Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Delphi Classics)

by Ambrose Bierce

  “I hold the human eye in profound esteem,” replied the lion, “and I confess its power. It assists digestion if taken just before a meal. But I don’t understand why you should have two and I none.”

  With that he raised his foot, unsheathed his claws, and transferred one of the gentleman’s visual organs to his own mouth.

  “Now,” continued he, “during the brief remainder of a squandered existence, your lion-quelling power, being more highly concentrated, will be the more easily managed.”

  He then devoured the remnant of his victim, including the other eye.

  LXVIII.

  An ant laden with a grain of corn, which he had acquired with infinite toil, was breasting a current of his fellows, each of whom, as is their etiquette, insisted upon stopping him, feeling him all over, and shaking hands. It occurred to him that an excess of ceremony is an abuse of courtesy. So he laid down his burden, sat upon it, folded all his legs tight to his body, and smiled a smile of great grimness.

  “Hullo! what’s the matter with you?” exclaimed the first insect whose overtures were declined.

  “Sick of the hollow conventionalities of a rotten civilization,” was the rasping reply. “Relapsed into the honest simplicity of primitive observances. Go to grass!”

  “Ah! then we must trouble you for that corn. In a condition of primitive simplicity there are no rights of property, you know. These are ‘hollow conventionalities.’”

  A light dawned upon the intellect of that pismire. He shook the reefs out of his legs; he scratched the reverse of his ear; he grappled that cereal, and trotted away like a giant refreshed. It was observed that he submitted with a wealth of patience to manipulation by his friends and neighbours, and went some distance out of his way to shake hands with strangers on competing lines of traffic.

  LXIX.

  A snake who had lain torpid all winter in his hole took advantage of the first warm day to limber up for the spring campaign. Having tied himself into an intricate knot, he was so overcome by the warmth of his own body that he fell asleep, and did not wake until nightfall. In the darkness he was unable to find his head or his tail, and so could not disentangle and slide into his hole. Per consequence, he froze to death.

  Many a subtle philosopher has failed to solve himself, owing to his inability to discern his beginning and his end.

  LXX.

  A dog finding a joint of mutton, apparently guarded by a negligent raven, stretched himself before it with an air of intense satisfaction.

  “Ah!” said he, alternately smiling and stopping up the smiles with meat, “this is an instrument of salvation to my stomach — an instrument upon which I love to perform.”

  “I beg your pardon!” said the bird; “it was placed there specially for me, by one whose right to so convey it is beyond question, he having legally acquired it by chopping it off the original owner.”

  “I detect no flaw in your abstract of title,” replied the dog; “all seems quite regular; but I must not provoke a breach of the peace by lightly relinquishing what I might feel it my duty to resume by violence. I must have time to consider; and in the meantime I will dine.”

  Thereupon he leisurely consumed the property in dispute, shut his eyes, yawned, turned upon his back, thrust out his legs divergently, and died.

  For the meat had been carefully poisoned — a fact of which the raven was guiltily conscious.

  There are several things mightier than brute force, and arsenic [C] is one of them.

  LXXI.

  The King of Persia had a favourite hawk. One day his Majesty was hunting, and had become separated from his attendants. Feeling thirsty, he sought a stream of water trickling from a rock; took a cup, and pouring some liquor into it from his pocket-flask, filled it up with water, and raised it to his lips. The hawk, who had been all this time hovering about, swooped down, screaming “No, you don’t!” and upset the cup with his wing.

  “I know what is the matter,” said the King: “there is a dead serpent in the fountain above, and this faithful bird has saved my life by not permitting me to drink the juice. I must reward him in the regular way.”

  So he called a page, who had thoughtfully presented himself, and gave directions to have the Remorse Apartments of the palace put in order, and for the court tailor to prepare an evening suit of sackcloth-and-ashes. Then summoning the hawk, he seized and dashed him to the ground, killing him very dead. Rejoining his retinue, he dispatched an officer to remove the body of the serpent from the fountain, lest somebody else should get poisoned. There wasn’t any serpent — the water was remarkable for its wholesome purity!

