pick it up. You are my witnesses.

BLUEGRASS.

To what geologic family does it belong?

SCYTHE.

It is a genuine relic of the cosmic dust. Hurrah! I’ve got a geologic pebble! See the fluted sheets of color pervading its interior! It must have been suspended in the pre-Adamite fires for ages. Gentlemen, remember you have seen no meteors in the sky.

[_Taking out his note-book and writing._

_Enter_ SMALL BOY, _crying_.

BOY.

Give me my marble!

SCYTHE.

Why, boy, this is no marble. ’Tis a very rare specimen of the dewdrop form of crystallization, precipitated during the prevalence of the primeval sand-storms, formed by the cooling of the stony vapors.

BOY.

Give me my marble, or I’ll call my mother!

WHETSTONE.

Professor, you may have picked up the wrong specimen.

SCYTHE.

There can be no mistake. Let me examine it with my microscope. [_Examining it._] I clearly recognize the uniformity of its circular strata of color, which could be formed only as it revolved on its own incandescent axis in super-heated fires. Boy, look through this glass, and then see if you have the youthful cheek to say it is--I tremble to say it--your marble.

BOY [_looking at it through the glass_].

That’s my colored marble; I was playing with it. [_To_ WHETSTONE _and_ BLUEGRASS.] Make him give it back to me, won’t you? It has a nick and the first letter of my name on it.

SCYTHE [_surprisedly, re-examining it_].

Why, boy, I cannot afford an unscientific controversy with you or your mother. Alas! take it. [_Giving marble to the_ BOY.] And when again you play with it, remember-- [_Exit_ BOY, _hastily_.] Thus do my hopes of a pre-Adamite museum wither. It was a unique specimen of the circular group of crystallization dreamed of by science, but hitherto undiscovered. Major, here comes your seamaid.

_Enter_ CATHARINE _in disguise, with a basket of fish_.

CATHARINE.

Good afternoon, gentlemen landsmen! I have fish in my basket; will you buy? I have your fortunes in my keeping; will you have them?

BLUEGRASS.

I salute you, by the sea, as a near relative in the fields of romance to the milking-maid of our inland pastures.

CATHARINE.

I take you to be landsmen, and, therefore, good fresh men. I am a fortune-teller with varied fortunes. Each summer, for a month, to these shores I come to renew and perfect the spirit’s vision, which, even like natural sight, is cleared by good free air and sunshine; and as men with glasses have seen ten hundred living things upon a pin’s point, so I, with spiritual lenses, have seen the past, present, and future, each in proper order, marshalled upon a space no larger than a spectacle glass.

WHETSTONE.

Pardon me,--your name and home?

CATHARINE.

My name is Catharine, and my home is wherever I am. I come from the city, where there are more sharks in one day than you will see here in a year, and where people in despair come to me for the fortune fate has denied them. I am more pitiful than fate; and their pleased looks give me a joy greater than does their pittance. Hence, poor souls, I give them precious pictures of future good, which, believing in, they achieve, and thus their griefs assuage.

BLUEGRASS.

We all, to-day, bear our fortunes lightly.

CATHARINE.

And may you at nightfall bear them as lightly! Fine weather makes quick friends. Come, then, gentlemen, will you buy? Each one in his own humor. If there be a true merchant among you, I will tempt him with the fish’s weight; if there be a moralist, with the fish’s moral; if there be a scientist, with the fish’s complicated structure; if there be a poet, with the fish’s most poetical history; if there be a gourmand, with the fish’s flavor. Each one shall see in the fish he buys, his own humor. He shall have both weight and moral; for a good moral without weight is immoral, and a good weight without a good moral is a dull measure. You shall pay me for the weight, for that the fish had in the sea; but for the moral, that is in my humor, and gain has taken a vacation. Every one has his pastime, and no one is so poor but he has his humor. Mine is to see men buy a fish, each in his own humor; for by the fish’s scales will I weigh him.

SCYTHE.

How came your hair so white at your age?

CATHARINE.

With losing of my husband, and giving of good fortunes. But come, gentlemen; fair weather makes quick friends, but unfair questions, like unfair weather, part them. Will you buy?

BLUEGRASS.

Let us buy.

WHETSTONE.

Let us first learn the price of the fish.

BLUEGRASS.

It sounds to me like a romance. Come, let us all sit here in pleasant converse; the night is afar, and while we buy we’ll enjoy the aroma of the salt-sea zephyrs blown from off the invisible flower-beds of the sea.

WHETSTONE.

Stop your perpetual romance!

BLUEGRASS.

Romance that is not perpetual, but goes by fits and starts, is not worth the reality it feeds upon.

WHETSTONE.

I’d put the price on everything,--trees, fences, houses, the baby’s rattle, and in its first primer a price-list of its expenses.

BLUEGRASS.

