{"collection":"scripture-revelation","full_text_available":true,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/gutenberg_20766/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/gutenberg_20766","id":"gutenberg_20766","license":"Public Domain (US)","rights_basis":"gutenberg_metadata_copyright_false","source":"gutenberg","source_url":"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20766","summary":null,"tags":["Bible -- Humor","Category: Humour","Category: Novels"],"text":"THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF METHUSELAH\n\nEdited by\n\nJOHN KENDRICK BANGS\n\nIllustrated in Color by F. G. Cooper\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: Methuselah's stationery]\n\n\n\nNew York\nB. W. Dodge & Company\n1909\nCopyright, 1908, by\nB. W. Dodge & Company\n\n\n\n\nCONTENTS\n\n\n           FOREWORD\n\n   CHAPTER\n\n      I    I AM BORN AND NAMED\n\n     II    EARLY INFLUENCES\n\n    III    SOME REMINISCENCES OF ADAM\n\n     IV    GRANDMOTHER EVE\n\n      V    SOME NOTES ON CAIN AND ABEL\n\n     VI    HE CONFESSES TO BEING A POET\n\n    VII    THE INTERNATIONAL MARINE AND ZOO FLOTATION COMPANY\n\n   VIII    ON THE EXTINCTION OF THE MASTODON\n\n     IX    AS TO WOMEN\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFOREWORD\n\n\nHaving recently passed into what my great-grandson Shem calls my\nAnecdotage, it has occurred to me that perhaps some of the\nrecollections of a more or less extended existence upon this\nglobular[1] mass of dust and water that we are pleased to call the\nearth, may prove of interest to posterity, and I have accordingly, at\nthe earnest solicitation of my grandson, Noah, and his sons, Shem,\nHam and Japhet, consented to put them into permanent literary form. In\nview of the facts that at this writing, ink and paper and pens have\nnot as yet been invented, and that we have no capable stenographers\namong our village folk, and that because of my advanced years I should\nfind great difficulty in producing my manuscript on a type-writing\nmachine with my gouty fingers--for, of the luscious fluid of the grape\nhave I been a ready, though never over-abundant, consumer--even if I\nwere familiar with the keyboard of such an instrument, or, if indeed,\nthere were any such instrument to facilitate the work--in view of\nthese facts, I say, I have been compelled to make use of the literary\nmethods of the Egyptians, and with hammer and chisel, to gouge out my\n\"Few Remarks\" upon such slabs of stone as I can find upon my native\nheath.\n\n[Footnote 1: It is quite interesting, in the light of the contentions\nof history as to man's earliest realization that the earth is round,\nto find Methuselah speaking in this fashion. It would seem from this\nthat the real facts had dawned upon the Patriarch's mind even at this\nearly period, and one is therefore disposed to regard as less\napocryphal the anecdote recorded in Volume III, Chapter 38, of \"The\nLife and Voyages of Noah,\" wherein Adam, after being ejected from the\nGarden of Eden, asked by Cain if he believes the world to be round\nlike an orange, replies:\n\n\"_I used to think so, my son, but under prevailing conditions I am\nforced into a more or less definite suspicion that it is elliptical,\nlike a lemon._\"--EDITOR.]\n\n[Illustration: Ye scribe decides not to use Egyptian writing.]\n\nLet us hope that my story will not prove as heavy as my manuscript. It\nis hardly necessary for me to assure the indulgent reader that such a\nmethod of composition is not altogether an easy task for a man who is\nshortly to celebrate his nine hundred and sixty-fifth birthday, more\nespecially since at no time in my life have I studied the arts of the\nStone-Cutter, or been a master in the Science of Quarrying. Nor is it\neasy at my advanced age, with a back no longer sinewy, and muscles\ngrown flabby from lack of active exercise, for me to lift a virgin\nsheet of stone from the ground to the surface of my writing-desk\nwithout a derrick, but these are, after all, minor difficulties, and I\nshall let no such insignificant obstacles stand between me and the\ngreat purpose I have in mind. I shall persist in the face of all in\nthe writing of this Autobiography if for no worthier object than to\nprovide occupation for my leisure hours which, in these patriarchal\ndays to which I have attained, sometimes hang heavy on my hands. I\nknow not why it should so transpire, but it is the fact that since I\npassed my nine hundred and fiftieth birthday I have had little liking\nfor the pleasures which modern society most affects. To be sure, old\nand feeble as I am, and despite the uncertain quality of my knees, I\nstill enjoy the excitement of the Virginia Reel, and can still hold my\nown with men several centuries younger than myself in the clog, but I\nleave such diversions as bridge, draw-poker and pinochle to more\nfrivolous minds--though I will say that when my great-grandchildren,\nShem, Ham and Japhet, the sons of my grandson Noah, come to my house\non the few holidays, their somewhat over-sober parent allows them from\ntheir labors in the ship-yard, I take great delight in sitting upon\nthe ground with them and renewing my acquaintance with those games of\nmy youth, marbles, and mumbledy-peg, the which I learned from my\ngreat-uncle-seven-times-removed, Cain, in the days when with my\ngrandfather, Jared, I used to go to see our first ancestor, Adam, at\nthe old farm just outside of Edensburg where, with his beautiful wife\nEve, that Grand Old Man was living in honored retirement.\n\nNor have I in these days, as I used to have, any especial taste for\nthe joys of the chase. There was a time when my slungshot was\nunerring, and I could bring down a Dodo, or snipe my Harpy on the wing\nwith as much ease as my wife can hit our barn-door with a rolling-pin\nat six feet, and for three hundred and thirty years I never let escape\nme any opportunity for tracking the Dinosaur, the Pterodactyl, or that\nfierce and sanguinary creature the Osteostogothemy to his lair and\nthere fighting him unto the death during the open season for wild game\nof that particular sort. I well remember how, in my boyhood days, to\nbe precise, shortly after my two hundred and twenty-second birthday, I\nwent with my great-grandfather, Mehalaleel, over into the woods back\nof Little Ararat after a great horned Ornythyrhyncus and--but that is\nanother story. Suffice it to say that I have at last reached a period\nin my life where I am content to leave the pleasures of Nimrod to my\nmore nimble neighbors, and that now no winged thing, save an\noccasional mosquito, or locust, need fear my approach, and that my\nindulgence in the shedding of the blood of animals is confined to an\ninfrequent personal superintendence of the slaughter of a spring-lamb\nin green-pea time, when the scent is in the julep and the bloom is on\nthe mint; or possibly, now and then, the removal from the pasture to\nthe pantry of a bit of lowing roast-beef, when I feel an inner craving\nfor the crackle and the steak.\n\nRacing I have an abhorrence for, and always have had since in my early\ndays I attended the county-fair at North Ararat, and was there induced\nby one of my neighbors to participate as a rider in a twenty-mile\nsteeplechase between a Discosaurus which I rode, and a Diplodocus in his\npossession. I found after the race had started that the animal which had\nbeen assigned to me as a gentleman jockey, had not been broken to the\nsaddle, and my experience during the next six days in staying on his\nback--for he immediately took the bit between his teeth and bolted for\nthe woods, and was not again got under control for that time--as he\njumped over the various obstacles to his progress, from thank-you-marms\nin the highways which were plentiful, to such mountains as the country\nfor a thousand miles about provided for his delectation, was one of the\nmost terrific in my life, prolonged as it has been. I had been assured\nthat the race was to be a \"Go-As-You-Please\" affair, but I had not been\nseated on that horrible creature's back for two minutes before I\ndiscovered that it was a \"Go-As-He-Pleased\" affair and that\n\"Going-As-I-Pleased,\" like the flowers that bloom in the Spring, had\nnothing to do with the case. Had I begun in the pursuit of the pleasures\nof the track in later years after the invention of wheels, whereby that\neasy running vehicle, the sulky, was brought into being, and when, by\nthe taming of the horse, the latter became a domesticated animal with\nsporting proclivities, instead of a mere prowler of the plains, I might\nhave found the joys of racing more to my taste, although in these later\nyears of my life when a truly noble pursuit has degenerated into a mere\ngambling enterprise, wherein those who can ill afford it squander their\nsubstance in riotous bookmaking, I am inclined to be grateful that my\nfirst experience in this direction has led me to cultivate an\nunconcerned aloofness from a pursuit which is ruinous to the old and\ncorrupting to the young.