We Discussed Everything
We Knew, During The First Fifteen Or Twenty Minutes,
That Morning, And Then Branched Out Into The Glad, Free,
Boundless Realm Of The Things We Were Not Certain About.
Harris said that if the best writer in the world once got
the slovenly habit of doubling up his "haves" he could
never get rid of it while he lived.
That is to say,
if a man gets the habit of saying "I should have liked
to have known more about it" instead of saying simply
and sensibly, "I should have liked to know more about it,"
that man's disease is incurable. Harris said that his sort
of lapse is to be found in every copy of every newspaper
that has ever been printed in English, and in almost all
of our books. He said he had observed it in Kirkham's
grammar and in Macaulay. Harris believed that milk-teeth
are commoner in men's mouths than those "doubled-up haves." [1]
1. I do not know that there have not been moments in the
course of the present session when I should have been
very glad to have accepted the proposal of my noble friend,
and to have exchanged parts in some of our evenings
of work. - [From a Speech of the English Chancellor
of the Exchequer, August, 1879.]
That changed the subject to dentistry. I said I believed
the average man dreaded tooth-pulling more than amputation,
and that he would yell quicker under the former operation
than he would under the latter. The philosopher Harris
said that the average man would not yell in either case
if he had an audience. Then he continued:
"When our brigade first went into camp on the Potomac,
we used to be brought up standing, occasionally, by an
ear-splitting howl of anguish. That meant that a soldier
was getting a tooth pulled in a tent. But the surgeons
soon changed that; they instituted open-air dentistry.
There never was a howl afterward - that is, from the man
who was having the tooth pulled. At the daily dental
hour there would always be about five hundred soldiers
gathered together in the neighborhood of that dental chair
waiting to see the performance - and help; and the moment
the surgeon took a grip on the candidate's tooth and began
to lift, every one of those five hundred rascals would
clap his hand to his jaw and begin to hop around on one
leg and howl with all the lungs he had! It was enough
to raise your hair to hear that variegated and enormous
unanimous caterwaul burst out! With so big and so derisive
an audience as that, a suffer wouldn't emit a sound though
you pulled his head off. The surgeons said that pretty
often a patient was compelled to laugh, in the midst
of his pangs, but that had never caught one crying out,
after the open-air exhibition was instituted."
Dental surgeons suggested doctors, doctors suggested death,
death suggested skeletons - and so, by a logical process
the conversation melted out of one of these subjects
and into the next, until the topic of skeletons raised up
Nicodemus Dodge out of the deep grave in my memory where he
had lain buried and forgotten for twenty-five years.
When I was a boy in a printing-office in Missouri,
a loose-jointed, long-legged, tow-headed, jeans-clad
countrified cub of about sixteen lounged in one day,
and without removing his hands from the depths
of his trousers pockets or taking off his faded ruin
of a slouch hat, whose broken rim hung limp and ragged
about his eyes and ears like a bug-eaten cabbage leaf,
stared indifferently around, then leaned his hip
against the editor's table, crossed his mighty brogans,
aimed at a distant fly from a crevice in his upper teeth,
laid him low, and said with composure:
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