Where was I? Oh, speaking of invalids! Sickness
is to be dreaded with many because of death, but from
the high moral plane from which I regard it, it is
chiefly objectionable on account of the lying it gives
rise to. Directly a man gets well on the way down
hill, the good natured world gets this lie photographed,
and each man presents him a copy—“Why,
I never saw you looking better in my life!” For
the first few copies that are presented him the poor
devil is grateful; of the next few he is suspicious,
and thereafter he is worried, vexed and profane.
If you remonstrate against the truth of the assurance
and call attention to the prominent skeleton which
you are presenting to the public eye, the good natured
liar looks you unflinchingly in the eye while he presents
you with another lithograph bearing this inscription:
“Oh, I didn’t mean that you were fatter,
I meant that your skin is clearer and your eyes are
brighter.” Not having a sample of your
former skin, nor another pair of eyes handy to confute
him with, this well-meaning liar walks off triumphantly.
I, myself, however, am no better than the rest of
them, though my presenting the lithograph cost me
dearly one day. In one of the towns where I stopped,
a young girl came to the hotel the shadow of what
she had been. I suppose one evening I must have
felt unusually chipper and kindly myself, for, coming
up on the porch where she was sitting, I dashed off
the old lithograph, “Why you are looking so
much better.” Her eyes—I never
saw eyes that had so much of the other world and so
little of this in them—turned on me with
a half kind, half reproachful look, and at once filled
with tears. She merely said gently, “Thank
you,” and got up and walked away. God forgive
me, that I should have interrupted a soul so near
to setting sail, to pay a lithographed and lying compliment.
Three weeks later, in another town, I was told that
she had gone on the last long voyage. I have
burned my lithographs.
At Afton in the Blue Ridge Mountains. There now,
sit still, I am not going to commence about “lifting
their eternal heads;” indeed I am not.
Did it ever strike you, though, how different a man
talks when he gets a pen in his hand; how impossible
it is for a man to keep his feet on the ground and
use a reasonably plain English without absurd adjectives,
when he is writing descriptions of scenery. It
is a miserable piece of affectation, you know; and
they know you know, but they do it all the same.
It comes, I presume, from a desire to assert the possession
of imagination. The vulgar name for it is “flowery”
and I am not certain that it is not a good name, for
the chief business of flowers is to please the senses.
You will find it popular with three classes of orators—commencement
orators, political orators, and pulpit orators.
The first use it because they know no better; the second,