\n\nWere the present state of literature more hopeful, perhaps I should\nfind pleasure in reading, but I have viewed with such increasing alarm\nthe growth of sensationalism in the literary output of my age that I\nhave felt that I owed it to my posterity, which is rapidly growing in\nnumbers--I believe that the latest annual report of the Society of the\nSons and Daughters of Methuselah shows a membership of six hundred and\nthirty-eight thousand, without counting the new arrivals since the end\nof the last fiscal year, which, at a rough guess, I should place at\nthirty-six thousand--I have felt, I say, that I owe it to that\nposterity to set it the example of not reading, as my most effective\nprotest against those pernicious influences which have made the modern\nliterary school a menace to civilization. Surely if Noah's children\nfor instance, Shem, Ham and Japhet, whom I have already had occasion\nto mention, were to surprise me, their venerable, and I hope venerated\nancestor, reading such stories as are now put forth by our most\nsuccessful quarrymen--stories like that unspeakable novel \"Three\nDecades,\" of which I am credibly informed eight million tons have\nalready been sold; and which, let me say, when I had read only seven\nslabs of it I had carted away and dumped into the Red Sea; or the\ninnocuous but highly frivolous tales of Miss Laura Jean\nDiplodocus--they would hardly accept from me as worthy of serious\nattention such admonitions as I am constantly giving them on the\nsubject of the decadence of literature when I find them poring over\nthe novels of the day. Consequently even this usual solace of old age\nis denied to me, and writing becomes my refuge.\n\nI bespeak the reader's indulgence if he or she find in the ensuing\npages any serious lapses from true literary style. I write merely as I\nfeel, and do not pretend to be either an expert hieroglyphist or a\nrhetorician of commanding quality. Perhaps I should do more wisely if\nI were to accept the advice of my great-grandson Ham, who, overhearing\nmy remark to a caller last Sunday evening that the work I have\nundertaken is one of considerable difficulty, climbed up into my lap\nand in his childish way asked me why I did not hire a boswell to do it\nfor me. I had to tell the child that I did not know what a boswell\nwas, and when I questioned him on the subject more closely, I found\nthat it was only one of his childish fancies. If there were such a\nthing as that rather euphoniously named invention of Ham's who could\nrelieve me of the drudgery of writing my own life, and who would do it\nwell, I would cheerfully relinquish that end of my enterprise to him,\nbut in the absence of such a thing, I am, in spite of my manifest\nshortcomings, compelled to do the work myself. On behalf of my story I\ncan say, however, that whatever I shall put down here will be the\ntruth, and that what I remember notwithstanding my advanced years, I\nremember perfectly. I am quite aware that in some of the tales that I\nshall tell, especially those having to do with Prehistoric Animals I\nhave met, or Antediluvians as I believe the Scientists call them, what\nI may say as to their habits--I was going to say manners, but refrain\nbecause in all my life I have never observed that they had any--and\npowers may fall upon some ears as extravagant exaggerations. To these\nlet me say here and now that there are exceptions to all rules, and\nthat if for instance, I tell the story of a Pterodactyl that after\nbeing swallowed whole by a Discosaurus, successfully gnaws his way\nthrough the walls of the latter's stomach to freedom, I make no claim\nthat all Pterodactyls could do the same, but merely that in this\nparticular case the Pterodactyl to which I refer did it, and that I\nknow that he did it because the man who saw it is a cousin of my\ngrandfather's first wife's step-son, and is so wedded to truth that he\nis even now in jail because he would not deny a charge of\nsheep-stealing, which he might easily have done were he an untruthful\nman. Again when I observe that I have caught with an ordinary\nfish-hook, baited with a common garden, or angle worm, on the end of a\nlight trout-line, a Creosaurus with a neck ninety-seven feet long, and\nscales so large that you could weigh a hay-wagon on the smallest of\nthe lot near the end of his tail, I admit at the outset that the feat\nwas unusual, had never occurred before, and is never likely to occur\nagain, but can bring affidavits to prove that it did happen that time,\nsigned by reputable parties who have heard me tell about it more than\nonce. I make these statements here not in any sense to apologize for\nanything I shall say in my book, but merely to forestall the criticism\nof highly cultivated and truly scientific readers who, after a\nlifelong study of the habits of these creatures may feel impelled to\nquestion the accuracy of my statements and add to my perplexities by\nso advertising my book that I shall be put to the arduous necessity of\nchiseling out another edition, a labor which I have no desire to\nassume.\n\nOne word more as to the language I have chosen for the presentation of\nmy narrative. I have chosen English as the language in which to chisel\nout these random recollections of mine for a variety of reasons. Most\nconspicuous of these is that at the time of this writing no one has as\nyet thought to devise a French, German, Spanish or Italian language.\nRussian I have no familiarity with. Chinese I do not care for. Latin\nand Greek few people can read, and as for Egyptian, while it is an\nexcellent and fluent tongue for speaking purposes, I find myself\nappalled at the prospect of writing a story of the length of mine in\nthe hieroglyphics which up to date form the whole extent of Egyptian\nchirography. An occasional pictorial rebus in a child's magazine is a\nsource of pleasure and profit to both the young and the old, but the\nautobiography of a man of my years told in pictures, and pictures for\nthe most part of squab, spring chickens, and canvas-back ducks, would,\nI fear, prove arduous reading. Moreover I am but an indifferent\ndraughtsman, and I suspect that when the precise thought that I have\nin mind can best be expressed by a portrait of a humming-bird, or a\nflamingo, my readers because of my inexpert handling of my tools would\nhardly be able to distinguish the creature I should limn from an\nalbatross, a red-head duck, or a June-Bug, which would lead to a great\ndeal of obscurity, and in some cases might cause me to say things that\nI should not care to be held responsible for. There is left me then\nonly a choice between English and Esperanto, and I incline to the\nformer, not because I do not wish the Esperantists well, but because\nin the present condition of the latter's language, it affects the eye\nmore like a barbed-wire fence than a medium for the expression of\nideas.\n\nAt this stage of the proceedings I can think of nothing else either to\nexplain or to apologize for, but in closing I beg the reader to accept\nmy assurance that if in the narratives that follow he finds anything\nthat needs either explanation or apology, I shall be glad to explain\nif he will bring the matter to my attention, and herewith tender in\nadvance for his acceptance any apology which occasion may require.\n\nAnd so to my story.\n\nGEORGE W. METHUSELAH.\n\nArarat Corners, B. C. 2348.