And they
were so tame and cunning, and would follow me all around!" Then I tell
her of the horrors of the French Revolution to distract her attention
from the present crisis, and alluded to the horrors of cannibalism
recently disclosed in Africa. Then I fall into a queer reverie and
imagine how awful it would be if we should ever be called to submit to a
race of beings as much larger than we are as we are above the fowls. I
almost hear such a monster of a house-wife, fully ninety feet high, say
to a servant, looking sternly and critically at me:
"That fat, white creature must be killed; just eats her old head
off--will soon be too tough"--Ugh! Here Tom comes with five headless
fowls. Wasn't that a weird fancy of mine?
Truly "Me and Crankin's two different critters."
From the following verse, quoted from a recent poultry magazine, I
conclude that I must be classed as a "chump." As it contains the secret
of success in every undertaking, it should be committed to memory by all
my readers.
"Grit makes the man,
The want of it the chump.
The men who win,
Lay hold, hang on, and hump."
CHAPTER VI.
GHOSTS.
"But stop," says the courteous and prudent reader, "are there any
such things as ghosts?"
"Any ghostesses!" cries Superstition, who settled long since in the
country, near a church yard on a "rising ground," "any ghostesses!
Ay, man, lots on 'em! Bushels on 'em! Sights on 'em! Why, there's
one as walks in our parish, reglar as the clock strikes twelve--and
always the same round, over church-stile, round the corner, through
the gap, into Shorts Spinney, and so along into our close, where he
takes a drink at the pump--for ye see he died in liquor, and then
arter he squenched hisself, wanishes into waper.
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