Young
Ossius Dome sees him and hails him.
"Oh, Doc!" he calls out. "Come over here a minute. I've got some
brand-new limerickii for you. Tertiary Tonsillitis got 'em from
a traveling man he met day before yesterday when he was up in the
city laying in his stock of fall and winter armor."
The healer of ills crosses over; and as the group push themselves
in toward a common center I hear the voice of the speaker:
"Say, they're all bully; but this is the bullissimus one of the
lot. It goes like this:
"'There was a young maid of Sorrento,
Who said to her - '"
I have regretted ever since that at this juncture I came to and
so failed to get the rest of it. I'll bet that was a peach of a
limerick. It started off so promisingly.
Chapter XXIII
Muckraking in Old Pompeii
It now devolves on me as a painful yet necessary duty to topple
from its pedestal one of the most popular idols of legendary lore.
I refer, I regret to say, to the widely famous Roman sentry of
old Pompeii.
Personally I think there has been entirely too much of this sort
of thing going on lately. Muckrakers, prying into the storied
past, have destroyed one after another many of the pet characters
in history. Thanks to their meddlesome activities we know that
Paul Revere did not take any midnight ride. On the night in
question he was laid up in bed with inflammatory rheumatism. What
happened was that he told the news to Mrs. Revere as a secret, and
she in strict confidence imparted it to the lady living next door;
and from that point on the word traveled with the rapidity of
wildfire.
Horatius never held the bridge; he just let the blamed thing go.
The boy did not stand on the burning deck, whence all but him had
fled; he was among the first in the lifeboats. That other boy
- the Spartan youth - did not have his vitals gnawed by a fox; the
Spartan youth had been eating wild grapes and washing them down
with spring water. Hence that gnawing sensation of which so much
mention has been made. Nobody hit Billy Patterson. He acquired
his black eye in the same way in which all married men acquire a
black eye - by running against a doorjamb while trying to find the
ice-water pitcher in the dark. He said so himself the next day.
Even Barbara Frietchie is an exploded myth. She did not nail her
country's flag to the window casement. Being a female, she could
not nail a flag or anything else to a window. In the first place,
she would have used a wad of chewing gum and a couple of hairpins.
In the second place, had she recklessly undertaken to nail up a
flag with hammer and nails, she would never have been on hand at
the psychological moment to invite Stonewall Jackson to shoot her
old gray head.