\n\n\n\n\nTHE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF METHUSELAH\n\nCHAPTER I\n\nI AM BORN AND NAMED\n\n\nThe date of my birth, occurring as it did, nine hundred and sixty-five\nyears ago, is so far removed from my present that my recollections of\nit are not altogether clear, but Mrs. Adam, my great-grandmother seven\ntimes removed, with whom I was always a great favorite because I\nlooked more like my original ancestor, her husband, than any other of\nhis descendants, has given me many interesting details of that\nimportant epoch in my history. Personally I do remember that the date\nwas B. C. 3317, and the twenty-third of June, for the first thing to\ngreet my infant eyes, when I opened them for the first time, was a\nhuge insurance calendar hanging upon our wall whereon the date was\nprinted in letters almost as large as those which the travelling\ncircuses of Armenia use to herald the virtues of their show when at\nCounty Fair time they visit Ararat Corners. I also recall that it was\na very stormy day when I arrived. The rain was coming down in\ntorrents, and I heard simultaneously with my arrival my father, Enoch,\nin the adjoining room making sundry observations as to the\nmeteorological conditions which he probably would have spoken in a\nlower tone of voice, or at least in less vigorous phraseology had he\nknown that I was within earshot, although I must confess that it has\nalways been a nice question with me whether or not when a man\nexpresses a wish that the rain may be dammed, he voices a desire for\nits everlasting condemnation, or the mere placing in its way of an\nimpediment which shall prevent its further overflow. I think much\ndepends upon the manner, the inflection, and the tone of voice in\nwhich the desire is expressed, and I am sorry to say that upon the\noccasion to which I refer, there was more of the asperity of profanity\nthan the calmness of constructive suggestion in my father's manner. In\nany event I did not blame him, for here was I coming along, undeniably\nimminent, a tempest raging, and no doctor in sight, and consequently\nno telling when my venerable sire would have to go out into the wet\nand fetch one.\n\nIn those primitive days doctors were few and far between. There was\nlittle profit in the practice of such a profession at a time when\neverybody lived so long that death was looked upon as a remote\npossibility, and one seldom called one in until after he had passed\nhis nine hundredth birthday and sometimes not even then. It may be\nthat this habit of putting off the call to the family physician was\nthe cause of our wonderful longevity, but of that I do not know, and\ndo not care to express an opinion on the subject, for socially I have\nalways found the medicine folk charming companions and I would not say\naught in this work that could by any possibility give them offense.\nNot only were doctors rare at that period, but owing to our limited\nfacilities in the matter of transportation, it was exceedingly\ndifficult for them to get about. The doctor's gig, now so generally in\nuse, had not as yet been brought to that state of perfection that has\nmade its use in these modern times a matter of ease and comfort. We\nhad wheels, to be sure, but they were not spherical as they have since\nbecome, and were made out of stone blocks weighing ten or fifteen tons\napiece, and hewn octagonally, so that a ride over the country roads in\na vehicle of that period not only involved the services of some thirty\nor forty horses to pull the wagon, but an endless succession of jolts\nwhich, however excellent they may have been in their influence on the\nliver were most trying to the temper, and resulted in attacks of\nsickness which those who have been to sea tell me strongly resembles\nsea-sickness. So rough indeed was the operation of riding in the\nwagons of my early youth that a great many of our best people who kept\neither horses or domesticated elephants, still continued to drive\nabout in stone boats, so-called, built flat like a raft, rather than\nsuffer the shaking up which the new-fangled wheels entailed. Griffins\nwere also used by persons of adventurous nature, but were gradually\ndying into disuse, and the species being no longer bred becoming\nextinct, because of the great difficulty in domesticating them. It was\nnot a hard task to break them to the saddle, and on the ground they\nwere fleet and sure footed, but in the air they were extremely\nunreliable. They used their wings with much power, but were not\nresponsive to the reins, and in flying pursued the most erratic\ncourses. What was worse, they were seldom able to alight after an\naerial flight on all four feet at once, having a disagreeable habit of\napproaching the earth vertically, and headfirst, so that the rider,\nunless he were strapped on, was usually unseated while forty or fifty\nfeet in the air, with the result that he either broke his neck, or at\nleast four or five ribs, and a leg or two, at the end of his ride.\nWhen we remember that in addition to all this we had no telephone\nservice at that time, and that the umbrella had not as yet been\ndevised, my father's anxiety at the moment may easily be realized.\n\nHis temper was only momentary, however, for I recall that I was very\nmuch amused at this critical moment of my career by another\nobservation that I overheard from the adjoining room. My grandfather,\nJared, who was with my father at the time looking out of the window\nmade the somewhat commonplace observation--\n\n\"It's raining cats and dogs, isn't it?\"\n\n\"Cats and dogs?\" retorted Enoch, scornfully. \"It's raining\nDiplodocuses!\"\n\nThis was naturally the first bit of humor that I had ever heard, and\ncoming as it did simultaneously with my d\u00e9but as a citizen of\nEnochsville, perhaps it is not to be wondered at that instead of\ncelebrating my birth with a squall, as do most infants, I was born\nlaughing. I must have cackled pretty loudly, too, for the second thing\nthat I remember--O, how clearly it all comes back to me as I write, or\nrather chisel--was overhearing the Governor's response to the nurse's\nannouncement of my arrival.\n\n\"It's a boy, sir,\" the good woman called out as she rushed excitedly\ninto the other room.\n\n\"Good, Dinah,\" replied my father. \"You have taken a great load off my\nmind. I am dee-lighted. I was afraid from his opening remarks that he\nwas a hen!\"\n\nIt was thus that the keynote of existence was struck for me, one of\nmirth even in the dark of storm, and that I have since become the\noldest man that ever lived, and shall doubtless continue to the end of\ntime to hold the record for longevity, I attribute to nothing else\nthan that, thanks to my father's droll humor, I was born smiling. Nor\ndid the good old gentleman ever stint himself in the indulgence of\nthat trait. In my youth such things as comic papers were entirely\nunknown, nor did the columns of the newspapers give over any portion\nof their space to the printing of jokes, so that my dear old father\nnever dreamed of turning his wit to the advantage of his own pocket,\nas do some latter-day joke-wrights who shall be nameless, lavishly\nbestowing the fruits of his gift upon the members of his own family.\nOf my own claims to an inheritance of humor from my sire, I shall\nspeak in a later chapter.\n\nI recall that my first impressions of life were rather disappointing.\nI cannot say that upon my arrival I brought with me any definite\nnotions as to what I should find the world to be like, but I do know\nthat when I looked out of the window for the first time it seemed to\nme that the scenery was rather commonplace, and the mountains which I\ncould see in the distance, were not especially remarkable for\ngrandeur. The rivers, too, seemed trite. That they should flow\ndown-hill struck me as being nothing at all remarkable, for I could\nnot for the life of me see how they could do otherwise, and when night\ncame on and my nurse, Dinah, pointed out the moon and asked me if I\ndid not think it was remarkable, I was so filled with impatience that\nso ordinary a phenomenon should be considered unusual that I made no\nreply whatsoever, smiling inwardly at the marvelous simplicity of\nthese people with whom destiny had decreed that I should come to\ndwell. I should add, however, that I was quite contented on that first\nday of my existence for the reason that all of my wants appeared to\nbe anticipated by my guardians, the table was good, and all through\nthe day I was filled with a comfortable sense of my own importance as\nthe first born of one of the first families of the land, and when\nalong about noon the skies cleared, and the rain disappeared before\nthe genial warmth of the sun, and the neighbors came in to look me\nover, it was most agreeable to realize that I was the center of so\nmuch interest. What added to my satisfaction was the fact that when my\ngreat-uncle Zib came in and began to talk baby-talk to me--a jargon\nthat I have always abhorred--by an apparently casual movement of my\nleft leg I was able with seeming innocence of intention to kick him on\nthe end of his nose.\n\nAn amusing situation developed itself along about 4 o'clock in the\nafternoon, in respect to my name. One of the neighbors asked my\nfather what my name was to be.\n\n\"Well,\" he replied with a chuckle, \"we are somewhat up a tree in\nrespect to that. We have held several family conclaves on the subject,\nand after much prayerful consideration of the matter we had finally\nsettled on Gladys, but--well, since we've seen him the idea has been\ngrowing on us that he looks more like a James.