Hercules Whetstone, Mayor of Cornville, there are some things upon this magnificent star of ours that are not in the market,--things so high that you cannot reach and put a price upon them in the cold-blooded shambles of merchandise.

WHETSTONE.

There you go again, trying to throw star-dust in your benefactor’s eyes. Oh, why did I make you editor of my Cornville Eagle?

BLUEGRASS.

Because your Eagle was asleep, and I was the only one who could wake him up and make him soar into a higher circulation. He looked like a whipped buzzard that had dulled his talons upon old newspapers; but I put new life into him; and now that I have made you the proprietor of a newspaper which is a household word, and which will be in every scholar’s library at the close of human learning, you scoff at me. Such is glory in a commercial age! Columbus may discover, but the merchant Americus gives his name to two continents.

SCYTHE.

Good woman, some undesirable chemical change may take place in your fish. I would advise you to put some salt on them. I am a chemist.

CATHARINE.

The fish are dead; they cannot hear.

SCYTHE.

Mayor Whetstone, why do you not change the Eagle to the Hawkeye Review of Western Science?

BLUEGRASS.

Strip that proud bird of his plumage, and in less than seven revolutions of this magnificent star of ours he will have fewer followers than a vanquished rooster.

WHETSTONE.

Major, I cannot resist you. You are my true, my great and only editor. Give me your hand; let us be friends.

BLUEGRASS.

Now let us go on with our romance. [_To_ CATHARINE.] Bring on your fish!

CATHARINE.

There are as queer fish inside as outside the basket, I’ll warrant you. [_She presents the basket to_ WHETSTONE; _he selects a codfish_.] That is a fish in weight and look of much import,--the codfish. He is an aristocrat among the shoals and schools, and he has done much to build up our own aristocracy. [_She presents the basket to_ SCYTHE, _and he selects a Holothurian_.]

SCYTHE.

Why, madam, this is a rare fish, a Holothurian, vulgarly called a sea-cucumber, from its resemblance to that common garden vegetable. I’ll mount its skeleton at once. It is the fish of science, and has the power of analysis; for ’tis written that when attacked, for self-protection it will divide itself into many pieces, or turn itself inside out.

_She presents the basket to_ BLUEGRASS, _and he selects a flying-fish_.

BLUEGRASS.

How beautiful!

CATHARINE.

Yes, ’tis a flying-fish, which, rising above the heavy and obscurer element of its kind, and using its fins as wings, in aërial courses, sparkling like a jewel, beholds the glittering and sunlit scenery of the upper air. There is much similarity between these excursions and the poet’s fancies. And as these lower creatures in their airy flights excite the wonderment of fishes and please men, so may human excursions in the higher element of fancy excite the wonderment of men and please the gods.

BLUEGRASS [_in admiration_].

Madam, consider yourself engaged as sea-side correspondent of the Cornville Eagle: topic, sea-fish and their morals. Please accept my card, and draw upon me for a month’s salary.

[_Gives his card._

SCYTHE [_writing in his note-book_].

Item,--this is important. In evolution, the grasshopper sprang from the flying-fish.

WHETSTONE.

What birds are those flying above the waves and darting like flying squirrels?

CATHARINE.

They are the larks of the sea, and in the wake of a ship are wider awake than your land larks.

BLUEGRASS.

Madam, with your permission,--upon the first streak of dawn our common meadow-lark has been known to climb the heavenly vaults above this magnificent star of ours like a morning-glory of song.

WHETSTONE.

Professor Scythe, explain.

SCYTHE [_examining the birds with his glass_].

Leaving, for a moment, grave mysteries of the deep upon the floor of the abysmal sea, we ascend to trace in the flight of a simple bird its name and family. The wings of the bird are the pre-Adamite forefeet of an animal which, through ceaseless efforts of evolution, became crowned with feathers. From the movements of these feathered forefeet we can tell all about the bird. Now, Mayor Whetstone, take this glass. [_He gives glass to_ WHETSTONE, _who follows the movements of the bird with it_.] Now watch closely the parabola of dip or curve of flight that puts it in the great family of web-footed water-fowls. See the unwavering scoop, the practiced and web-footed ease with which it grazes a wave. We have before us a genuine sea-gull.

WHETSTONE.

Major, put that in the Eagle, and see how it looks in print. Something’s bitten me! it must be one of your sea-fleas.

[_Looking up his sleeve._

BLUEGRASS.

Sea-flea; do you see it?

CATHARINE.

To see a flea, you must flee the sea,--unless perchance you may see a deep-sea flea such as I have at the bottom of my basket. [_Takes out a lobster._] This is the wicked flea the fisherman pursues. He will give a biting relish to your codfish.

[_Offers lobster to_ WHETSTONE, _who draws back_.

WHETSTONE.

Is he dead?

CATHARINE.

Such is his seeming.

