’Nine months—nine dull, sad months—went
by, and at last came the day of the Great Annual Sacrifice,
when all the maidens of the tribe wash their faces
and comb their hair. With the first sweep of
my comb out came the fatal fish-hook from where it
had been all those months nestling, and I fell fainting
into the arms of my remorseful father! Groaning,
he said, “We murdered him, and I shall never
smile again!” He has kept his word. Listen;
from that day to this not a month goes by that I do
not comb my hair. But oh, where is the good
of it all now!’
So ended the poor maid’s humble little tale—whereby
we learn that since a hundred million dollars in New
York and twenty-two fish-hooks on the border of the
Arctic Circle represent the same financial supremacy,
a man in straitened circumstances is a fool to stay
in New York when he can buy ten cents’ worth
of fish-hooks and emigrate.
’It is the first
time since the dawn-days of Creation that a Voice
has gone crashing through
space with such placid and complacent
confidence and command.’
This last summer, when I was on my way back to Vienna
from the Appetite-Cure in the mountains, I fell over
a cliff in the twilight and broke some arms and legs
and one thing or another, and by good luck was found
by some peasants who had lost an ass, and they carried
me to the nearest habitation, which was one of those
large, low, thatch-roofed farm-houses, with apartments
in the garret for the family, and a cunning little
porch under the deep gable decorated with boxes of
bright-coloured flowers and cats; on the ground floor
a large and light sitting-room, separated from the
milch-cattle apartment by a partition; and in the
front yard rose stately and fine the wealth and pride
of the house, the manure-pile. That sentence
is Germanic, and shows that I am acquiring that sort
of mastery of the art and spirit of the language which
enables a man to travel all day in one sentence without
changing cars.
There was a village a mile away, and a horse-doctor
lived there, but there was no surgeon. It seemed
a bad outlook; mine was distinctly a surgery case.
Then it was remembered that a lady from Boston was
summering in that village, and she was a Christian
Science doctor and could cure anything. So she
was sent for. It was night by this time, and
she could not conveniently come, but sent word that
it was no matter, there was no hurry, she would give
me ‘absent treatment’ now, and come in
the morning; meantime she begged me to make myself
tranquil and comfortable and remember that there was
nothing the matter with me. I thought there
must be some mistake.
‘Did you tell her I walked off a cliff seventy-five
feet high?’
‘Yes.’
‘And struck a boulder at the bottom and bounced?’