\"\n\nAnd indeed this question as to my name became a most serious one as\nthe days passed by, and at one time I began to fear that I should be\ncompelled to pass through life anonymously. There was some desire on\nthe part of my father, who was of a providential nature, to call me\nZib, after my great uncle of that name, for Uncle Zib had been\nforehanded, and was possessed of much in the way of filthy lucre,\nowning many cliff-dwellings, a large if not controlling interest in\nthe Armenian Realty Company, whose caves on the leading thoroughfares\nof Enochsville and Edensburg commanded the highest and steadiest\nrents, and was the chief stock-holder in the Ararat Corners and Red\nSea Traction Company, running an hourly service of Pterodactyls and\nCreosauruses between the most populous points of the country. This\nnaturally made of Uncle Zib a nearer approach to a Captain of Finance\nthan anything else known to our time, and inasmuch as he had never\nmarried, and was without an heir, my father thought he would\nappreciate the compliment of having his first-born named for him. But\nUncle Zib's moral character was of such a nature that his name seemed\nto my mother as hardly a fit association for an infant of my tender\nyears. He was known to be addicted to pinochle to a degree that had\ncaused no end of gossip at the Ararat Woman's Club, and before he had\nreached the age of three hundred he had five times been successfully\nsued in the courts for breach of promise. Indeed, if Uncle Zib had had\nfewer material resources he would long since have been ostracised by\nthe best people of our section, and even as it was the few people in\nour neighborhood to whom he had not lent money regarded his social\npretensions with some coolness. The fact that he had given Enochsville\na public library, and had filled its shelves with several tons of the\nbest reading that the Egyptian writers of the day provided, was\nregarded as a partial atonement for some of his indiscretions, and the\nendowment of a large stone-quarry at Ararat where children were taught\nto read and write, helped materially in his rehabilitation, but on the\nwhole Uncle Zib was looked upon askance by the majority. On the other\nhand Uncle Azag, a strong, pious man, who owed money to everybody in\ntown, was the one after whom my mother wished me to be named, a\nproposition which my father resisted to the uttermost expense of his\npowers.\n\n\"What's the use?\" I heard him ask, warmly. \"He'll get his name on\nplenty of I. O. U.'s on his own account before he leaves this glad\nlittle earth, without our giving him an autograph that is already on\nenough over-due paper to decorate every flat in Uncle Zib's model\ntenements.\"\n\nThe disputation continued with some acrimony for a week, until finally\nmy father put his foot down.\n\n\"I'm tired of referring to him as IT,\" he blurted out one night.\n\"We'll compromise, and name him after me and thee. He shall be called\nMe for me, and Thou for thee, Selah!\"\n\nAnd so it was that from that day forth I was known as Methouselah,\nsince corrupted into Methuselah.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER II\n\nEARLY INFLUENCES\n\n\nBoys remained boys in those old days very much longer than they do\nnow. The smartness of children like my grandsons, Shem, Ham and\nJaphet, for instance, who at the age of two hundred and fifty arrogate\nto themselves all the knowledge of the universe, was comparatively\nunknown when I was a child. To begin with we were of a different breed\nfrom the boys of to-day, and life itself was more simple. We were\nsurrounded with none of those luxuries which are characteristic of\nmodern life, and we were in no haste to grow old by taking short cuts\nacross the fields of time. We were content to remain youthful, and\neven childish, taking on ourselves none of the superiorities of age\nuntil we had attained to the years which are presumed to go with\ndiscretion. We did not think either arrogantly or otherwise that we\nknew more by intuition than our parents had been able to learn from\nexperience, and, with a few possible exceptions, we none of us assumed\nthat position of high authority in the family which is, I regret to\nsay, generally assumed by the sons and daughters of the present. For\nmyself, I was quite willing to admit, even on the day of my birth,\nthat my father, in spite of certain obvious limitations, knew more\nthan I; and that my mother in spite of the fact that she was a woman,\nwas possessed, in a minor degree perhaps, but still indubitably\npossessed, of certain of the elementary qualities at least of human\nintelligence. As I recall my attitude towards my elders in those\ndays, the only person whose pretensions to superior attainments along\nlines of universal knowledge I was at all inclined to resent, was my\nmaiden aunt, Jerusha, my father's sister, who, having attained to the\nkittenish age of 623 years, unmarried, and having consequently had no\nchildren, knew more about men and their ways, and how to bring up\nchildren scientifically than anybody at that time known to civilized\nsociety. Indeed I have always thought that it was the general\nrecognition of the fact that Aunt Jerusha knew just a little more than\nthere was to know that had brought about that condition of enduring\nspinsterhood in which she was passing her days. Even her, however, I\ncould have viewed with amused toleration if so be she could have been\ninduced to practice her theories as to the Fifty-seven Best Ways To\nBring Up The Young upon others than myself. She was an amusing young\nthing, and the charming way in which even in middle age--she was as I\nhave already said 623 years old at the time of which I write--she held\non to the manners of youth was delightful to contemplate. She always\nkept herself looking very fit, and was the first woman in our section\nof the world to wear her hair pompadour in front, running to the\nextreme psychic knot behind--she called it psychic, though I have\nsince learned that the proper adjective is Psyche, indicating rather a\nlevity of mind than anything else. It should be said of her in all\njustice that she was a leader in her set, and as President of the\nWoman's Club of Enochsville was a person of more than ordinary\ninfluence, and it was through her that the movement to grant the\nfranchise to all single women over three hundred and forty, resulted\nin the extension of the suffrage to that extent.\n\n[Illustration: \"It's a boy, sir!\"]\n\nIncidentally I cannot forget the wise words of my father in this\nconnection. He had always been an anti-suffragist, but when Aunt\nJerusha's plan was laid before him he swung instantly around and\nbecame one of its heartiest advocates.\n\n\"It is a wise measure,\" said he. \"Safe, sane and practical, for no\nsingle woman will confess to the age of qualification, so that in\npassing this act we grant the prayers of our petitioners without\nsubjecting ourselves to the dangers of women's suffrage. Remember my\nson, that it always pays to be generous with that which costs you\nnothing, and that woman's suffrage is as harmless as the cooing dove\nif you only take the precaution to raise the age limit high enough to\nfreeze out the old maids.\"\n\nI should add too that Aunt Jerusha had a way with her that was not\nwithout its fascination. To look at her you would never have supposed\nthat she was more than four hundred years old, and the variety of eyes\nthat she could make when there were men about, was wonderful to see. I\nnoticed it the very day I was born, and when I first caught sight of\nthat piquante little glance that now and then she cast in my direction\nout of the tail of her eye, I began rummaging about in the back of my\nsubconscious mind for the precise words with which to characterize\nher.\n\n\"You giddy old flirt!\" was the apostrophe I had in mind at the moment,\nbut, of course, having had no practice in speech I was compelled to\nforego the pleasure of giving audible expression to the thought.\n\nUnfortunately for me Aunt Jerusha equipped with that intuitive\nknowledge of what to do under any given circumstances that invariably\ngoes with the status of maiden-aunthood in its acute stages, now\nassumed complete control of my destinies; and for a time it looked as\nthough I were in a fair way to become what the great Egyptian ruler,\nKing Ptush the Third was referring to in many of his State papers as a\n\"Meticulous Mollycoddle.