Europe Revised By Irvin S. Cobb









































































 -   They are
especially brilliant in their flashing interchanges of wit and
humor, because the Mastodon Minstrels were here only last - Page 82
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They Are Especially Brilliant In Their Flashing Interchanges Of Wit And Humor, Because The Mastodon Minstrels Were Here Only Last Week, With A New Line Of First-Part Jokes.

Along the opposite side of the street passes Nux Vomica, M.D., with a small black case in his hand, gravely intent on his professional duties.

Being a young physician, he wears a beard and large-rimmed eyeglasses. 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. When General Jackson passed the house she would have been in the bathroom bathing her left thumb in witch-hazel.

Furthermore, she did not have any old gray head. At the time of the Confederate invasion of Maryland she was only seventeen years old - some authorities say only seven - and a pronounced blonde. Also, she did not live in Frederick; and even if she did live there, on the occasion when the troops went through she was in Baltimore visiting a school friend. Finally, Frederick does not stand where it stood in the sixties. The cyclone of 1884 moved it three miles back into the country and twisted the streets round in such a manner as to confuse even lifelong residents. These facts have repeatedly been proved by volunteer investigators and are not to be gainsaid.

I repeat that there has been too much of this. If the craze for smashing all our romantic fixtures persists, after a while we shall have no glorious traditions left with which to fire the youthful heart at high-school commencements. But in the interests of truth, and also because I made the discovery myself, I feel it to be my solemn duty to expose the Roman sentry, stationed at the gate of Pompeii looking toward the sea, who died because he would not quit his post without orders and had no orders to quit.

Until now this party has stood the acid test of centuries. Everybody who ever wrote about the fall of Pompeii, from Plutarch and Pliny the Younger clear down to Bulwer Lytton and Burton Holmes, had something to say about him. The lines on this subject by the Greek poet Laryngitis are familiar to all lovers of that great master of classic verse, and I shall not undertake to quote from them here.

Suffice it to say that the Roman sentry, perishing at his post, has ever been a favorite subject for historic and romantic writers. I myself often read of him - how on that dread day when the devil's stew came to a boil and spewed over the sides of Vesuvius, and death and destruction poured down to blight the land, he, typifying fortitude and discipline and unfaltering devotion, stood firm and stayed fast while all about him chaos reigned and fathers forgot their children and husbands forgot their wives, and vice versa, though probably not to the same extent; and how finally the drifting ashes and the choking dust fell thicker upon him and mounted higher about him, until he died and in time turned to ashes himself, leaving only a void in the solidified slag.

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