LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

the surgeon thinks it was

       Tuesday. The child will never know its own birthday. It will always be choosing first one and then the other, and will never be able to make up its mind permanently. This will breed vacillation and uncertainty in its opinions about religion, and politics, and business, and sweethearts, and everything, and will undermine its principles, and rot them away, and make the poor thing characterless, and its success in life impossible. Every one in the ship says so. And this is not all--in fact, not the

       worst. For there is an enormously rich brewer in the ship who said as much as ten days ago, that if the child was born on his birthday he would give it ten thousand dollars to start its little life with. His birthday

       was Monday, the 9th of September.

       If the ships all moved in the one direction--westward, I mean--the world would suffer a prodigious loss--in the matter of valuable time, through

       the dumping overboard on the Great Meridian of such multitudes of days by ships crews and passengers. But fortunately the ships do not all sail

       west, half of them sail east. So there is no real loss. These latter

       pick up all the discarded days and add them to the world's stock again; and about as good as new, too; for of course the salt water preserves them.

       70

       CHAPTER V.

       Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.

       --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

       WEDNESDAY, Sept. 11. In this world we often make mistakes of judgment. We do not as a rule get out of them sound and whole, but sometimes we do. At dinner yesterday evening-present, a mixture of Scotch, English,

       American, Canadian, and Australasian folk--a discussion broke out about the pronunciation of certain Scottish words. This was private ground, and the non-Scotch nationalities, with one exception, discreetly kept

       still. But I am not discreet, and I took a hand. I didn't know anything about the subject, but I took a hand just to have something to do. At

       that moment the word in dispute was the word three. One Scotchman was claiming that the peasantry of Scotland pronounced it three, his adversaries claimed that they didn't--that they pronounced it 'thraw'.

       The solitary Scot was having a sultry time of it, so I thought I would enrich him with my help. In my position I was necessarily quite

       impartial, and was equally as well and as ill equipped to fight on the

       one side as on the other. So I spoke up and said the peasantry pronounced the word three, not thraw. It was an error of judgment. There was a moment of astonished and ominous silence, then weather ensued. The storm rose and spread in a surprising way, and I was snowed under in a very few minutes. It was a bad defeat for me--a kind of

       71

       Waterloo. It promised to remain so, and I wished I had had better sense than to enter upon such a forlorn enterprise. But just then I had a

       saving thought--at least a thought that offered a chance. While the

       storm was still raging, I made up a Scotch couplet, and then spoke up and said:

       "Very well, don't say any more. I confess defeat. I thought I knew, but

       I see my mistake. I was deceived by one of your Scotch poets."

       "A Scotch poet! O come! Name him."

       "Robert Burns."

       It is wonderful the power of that name. These men looked doubtful--but paralyzed, all the same. They were quite silent for a moment; then one

       of them said--with the reverence in his voice which is always present in a Scotchman's tone when he utters the name.

       "Does Robbie Burns say--what does he say?"

       "This is what he says:

       'There were nae bairns but only three

       --Ane at the breast, twa at the knee.'"

       It ended the discussion. There was no man there profane enough, disloyal enough, to say any word against a thing which Robert Burns had settled.

       I shall always honor that great name for the salvation it brought me in

       this time of my sore need.

       72

       It is my belief that nearly any invented quotation, played with

       confidence, stands a good chance to deceive. There are people who think

       that honesty is always the best policy. This is a superstition; there are times when the appearance of it is worth six of it.

       We are moving steadily southward-getting further and further down under the projecting paunch of the globe. Yesterday evening we saw the Big Dipper and the north star sink below the horizon and disappear from our world. No, not "we," but they. They saw it--somebody saw it--and told

       me about it. But it is no matter, I was not caring for those things, I

       am tired of them, any way. I think they are well enough, but one doesn't want them always hanging around. My interest was all in the Southern Cross. I had never seen that. I had heard about it all my life, and it

       was but natural that I should be burning to see it. No other constellation makes so much talk. I had nothing against the Big Dipper

       --and naturally couldn't have anything against it, since it is a citizen of

       our own sky, and the property of the United States--but I did want it to move out of the way and give this foreigner a chance. Judging by the

       size of the talk which the Southern Cross had made, I supposed it would need a sky all to itself.

       But that was a mistake. We saw the Cross to-night, and it is not large. Not large, and not strikingly bright. But it was low down toward the horizon, and it may improve when it gets up higher in the sky. It is ingeniously named, for it looks just as a cross would look if it looked like something else. But that description does not describe; it is too vague, too general, too indefinite. It does after a fashion suggest a

       73

       cross -- a cross that is out of repair--or out of drawing; not correctly shaped. It is long, with a short cross-bar, and the cross-bar is canted out of the straight line.

       It consists of four large stars and one little one. The little one is

       out of line and further damages the shape. It should have been placed at the intersection of the stem and the cross-bar. If you do not draw an imaginary line from star to star it does not suggest a cross--nor

       anything in particular.

       One must ignore the little star, and leave it out of the combination--it confuses everything. If you leave it out, then you can make out of the four stars a sort of cross--out of true; or a sort of kite--out of true;

       or a sort of coffin-out of true.

       Constellations have always been troublesome things to name. If you give one of them a fanciful name, it will always refuse to live up to it; it

       will always persist in not resembling the thing it has been named for. Ultimately, to satisfy the public, the fanciful name has to be discarded for a common-sense one, a manifestly descriptive one. The Great Bear remained the Great Bear--and unrecognizable as such--for thousands of years; and people complained about it all the time, and quite properly; but as soon as it became the property of the United States, Congress

       changed it to the Big Dipper, and now every body is satisfied, and there

       is no more talk about riots. I would not change the Southern Cross to

       the Southern Coffin, I would change it to the Southern Kite; for up there

       in the general emptiness is the proper home of a kite, but not for coffins and crosses and dippers. In a little while, now--I cannot tell exactly how long it will be--the globe will belong to the

       74

       English-speaking race; and of course

Скачать книгу