\" To begin with, Aunt Jerusha was a strong\nbeliever in the New Thought School of Infantile Development, and when\nI was barely six weeks old she began strapping me on a board like an\nEskimo baby, and suspending me thus restrained to a peg in the wall,\nwhere, helpless, I was required to hang and stare while she implanted\nthe germs of strength in my soul by reading aloud whole chapters from\nthe inspired chisellings of the popular seer Ber Nard Pshaw, who was\nto the literature of that period what King Ptush was to statecraft. He\nwas the acknowledged leader of the Neo-Bunkum School of Right\nThinking, and had first attracted the attention of his age by his\nfamous reply to one who had called him an Egotist.\n\n\"I am more than that,\" he answered. \"I am a Megotist. The world is\nfull of I's, but there is only one Me.\"\n\nUpon this sort of thing was I fed, not only spiritually but\nphysically, by my Aunt Jerusha. When, for instance, I found myself\nsuffering from a pain in my Commissary Department for the sole and\nsufficient reason that my nurse had inadvertently handed me the hard\ncider jug instead of my noon-day bottle of discosaurus' milk, she\nwould rattle off some such statement as this: _Thought is everything.\nPain is something. Hence where there is no thought there can be no\npain. Wherefore if you have a pain it is evident that you have a\nthought. To be rid of the pain stop thinking._\n\nThen she would fix her eye on mine, and gaze at me sternly in an\neffort to remove my sufferings by the hot poultice of her own mushy\nreflections instead of getting the peppermint and the hot-water bag.\nWhen night came on and I was restless instead of wooing slumber on my\nbehalf with soft and soothing lullabies, or telling me fairy-stories\nsuch as children love, she would say: _The child's mind is immature.\nHis conclusions, therefore, are immature. Whence his decisions as to\nwhat he likes lack maturity, and consequently to give him that for\nwhich he professes to like is equivalent to feeding him on unripe\nfruit. So we conclude that what he says he likes he really does not\nlike, and to please him therefore, it becomes necessary to give him\nwhat he professes to dislike. Ergo, I will read him to sleep with the\nseventeenth chapter, part forty-nine of the works of Niet-Zhe on the\nco-ordination of our \u00e6sthetic powers in respect to the relative\ndelights of pleasure and pain._\n\nI will do my Aunt Jerusha the credit of saying at this point that her\nmethod of putting me to sleep was efficacious. I do not ever remember\nhaving retained consciousness past the third paragraph of her remedy\nfor insomnia.\n\n[Illustration: Aunt Jerusha as a disciplinarian.]\n\nI tremble to think of what I should have become had this fauntleroy\nprocess of rearing been allowed to continue unchecked. There were\nprigs enough in our family already without afflicting the world with\nanother, and it rejoices me to this day to recall that just as we were\nreaching the point when it was either an early and beautiful demise in\nthe odor of sanctity as a perfect child, or my present eminence as the\nmost continuous human performance on record for me, my father stepped\nin, reasserted his authority and rescued me from the clutches of my\nAunt Jerusha. Returning one day from business, he discovered Aunt\nJerusha sitting in a rocking-chair in the nursery before me reading\naloud from her tablets, whilst I, as usual, hung strapped and\nsuspended from a hook on the picture moulding. It was my supper-time,\nand she was feeding me according to the New Thought method of\ncatering. The substance of her discourse was that hunger was an idea,\nnothing more. She was proving to her own satisfaction at least that I\nwas hungry only because I thought I was hungry, and as father came in\nshe was trying to persuade me that if I would be a good boy and make\nup my mind that my appetite had been appeased by a series of courses\nof thought biscuits, spirituelle waffles, and mental hors d'oeuvres\ngenerally I would no longer be hungry.\n\n\"Fill your spirit stomach with the food of thought, Methy, dear,\" she\nwas saying as my father appeared in the door-way. \"Make up your mind\nthat it is stuffed with the crackers and milk of the spirit; that\nyour spiritual bread is buttered with the oleomargerine of lofty\nideals, and sugared with the saccharin of your granulated meditations,\nand you will grow strong. You will become an intellectual athlete,\nlike the great King Ptush of Egypt; a winner in the spiritual\nMarathon--\"\n\n\"What are you trying to do with this kid, anyhow?\" demanded my father\nat this point. \"Turn him into a strap-hanger, or is this just a little\nlynching party?\"\n\n\"Hush, Enoch,\" protested Aunt Jerusha. \"Do not project an\nunsympathetic thought wave across our wires. I am just getting little\nMethy into a receptive mood. He is having his supper.\"\n\n\"Supper?\" roared my father. \"You call that stuff supper? Why, the\nchild is getting thinner than a circus lemonade--\"\n\n\"In the grosser sense, yes,\" replied Aunt Jerusha, calmly, after the\nmanner of maiden ladies who are sure of their position. \"But look at\nthose eyes. Do they not betoken a great and budding soul within that\nis hourly waxing in strength and beauty?\"\n\n\"My dear Jerusha,\" said my father, unhooking me from the wall and\nhanding me a ripe red banana to eat, \"all that you say is very lovely,\nand I have no doubt that under your administration of affairs the boy\nwill sooner or later become a bully idea, but I hate a man whose\nconvexity of soul has been attained through a concavity of stomach.\nWhat this boy needs at this stage of the game is development in what\nyou properly term the grosser sense, I might even go so far as to say\nthe butcher sense as well as the grocer sense. Ham and eggs is what he\nneeds.\"\n\nAnd with that he sent out and had a diplodocus carnegii killed, and\nfed me himself for the next ten days on dainty morsels cut from the\nfatted calf of that luscious bird. It was thus that I escaped the fate\nof the over-good who die young and became a factor in the world of\naffairs rather than a pleasant memory in the minds of my family.\n\nAs for my education it was limited, and I may say desultory. In this\nmy Aunt Jerusha was allowed a greater authority than in the matter of\nmy diet, and she early made up her mind that the great weakness of the\neducational system of the day was the tendency of the teachers in our\nschools to cram the minds of the young.\n\n\"There is no hurry in days like these when people live to be eight or\nnine hundred years old,\" she observed to my mother. \"There is not very\nmuch to be learned as yet. Science is in its infancy, very little\nhistory has been made, and as for Latin and Greek, it is entirely\nunnecessary for Methy to study those languages, because as yet,\nnobody speaks them, and with the possible exception of that tramp\npoet, Homer, who passed through here last week on his way West, nobody\nis using it in literature. Teach him the three Rs and all will be\nwell. Taking the alphabet first and learning one letter a year for\ntwenty-six years he will be able to read and write as early in life as\nhe ought to. If we were more careful not to teach our children to read\nin their childhood we should not be so anxious about the effects of\npernicious literature upon their adolescent morals. If I had my way no\none should be taught to read until after he had passed his hundredth\nyear. In that way, and in that way only can we protect our youth from\nthe dreadful influence of such novels as 'Three Cycles, Not To Mention\nThe Rug,' which dreadful book I have found within the past month in\nthe hands of at least twenty children in the neighborhood, not one of\nwhom was past sixty.\"\n\nIt was thus resolved that my education should proceed with due\ndeliberation and even as Aunt Jerusha had suggested, I was taught only\none letter a year for the first twenty-six years of my life, after\nwhich I took up addition, multiplication, short and long division and\nfractions. My father would not permit me to learn subtraction.\n\n\"It is a waste of time,\" said he. \"Children subtract by intuition. Put\nin all your time teaching Methy how to add and multiply.