WHETSTONE.

What a monster! [_Observing the lobster._] Professor, what’s his scientific history?

SCYTHE [_weariedly_].

I don’t know.

WHETSTONE.

Don’t know! Professor, it cost me a heap of money to build my nursery of learning, the Cornville Academy, and I’m going to make it the biggest paying institution on this broad continent. I’ve advertised you in letters big as fence-posts as our own prided prince of science, engaged at an enormous salary. There are already applications for next term from over five hundred anxious fathers of wonderful sons. Can I afford to disappoint them? No. Can you stand there and calmly tell me you cannot give me so simple a thing as the history of a deep-sea flea?

SCYTHE [_looking at lobster with his glass_].

In the race for life, he first made his appearance in the epoch of the mammoth, anterior to the gigantic antediluvians, before the apparition of man upon the earth, and at a season in the progressive series of pre-Adamite evolution soon after the separation of the crocodile branch from the main stem, about forty-five millions of years ago.

WHETSTONE.

Astonishing! so long as that?

SCYTHE.

I will not in detail give his scientific biography. It is sufficient that during this period he gorged himself with the blood of these primeval mammoths, which accounts for his size, and often, frenzied by the harrowing appetite of this parasite, these gigantic and prehistoric brutes made the primeval forests for a hundred miles ring with their helpless bellowings. But I will not further excite your pity for the remote ages.

WHETSTONE.

Go on, Professor, go on!

SCYTHE.

This was the summer of his race; but, alas! then came the glacial period. He was frozen up with the mammoths, and remained so for probably twenty millions of years; but such was his tenacity of life, that when the world thawed out, he again appeared, his skin somewhat hardened by exposure,--a fact which you will recognize,--but otherwise cheerful, and in his usual health. Well may his kind be grateful; for, wrapped in ice for æons of time, he was the slender thread upon which their future hung.

WHETSTONE.

But why did he take to the sea?

SCYTHE.

After the apparition of man upon the earth he was driven into the sea by the excited inhabitants.

WHETSTONE.

Major, this is truly wonderful. The Academy will succeed.

BLUEGRASS.

’Tis the very romance of science.

WHETSTONE.

But, Professor, what was the glacial period?

SCYTHE.

Well, sir, the glacial period was an epoch when, from a business point of view, ice was cheaper than dirt. Had the apparition then occurred, man could have gone all over the globe on skates. But as it was a vast ball of ice, he would probably have slipped off into space, and nothing more would have been heard of him. And so this star of ice for countless ages rolled on through the sky like a big snow-ball; but at last the great electric sun struck the earth on the equator, which accounts for the equatorial bulge which exists to this day. Then commenced the greatest drama of the elements ever witnessed upon our planet. The vast ice-fields were riven in twain, with terrific reports which reverberated through the heavenly spaces, and to which our present thunder is but as an elemental whisper. Icebergs formed, and in fantastic and sublime shapes, towering mountain high and illuminated by the sun, floated down towards the equator.

WHETSTONE.

Go on, don’t stop; go on.

SCYTHE.

Then commenced the great oscillation of the land-masses; then the eruptive rocks and sedimentary strata were moved from their foundations. Then occurred the geologic epoch of the denudation and washdown of hills and mountains, and then were formed the ocean floors, the islands, and the continental areas which we inhabit.

WHETSTONE.

Put that in the Eagle. [_The lobster clings to him._] Hello! What’s the matter now? Professor! Major! Woman! Take off your flea!

BLUEGRASS.

Be a hero!

WHETSTONE.

Great thunder! take him off. He has claws to his eyes. [_Takes off his coat, with the lobster clinging to it._] Major, this is your fault. Don’t speak to me again until you apologize. Come, Professor.

[_Exeunt_ SCYTHE _and_ WHETSTONE _carrying his coat with lobster clinging to it_.

CATHARINE.

Fair is your prairie wit, and these sea-scenes have keen spices which well try its mettle. He that is young and fresh shall have the salt of experience. Many that come here to be salted by the sea are seasoned by love. Would you be so seasoned?

BLUEGRASS.

If it be a fair, good seasoning.

CATHARINE.

At yonder villa by the sea I well know Mademoiselle Ninon, a French maid who is in friendly service to one Violet. She has a dainty wit, with a foreign flavor that will season you well.

BLUEGRASS.

Acquaint us. I would be so seasoned.

CATHARINE.

To-day she comes that I may tell her fortune. Be at the masquerade to-night; wear a blue ribbon,--there you shall meet her. Trust me. Fare thee well.

[_Exit_ CATHARINE.

BLUEGRASS.

This is genuine romance. ’Tis sweeter than ambrosia. Oh, why was I so long pent up in the heart of a continent? Farewell, dull facts of business which have stung me sharper than thistles. Roll on, magnificent star, and bring night and romance.

[_Exit._