  Then the King, cheated of his remorse, was sorry he had slain the bird; he said it was a needless waste of power to kill a bird who merely deserved killing. It never occurred to the King that the hawk’s touching solicitude was with reference to the contents of the royal flask.

  Fabula ostendit that a “twice-told tale” needs not necessarily be “tedious”; a reasonable degree of interest may be obtained by intelligently varying the details.

  LXXII.

  A herd of cows, blown off the summit of the Himalayas, were sailing some miles above the valleys, when one said to another:

  “Got anything to say about this?”

  “Not much,” was the answer. “It’s airy.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of that,” continued the first; “I am troubled about our course. If we could leave the Pleiades a little more to the right, striking a middle course between Boötes and the ecliptic, we should find it all plain sailing as far as the solstitial colure. But once we get into the Zodiac upon our present bearing, we are certain to meet with shipwreck before reaching our aphelion.”

  They escaped this melancholy fate, however, for some Chaldean shepherds, seeing a nebulous cloud drifting athwart the heavens, and obscuring a favourite planet they had just invented, brought out their most powerful telescopes and resolved it into independent cows — whom they proceeded to slaughter in detail with the instruments of smaller calibre. There have been occasional “meat showers” ever since. These are probably nothing more than —

  [Our author can be depended upon in matters of fact; his scientific theories are not worth printing. — TRANSLATOR.]

  LXXIII.

  A bear, who had worn himself out walking from one end of his cage to the other, addressed his keeper thus:

  “I say, friend, if you don’t procure me a shorter cage I shall have to give up zoology; it is about the most wearing pursuit I ever engaged in. I favour the advancement of science, but the mechanical part of it is a trifle severe, and ought to be done by contract.”

  “You are quite right, my hearty,” said the keeper, “it is severe; and there have been several excellent plans proposed to lighten the drudgery. Pending the adoption of some of them, you would find a partial relief in lying down and keeping quiet.”

  “It won’t do — it won’t do!” replied the bear, with a mournful shake of the head, “it’s not the orthodox thing. Inaction may do for professors, collectors, and others connected with the ornamental part of the noble science; but for us, we must keep moving, or zoology would soon revert to the crude guesses and mistaken theories of the azoic period. And yet,” continued the beast, after the keeper had gone, “there is something novel and ingenious in what the underling suggests. I must remember that; and when I have leisure, give it a trial.”

  It was noted next day that the noble science had lost an active apostle, and gained a passive disciple.

  LXXIV.

  A hen who had hatched out a quantity of ducklings, was somewhat surprised one day to see them take to the water, and sail away out of her jurisdiction. The more she thought of this the more unreasonable such conduct appeared, and the more indignant she became. She resolved that it must cease forthwith. So she soon afterward convened her brood, and conducted them to the margin of a hot pool, having a business connection with the boiling spring of Doo-sno-swair. They straightway launched themselves for a cruise
— returning immediately to the land, as if they had forgotten their ship’s papers.

  When Callow Youth exhibits an eccentric tendency, give it him hot.

  LXXV.

  “Did it ever occur to you that this manner of thing is extremely unpleasant?” asked a writhing worm of the angler who had impaled him upon a hook. “Such treatment by those who boast themselves our brothers is, possibly, fraternal — but it hurts.”

  “I confess,” replied the idler, “that our usages with regard to vermin and reptiles might be so amended as to be more temperately diabolical; but please to remember that the gentle agonies with which we afflict you are wholesome and exhilarating compared with the ills we ladle out to one another. During the reign of His Pellucid Refulgence, Khatchoo Khan,” he continued, absently dropping his wriggling auditor into the brook, “no less than three hundred thousand Persian subjects were put to death, in a pleasing variety of ingenious ways, for their religious beliefs.”

  “What that has to do with your treatment of us” interrupted a fish, who, having bitten at the worm just then, was drawn into the conversation, “I am quite unable to see.”