\"\n\nMy history was meagre, because as Aunt Jerusha had said, history\nitself was meagre. There had not even been a flood, much less a first,\nsecond, or third Punic War. Nobody in my time had ever heard of\nNapoleon Bonaparte or George Washington or Julius C\u00e6sar, or\nAlexander, save a few prophets in the hills back of Enochsville, in\nwhose prognostications few of their contemporaries took any stock; as\nwas indeed not unnatural, since when they attempted to prophesy as to\nthe weather they showed themselves to be rather poor guessers. If a\nman prophesies a blizzard for to-morrow and to-morrow comes bringing\nwith it the balmy odors of Spring, no one is likely to set much store\nby his prognostications concerning the possible presidential candidacy\nof a man named Bryan six or seven thousand years later. Consequently\nthe only history with which I took the trouble to familiarize myself\nwas that which ante-dated my birth, and even that was somewhat hazy in\nthe minds of historians. My predecessors in the patriarchal profession\nwere a reticent lot, inherited no doubt from our original ancestor\nAdam, who could never be got to talk even to members of his immediate\nfamily on the subject of his early years. True, it is generally\nbelieved that he had no early years, and that he was born on his\nfifty-ninth birthday, but even as to that he would not speak. I shall\nnever forget the look on his face when I asked him at a Thanksgiving\ndinner one year if he had ever been a monkey with a tail. He rose up\nfrom the table with considerable dignity, and leading me out into the\nwood-shed turned me over on his knee and subjected me to a rather\nsevere course of treatment with a hair-brush.\n\n\"There, my lad,\" he observed when he had done. \"If I had had a tail\nthat is about where I should have worn it.\"\n\nI never referred to the subject again.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER III\n\nSOME REMINISCENCES OF ADAM\n\n\nThe concluding paragraphs of my last chapter have set my mind running\nupon the subject of my original forebears, and inasmuch as I have\ndecided to write these memoirs of mine along the lines of least\nresistance, it becomes proper that I should at this time, put down\nwhatever happens to be in my mind. To speak frankly I never really\ncould get up much of a liking for old grandfather Adam. He was as\ndevoid of real humor as the Scottentots, and simply because by a mere\naccident of birth he became the First Gentleman of Europe, Asia and\nAfrica, he assumed airs that rendered him distinctly unpopular with\nhis descendants. He considered himself the fount of all knowledge\nbecause in the early days of his occupancy of the Garden of Eden there\nwas no one to dispute his conclusions, and the fact that he had been\nborn without a boyhood, as we have already seen at the age of\nfifty-nine, left him entirely unsympathetic in matters where boys were\nconcerned. I shall never forget a conspicuous case in point\ndemonstrating his utter lack of comprehension of a boy's way of\nlooking at things. He was on a visit to our home at Enochsville, and\non the night of his arrival, having called for a glass of fermented\ngrape-juice, thinking to indulge in a mere pleasantry, I brought him a\ntumblerful of sweetened red ink, the which he gulped down so avidly\nthat it was not until it was beyond recall that he realized what I had\ndone; and when in his wrath he called for an instant remedy and I\nbrought him the blotting paper, instead of smiling at the merry\nquality of my jest, he pursued me for two hours around my father's\nfarm, and finally cornering me in the Discosaurus shed, larruped me\nfor twenty full minutes with a paddle pulled from a prickly cactus\nplant in my mother's drawing-room, thorn side down. Indeed most of my\nearly recollections of the old gentleman are inseparably associated\nwith a series of chastisements which, even as he had prophesied when\nadministering them, I have not been able to forget, although I cannot\nsee that any of them ever resulted in a lasting reformation of my\nways. On the contrary the desire to see what new form of thrashing his\ndisciplinary mind could invent led me into devising new kinds of\nprovocation, so that for a great many years his visits to our house\nwere a source of great anxiety to my parents. His view of me and my\nways were expressed with some degree of force to our family physician\nwho, when at the age of a hundred and fifty-three I came down with the\nmumps, having summoned the whole family and said that I would burst\nbefore morning, was met by a reassuring observation from Adam that he\nwouldn't believe I was dead even if I had been buried a year.\n\n\"It is the good who die young, Doctor,\" he said. \"On that principle\nthis young malefactor will live to be the oldest man in the world.\"\n\nA curious example of his gift of prophecy!\n\nAdam's table manners were a frequent source of mortification to us\nall. The free and easy habits of the Garden period clung to him\nthroughout his life, and under no circumstances could he be induced to\nuse either a fork, a knife or a spoon, and even on the most formal\noccasions he absolutely refused to dress for dinner.\n\n\"Fingers were made before forks,\" he said, \"and as for spoons I have\nno use for such frills. I can eat my peas out of the pod, and as for\nsoup it tastes better out of a dipper anyhow.\"\n\nAs for the knives, his dislike of them was merely in their use at\ntable. He was fond of knives of all sorts, and he regarded them always\nas his legitimate spoil whenever he dined anywhere, pocketing every\none he could lay his hands on with as much facility as the Egyptian,\nand Abyssinian drummers who visited our section of the country every\nyear made off with the spoons of our hostelries. Nor could we ever\nappeal to him on the score of etiquette. Any observation as to the\nways of our first families was always met by a cold but quick response\nthat if there was any firster family than his own in all creation, he\ncouldn't find its name in the social register. Indeed the old\ngentleman was rather inclined to be very snobbish on this point, and\nwhen any of his descendants chose to take him to task for the\ncrudeness of his manners he was accustomed to look them coldly over\nand retort that things had come to a pretty pass when comparatively\nnew people ventured to instruct the oldest of the old settlers as to\nwhat was or was not good form. The only person who ever succeeded in\nbowling him over on this point was Uncle Zib, hitherto referred to as\nthe billionaire member of our family, who, after listening to a long\nand somewhat supercilious discourse from Adam on the subject of\nfamily, turned like a flash and asked:\n\n\"And who pray was your grandfather?\"\n\nThe old gentleman flushed deeply, and for once was silent, being as I\nhave already intimated rather sensitive, and therefore inclined to\nreticence on the score of his ancestry.\n\n[Illustration: Adam's Dress Chart.]\n\nHe took a great deal of pride in his success as a namer of animals,\nbut as my grandson Noah remarked several hundred years later, it was a\ncommonplace achievement after all.\n\n\"A dog is a dog, and a cat is a cat, and a horse is a horse. Any fool\nwould know that, so what virtue there was in his calling the beasts by\ntheir real names I don't quite see,\" said Noah.\n\nI am disposed, however, to give the old fellow the credit that is his\ndue for making so few mistakes. That he should instantly be able to\ntell the difference between a dromedary and a camel without any\nprevious instruction, strikes me as evidence of a more or less\nremarkable intuition, the like of which we do not often find to-day,\nand his dubbing that long-eared, four-footed piece of resistant\nuselessness the Ass an ass, always seemed to me to be a master\nstroke, although my father used to say that his greatest achievement\nlay in correctly designating the pig at first sight.\n\n\"If there is any animal in the whole category of four-legged creatures\nthat more thoroughly deserves to be called a pig than the pig, I don't\nknow what it is. He looks like a pig, he behaves like a pig, and he\neats like a pig--in fact he is a pig, and Adam never did anything\nbetter than when he invented that name and applied it.\"\n\nThe old gentleman was present when my father said that, and his face\nflushed with pleasure at his words of praise.\n\n\"Thank you, Enoch,\" he said. \"I am rather proud of it, but I think I\ndid quite as well when it came to the hen. Anything more aptly\nanswering to the word hen in all its various shades of meaning than\nthe hen itself I don't know, but it took me a full week to reason the\nthing out. It was not until I heard its absurd cackling over the\nlaying of a strictly fresh egg, strutting about the barn-yard like a\nfeathered Napoleon Bonaparte, and acting altogether as though she were\nthe winner of a Twentieth Century Marathon race that it dawned on me\nthat the creature was a hen, and could never be anything else than a\nhen. Mother wished me to call her an omelette, the feminine form of an\nom, as she expressed it, but I had already named the rooster, and the\nbird seemed so exactly like a rooster that I declined to make any\nchanges.