[The Professor talks with the Reader.He tells a Young Girl's Story.]
When the elements that went to the making of the first man, father of mankind, had been withdrawn from the world of unconscious matter, the balance of creation was disturbed.The materials that go to the making of one woman were set free by the abstraction from inanimate nature of one man's-worth of masculine constituents.These combined to make our first mother, by a logical necessity involved in the previous creation of our common father.All this, mythically, illustratively, and by no means doctrinally or polemically.
The man implies the woman, you will understand.The excellent gentleman whom I had the pleasure of setting right in a trifling matter a few weeks ago believes in the frequent occurrence of miracles at the present day.So do I.I believe, if you could find an uninhabited coral-reef island, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, with plenty of cocoa-palms and bread-fruit on it, and put a handsome young fellow, like our Marylander, ashore upon it, if you touched there a year afterwards, you would find him walking under the palm-trees arm in arm with a pretty woman.
Where would she come from?
Oh, that 's the miracle!
--I was just as certain, when I saw that fine, high-colored youth at the upper right-hand corner of our table, that there would appear some fitting feminine counterpart to him, as if I had been a clairvoyant, seeing it all beforehand.
--I have a fancy that those Marylanders are just about near enough to the sun to ripen well.--How some of us fellows remember Joe and Harry, Baltimoreans, both! Joe, with his cheeks like lady-apples, and his eyes like black-heart cherries, and his teeth like the whiteness of the flesh of cocoanuts, and his laugh that set the chandelier-drops rattling overhead, as we sat at our sparkling banquets in those gay ,times! Harry, champion, by acclamation, of the college heavy-weights, broad-shouldered, bull-necked, square-jawed, six feet and trimmings, a little science, lots of pluck, good-natured as a steer in peace, formidable as a red-eyed bison in the crack of hand-to-hand battle! Who forgets the great muster-day, and the collision of the classic with the democratic forces? The huge butcher, fifteen stone,--two hundred and ten pounds,--good weight,--steps out like Telamonian Ajax, defiant.No words from Harry, the Baltimorean,--one of the quiet sort, who strike first; and do the talking, if there is any, afterwards.No words, but, in the place thereof, a clean, straight, hard hit, which took effect with a spank like the explosion of a percussion-cap, knocking the slayer of beeves down a sand-bank,--followed, alas! by the too impetuous youth, so that both rolled down together, and the conflict terminated in one of those inglorious and inevitable Yankee clinches, followed by a general melee, which make our native fistic encounters so different from such admirably-ordered contests as that which I once saw at an English fair, where everything was done decently and in order; and the fight began and ended with such grave propriety, that a sporting parson need hardly have hesitated to open it with a devout petition, and, after it was over, dismiss the ring with a benediction.
I can't help telling one more story about this great field-day, though it is the most wanton and irrelevant digression.But all of us have a little speck of fight underneath our peace and good-will to men, just a speck, for revolutions and great emergencies, you know,--so that we should not submit to be trodden quite flat by the first heavy-heeled aggressor that came along.You can tell a portrait from an ideal head, I suppose, and a true story from one spun out of the writer's invention.See whether this sounds true or not.
Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin sent out two fine blood-horses, Barefoot and Serab by name, to Massachusetts, something before the time I am talking of.With them came a Yorkshire groom, a stocky little fellow, in velvet breeches, who made that mysterious hissing noise, traditionary in English stables, when he rubbed down the silken-skinned racers, in great perfection.After the soldiers had come from the muster-field, and some of the companies were on the village-common, there was still some skirmishing between a few individuals who had not had the fight taken out of them.The little Yorkshire groom thought he must serve out somebody.So he threw himself into an approved scientific attitude, and, in brief, emphatic language, expressed his urgent anxiety to accommodate any classical young gentleman who chose to consider himself a candidate for his attentions.I don't suppose there were many of the college boys that would have been a match for him in the art which Englishmen know so much more of than Americans, for the most part.However, one of the Sophomores, a very quiet, peaceable fellow, just stepped out of the crowd, and, running straight at the groom, as he stood there, sparring away, struck him with the sole of his foot, a straight blow, as if it had been with his fist, and knocked him heels over head and senseless, so that he had to be carried off from the field.This ugly way of hitting is the great trick of the French gavate, which is not commonly thought able to stand its ground against English pugilistic science.These are old recollections, with not much to recommend them, except, perhaps, a dash of life, which may be worth a little something.
The young Marylander brought them all up, you may remember.He recalled to my mind those two splendid pieces of vitality I told you of.Both have been long dead.How often we see these great red-flaring flambeaux of life blown out, as it were, by a puff of wind, --and the little, single-wicked night-lamp of being, which some white-faced and attenuated invalid shades with trembling fingers, flickering on while they go out one after another, until its glimmer is all that is left to us of the generation to which it belonged!
