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.