\"\n\n\"I don't see,\" put in Uncle Zib at this point, \"where you got the word\nhen from. That is the wonder of it to my mind.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" laughed Adam, \"that was easy, my dear Zib. I got it from an\ninspection of the egg.\"\n\n\"The egg?\" demanded Uncle Zib.\n\n\"Certainly,\" replied Adam. \"You see the minute I picked up the egg and\nlooked at it closely, I saw that it was a hen's egg, and there you\nare.\"\n\nAfter all it seemed very simple.\n\nI have spoken of his abhorrence of dress. He carried this to an\nextreme degree and to the end of his life predicted dire things from\nthe tendency of his descendants toward sartorial display. I shall\nnever forget the lucid fashion in which he presented the situation to\nmy father once while we were camping out one night on Mount Ararat,\nafter a day's hunting. He was seated on a woody knoll skinning a\npterodactyl for our supper.\n\n\"I tell you, Enoch,\" he said, \"and if you don't mark my words you'll\nwish you had, these new fangled notions that are coming along, and\naffecting the whole of modern society in respect to what you are\npleased to call dress, are going to result sooner or later in trouble.\nI can clearly see even if you cannot, that the new ideas as to clothes\nare breeders of extravagance. As things were in my young days anybody\nwho felt the need of a new costume of one kind or another had only to go\nout into the woods and pick it. If your great-great-great-grandmother or\nI, for instance, wanted a new Spring suit we'd go hand in hand together\nto the orchard, and in the course of a half hour's steady work would fit\nourselves out with a wardrobe that would have made this Queen of Sheba\nthat the prophets are foretelling, look like thirty clam-shells; and\nwhat is more, a Spring costume was indeed a Spring costume and nothing\nelse, for it was made of the freshest of the vernal leaves, beautiful in\ntheir early greens, and decorated here and there with a bit of a blossom\nthat gave the whole a most fetching appearance. And so it was with the\nother seasons. For summer we used leaves of the vintage of July and\nAugust, deeper in their green, with the summer flowers for decoration.\nNothing ever so stirred the heart of man as Mother Eve decked out in her\ngown of rose leaves, or hollyhocks; and occasionally when we went\ntravelling together dressed in our suits of hardy perennials, we were\nthe cynosure of all eyes. In the Autumn the rich red of the maple gave\nus an aspect of gayety in respect to our clothes that was most\npicturesque; and then when the winter blasts began to blow, our garments\nof pine, cedar and hemlock were not only warm, but appropriate and\nbecoming. It is true that clothes made of hemlock were not altogether\ncomfortable at first, having some of the prickly qualities of the\nhair-shirt, but the very tittilation of the epidermis by their pointed\nspills, sharp sometimes as a needle, served to keep our blood in\ncirculation, and consequently at all times warm and glowing. And it all\ncost us nothing more than the labor of the harvest, but now, all is\ndifferent. The use of costly fabrics, woven stuffs, silks, satins and\ncalicos, has introduced an added element of expense into our daily\nlives, and all to no useful purpose. Take your Aunt Jerusha, for\ninstance. Where Mother Eve enjoyed as many different costumes as there\nwere trees in the country without cost, all of them becoming, and wholly\nadequate, your Aunt Jerusha has to be satisfied with three or four gowns\nof indifferent fit, made by the village seamstress at an average cost of\nthirty or forty dollars apiece. A sheath-gown, costing Jerusha\nseventy-five dollars, in the distance, gives no more of an impression in\nthe matter of figure to an admiring world than your original grandmother\nused to make without any further sartorial embellishment than an\nostrich feather in her hair, and as for the men--well, if you see any\nvalue in the change in men's garments over those which prevailed in my\nday, you can see what I cannot, and what is going to be the result? The\ntime will come when tailors' bills will be regarded as a curse. Fathers\nof families who, under the scheme of dress invented by myself, could\nkeep a large number of growing boys appropriately clad, will sooner or\nlater be forced into bankruptcy by the demands of tailors under these\nnew methods now coming into vogue. In the train of this will come also a\nlove of display, and in the course of years you will find men judged not\nby the natural stature of their manhood, but by the clothes they wear,\nto the everlasting deception of society. By the use of a little expert\npadding, building up here and there, a miserable little human shoat will\nbe able to appear in all the glory of a gladiator. A silk outer garment\nwill cover the shoddy inner nature of a bit of attleboro humanity so\neffectively that you will hardly be able to tell the real thing from the\nbogus, and many a man lured into matrimony by the charms of an outward\nVenus, will find after marriage that he has tied himself up for life to\na human hat-rack, specially designed by a clever dressmaker, to yank him\nfrom the joys of a contented celibacy into the thorny paths of hymeneal\nchaos.\n\n\"Nor will it stop here,\" the old gentleman continued, warming to his\nsubject. \"I prophesy that just as at the present time society looks\nwith disfavor on me for going around in the simple dress of my early\ndays, so the time will come when an even more advanced society will\ndemand the placing of more clothes on top of those that you all wear\nnow. The outer garments of to-day will become the under-clothes of\nsome destined to-morrow, and centuries hence a man found walking on\nthe public highways dressed as you are will be arrested by the police\nfor shocking the sense of propriety of the community, and so on. It\nwill go on and on until you will find human beings everywhere decked\nout in layer after layer of clothes until he or she has lost all\nsemblance to that beautiful thing that an all-wise Providence has\ndesigned us to be. Man will wear under-clothes and outer clothes. He\nwill devise an absurd bit of starch, button-holes and tails called a\nshirt, in which doubtless he will screw diamond-studs, and over which\nhe will wear a resounding waistcoat embroidered with all sorts of\nwild-flowers in bloom. Then will come a stiff uncomfortable yoke for\nhis neck, which he will call a collar, around which he will wind what\nhe will call a necktie, the only useful purpose of which will be its\nvalue as a danger signal to the rest of mankind, for it will be\nthrough the medium of this addition to the human dress that character\nwill manifest itself, man being prone unconsciously to show his\nstrength or weaknesses in the manner of his personal adornment. This\nwill lead to all sorts of vain exhibitions until it will be with\nextreme difficulty that the public will be able to differentiate\nbetween a genuine peacock and an upstart jack-daw, masquerading in a\nmerry widow hat. Then will come the crowning misdemeanor in men's\nclothes which, for want of a better term let us call pants--a pair of\nbags sewed together at the top, and designed for no other purpose than\nto conceal from the world the character and quality of the wearer's\nlegs. When that beatific invention arrives your spindle-legged,\nknock-kneed imitation of a man will, as far as the public eye is\nconcerned, find himself on as sure a footing as your very Adonis, and\na person with a comparatively under-developed understanding will be\nable to make as good a showing in the world as the man who is really\nall there. Like charity, these pants will cover a multitude of shins\nthat once exposed to the world would at once give warning of the\npossessors' fundamental instability. In other words this new style of\ndress that our fashionable leaders are now advocating is designed\nsimply for the purpose of concealing from the world their natural\ndefects, enabling them to appear for what they are not, and therefore\nto deceive, the sure result of which is to be the fostering of vanity,\na love of display, the breeding of snobs, and an impairment of the\naverage man's purse to such an extent that some day or other tailors'\nand dressmakers' bills will become an inevitable item in every\nschedule in bankruptcy in the land. Clothes will also breed rags, for\nwithout clothes to grow threadbare and frayed, it is clear that the\nraw material of rags and tatters would be lacking, and many a scene of\nbeggary would be avoided.