  “That,” said the angler, disengaging him, “is because you have the hook through your eyeball, my edible friend.”

  Many a truth is spoken in jest; but at least ten times as many falsehoods are uttered in dead earnest.

  LXXVI.

  A wild cat was listening with rapt approval to the melody of distant hounds tracking a remote fox.

  “Excellent! bravo!” she exclaimed at intervals. “I could sit and listen all day to the like of that. I am passionately fond of music. Ong-core!”

  Presently the tuneful sounds drew near, whereupon she began to fidget; ending by shinning up a tree, just as the dogs burst into view below her, and stifled their songs upon the body of their victim before her eyes — which protruded.

  “There is an indefinable charm,” said she—”a subtle and tender spell — a mystery — a conundrum, as it were — in the sounds of an unseen orchestra. This is quite lost when the performers are visible to the audience. Distant music (if any) for your obedient servant!”

  LXXVII.

  Having been taught to turn his scraps of bad Persian into choice Latin, a parrot was puffed up with conceit.

  “Observe,” said he, “the superiority I may boast by virtue of my classical education: I can chatter flat nonsense in the language of Cicero.”

  “I would advise you,” said his master, quietly, “to let it be of a different character from that chattered by some of Mr. Cicero’s most admired compatriots, if you value the priviledge of hanging at that public window. ‘Commit no mythology,’ please.”

  The exquisite fancies of a remote age may not be imitated in this; not, perhaps, from a lack of talent, so much as from a fear of arrest.

  LXXVIII.

  A rat, finding a file, smelt it all over, bit it gently, and observed that, as it did not seem to be rich enough to produce dyspepsia, he would venture to make a meal of it. So he gnawed it into smithareens [D] without the slightest injury to his teeth. With his morals the case was somewhat different. For the file was a file of newspapers, and his system became so saturated with the “spirit of the Press” that he went off and called his aged father a “lingering contemporary;” advised the correction of brief tails by amputation; lauded the skill of a quack rodentist for money; and, upon what would otherwise have been his death-bed, essayed a lie of such phenomenal magnitude that it stuck in his throat, and prevented him breathing his last. All this crime, and misery, and other nonsense, because he was too lazy to worry about and find a file of nutritious fables.

  This tale shows the folly of eating everything you happen to fancy. Consider, moreover, the danger of such a course to your neighbour’s wife.

  LXXIX.

  “I should like to climb up you, if you don’t mind,” cried an ivy to a young oak.

  “Oh, certainly; come along,” was the cheerful assent.

  So she started up, and finding she could grow faster than he, she wound round and round him until she had passed up all the line she had. The oak, however, continued to grow, and as she could not disengage her coils, she was just lifted out by the root. So that ends the oak-and-ivy business, and removes a powerful temptation from the path of the young writer.

  LXXX.

  A merchant of Cairo gave a grand feast. In the midst of the revelry, the great doors of the dining-hall were pushed open from the outside, and the guests were surprised and grieved by the advent of a crocodile of a tun’s girth, and as long as the moral law.

  “Thought I ‘d look in,” said he, simply, but not without a certain grave dignity.

  “But,” cried the host, from the top of the table, “I did not invite any saurians.”

  “No — I know yer didn’t; it’s the old thing, it is: never no wacancies for saurians — saurians should orter keep theirselves to theirselves — no saurians need apply. I got it all by ‘eart, I tell yer. But don’t give yerself no distress; I didn’t come to beg; thank ‘eaven I ain’t drove to that yet — leastwise I ain’t done it. But I thought as ‘ow yer’d need a dish to throw slops and broken wittles in it; which I fetched along this ‘ere.”

  And the willing creature lifted off the cover by erecting the upper half of his head till the snout of him smote the ceiling.

  Open servitude is better than covert begging.

  LXXXI.

  A gander being annoyed by the assiduous attendance of his ugly reflection in the water, determined that he would prosecute future voyages in a less susceptible element. So he essayed a sail upon the placid bosom of a clay-bank. This kind of navigation did not meet his expectations, however, and he returned with dogged despair to his pond, resolved to make a final cruise and go out of commission. He was delighted to find that the clay adhering to his hull so defiled the water that it gave back no image of him. After that, whenever he left port, he was careful to be well clayed along the water-line.

  The lesson of this is that if all geese are alike, we can banish unpleasant reflections by befouling ourselves. This is worth knowing.

  LXXXII.

  The belly and the members of the human body were in a riot. (This is not the riot recorded by an inferior writer, but a more notable and authentic one.) After exhausting the well-known arguments, they had recourse to the appropriate threat, when the man to whom they belonged thought it time for him to be heard, in his capacity as a unit.

  “Deuce take you!” he roared. “Things have come to a pretty pass if a fellow cannot walk out of a fine morning without alarming the town by a disgraceful squabble between his component parts! I am reasonably impartial, I hope, but man’s devotion is due to his deity: I espouse the cause of my belly.”

  Hearing this, the members were thrown into so extraordinary confusion that the man was arrested for a windmill.

  As a rule, don’t “take sides.” Sides of bacon, however, may be temperately acquired.

  LXXXIII.

  A man dropping from a balloon struck against a soaring eagle.

  “I beg your pardon,” said he, continuing his descent; “I never could keep off eagles when in my descending node.”

  “It is agreeable to meet so pleasing a gentleman, even without previous appointment,” said the bird, looking admiringly down upon the lessening aeronaut; “he is the very pink of politeness. How extremely nice his liver must be. I will follow him down and arrange his simple obsequies.”

  This fable is narrated for its intrinsic worth.

  LXXXIV.

  To escape from a peasant who had come suddenly upon him, an opossum adopted his favourite expedient of counterfeiting death.

  “I suppose,” said the peasant, “that ninety-nine men in a hundred would go away and leave this poor creature’s body to the beasts of prey.” [It is notorious that man is the only living thing that will eat the animal.] “But I will give him good burial.”

  So he dug a hole, and was about tumbling him into it
, when a solemn voice appeared to emanate from the corpse: “Let the dead bury their dead!”

  “Whatever spirit hath wrought this miracle,” cried the peasant, dropping upon his knees, “let him but add the trifling explanation of how the dead can perform this or any similar rite, and I am obedience itself. Otherwise, in goes Mr. ‘Possum by these hands.”

  “Ah!” meditated the unhappy beast, “I have performed one miracle, but I can’t keep it up all day, you know. The explanation demanded is a trifle too heavy for even the ponderous ingenuity of a marsupial.”

  And he permitted himself to be sodded over.

  If the reader knows what lesson is conveyed by this narrative, he knows — just what the writer knows.

  LXXXV.

  Three animals on board a sinking ship prepared to take to the water. It was agreed among them that the bear should be lowered alongside; the mouse (who was to act as pilot) should embark upon him at once, to beat off the drowning sailors; and the monkey should follow, with provisions for the expedition — which arrangement was successfully carried out. The fourth day out from the wreck, the bear began to propound a series of leading questions concerning dinner; when it appeared that the monkey had provided but a single nut.

  “I thought this would keep me awhile,” he explained, “and you could eat the pilot.”

  Hearing this, the mouse vanished like a flash into the bear’s ear, and fearing the hungry beast would then demand the nut, the monkey hastily devoured it. Not being in a position to insist upon his rights, the bear merely gobbled up the monkey.

  LXXXVI.

  A lamb suffering from thirst went to a brook to drink. Putting his nose to the water, he was interested to feel it bitten by a fish. Not liking fish, he drew back and sought another place; but his persecutor getting there before him administered the same rebuff. The lamb being rather persevering, and the fish having no appointments for that day, this was repeated a few thousand times, when the former felt justified in swearing:

  “I’m eternally boiled!” said he, “if ever I experienced so many fish in all my life. It is discouraging. It inspires me with mint sauce and green peas.”