\n\n\"Wherefore, my son,\" the old man concluded, \"let me warn you to set\nyour face sternly against these modern innovations, and to return to\nthe plainer, and yet more beautiful habiliments of your sires. Let the\nsturdy oak be your tailor; when you need a vernal gown, seek the\nspreading chestnut tree and from its upper branches pluck the clothing\nthat you need, and when drear winter comes upon the scene hie you to\nthe mountain top, and from the rich stock of Hemlock, Pine and Co.,\nTailors, By Special Appointment To Their Majesties, The Eternal Hills,\ngather the sartorial blessings that there await you.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER IV\n\nGRANDMOTHER EVE\n\n\nVery different in almost every imaginable respect from Adam was his\nattractive lady, Madame Eve. Indeed, so radically different from each\nother were this rather ill-assorted pair that it was always difficult\nfor us to believe that they were related even by marriage, and I\nhesitate to say what I think would have been the outcome of their little\nromance had there been any competition for the lady's hand when Adam set\nout to win it. I have personally always had a feeling that this first of\nhymeneal experiments was rather a marriage of convenience than anything\nelse, and I have heard my great-great-great-grandmother say that in the\nold pioneer days there was very little for a woman to choose from in the\nmatter of men's society.\n\n\"For a long time,\" she remarked, \"Adam was the only man in sight, and\nI was a young thing entirely without experience in worldly matters. He\nseemed to my girlish fancy to be all that a man should be. His habits\nwere good. He neither smoked nor drank, cared apparently nothing for\ncards, and barring an interest in Discosaurus Racing, had very few\nsporting proclivities. We were thrown together a great deal, and\ninasmuch as the life in the Garden was a somewhat lonely one, we took\nconsiderable pleasure in each other's society. For myself, I was not\nparticularly anxious to be married, preferring the free and\nindependent life of the spinster, but as time went on and we came to\nrealize that the people of future generations might misunderstand us\nand, as people will do, talk about us, we decided that the best way\nto avoid all gossip was to announce our engagement, and at the end of\nthe usual period, settle down together as man and wife. I don't know\nthat I have ever regretted the step, though I will say that I think it\nis undesirable for a young girl to enter too hastily into the\nobligations of matrimony, or to marry the first man that comes along,\nunless she is absolutely sure that he is the only man she could\npossibly endure through three meals a day for the balance of her\nlife.\"\n\nIt must not be assumed from this little reminiscence of this first\nlady in the land that her marriage was an unhappy one. I think, that\nas a matter of fact, it was quite the contrary, for subsequent to the\nwedding each was too busy with other matters to get thinking either\nmorbidly or otherwise on the subject of their individual happiness.\nThey took it as a matter of course, and in the division of labor which\nthe social conditions of the day involved, found too much to occupy\nthem to worry over such unimportant abstractions as mere personal\nfelicity.\n\n\"We were spared one of the direst afflictions of modern social life,\"\nMadame Eve once remarked to my mother, in talking over the old days,\n\"in the absence of domestic servants from our family circle. Adam was\nhead of the house, general provider, hired-man, stable-boy,\nhead-gardener, coach-man, night-watchman and everything else of the\nmale persuasion on the place; whilst I was cook, laundress, nurse,\nhousekeeper, manicure, stenographer, and general housemaid, as well as\nthe mother of the family--a situation that even though it involved us\nin no end of hard work, had its compensations. Living off in suburbs\nas we did, you can have no idea of what a comfort it was to us not to\nbe at the mercy of a cook who would threaten to leave us every time\nanything happened to displease her, such as an extra meal to be cooked\nin emergency cases, or the failure of the cooking-sherry to come up to\nthe exalted standards of her taste as a connoisseur in wines, and hard\nas the housework was, as I look back upon it now, I realize how much\ntrouble I was spared in not having to follow a yellow-haired fluffy\nruffles about the house all day long cleaning up after her. If there\nis anything of the labor-saving device in that modern invention known\nas a chambermaid, I don't know where it comes in. I'd rather sweep\nthree floors, and make twenty-nine beds, every day of my life than put\nin one single week trying to get seven cents worth of efficient work\nout of a fourteen-dollar housemaid.\"\n\nAt this point I ventured to put in the suggestion that I should have\nthought some use could have been made of the monkeys in the matter of\nDomestic Service, whereupon the dear lady, who was not nearly so\nsensitive on the subject of the Simian family as her husband had\nalways shown himself to be, patted me on the head, and smiled\nindulgently, as she cracked her little joke.\n\n\"Monkeys, my dear Methy,\" she replied, \"were always more efficient in\nthe higher branches. Seriously, however,\" she went on, \"we had that\nsame idea ourselves, and we tried Simian labor for a while, but it was\nfar from satisfactory. They were too playfully impetuous, and we had\nto give them up as indoor servants. We had a Monkey Butler one season,\nand nothing could induce him to serve our dinner in that dignified\nfashion in which a dinner should be served. He would pass the soup\nwith one paw, the fish with the other, while serving the bread with\nhis tail, and all simultaneously, so that instead of dinner becoming a\npeaceful meal, it was at all times, a highly excitable function that\nleft us all in a state of trembling nervousness when it was over. Try\nas we might we could not induce them to do one thing at a time, and\nfinally when this particular butler, to whom I have referred, instead\nof standing as he was instructed to do behind Adam's chair, insisted\non swinging from the chandelier over the center of the table suspended\nby his caudal appendage, we decided that we would rather wait on\nourselves.\"\n\nAsked once if she had not found the primitive life uncomfortable, she\nshook her head in a decided negative.\n\n[Illustration: Eve's Scrap Book.]\n\n\"There were too many compensations in our freedom from the things that\nmake your social life of to-day a complex problem,\" she replied. \"In\nthe first place I never had to worry much over Adam. When he was not\nout getting the raw material for our daily meals he was most generally\nat home, for the very excellent reason that there was no other place\nto go. We hadn't any Clubs to begin with, so that on his way home from\nbusiness there was no temptation for him to stop off anywhere and\nfrivol away his time playing billiards, or squandering his limited\nmeans on rubbers of bridge or other ruinous games. The only Vaudeville\nshows we had at the time consisted of the somewhat too continuous\nperformances of the monkeys and the poll-parrots right there in our\nown back-yard, so that that menace to the happy home was entirely\nunknown to us, and inasmuch as I was the only cook in all Christendom\nat the time, the idea of not coming home to dinner never occurred to\nAdam. It is true that at times he criticised my cooking, but in view\nof certain ancestral limitations from which he suffered, I never had\nto sit quietly and listen to an exasperating disquisition on the Pies\nThat Mother Used To Make, a line of conversation that in these modern\ndays has broken up many an otherwise happy home. Socially the time had\nits draw-backs, but even in that respect there were advantages. The\nfact that we had no next-door neighbors enabled us to live without\nostentation. I have discovered that much of the trouble in the world\nto-day arises from a love of showing-off, and of course, if there is\nno one about to show-off to, you don't indulge in that sort of\nfoolishness. Being the only family in the place we were not spurred\ninto extravagances of living, either because we had to keep up an end\nin society, or because we wished to make a better showing than someone\nelse was making. There was correspondingly no gossip going on all\nabout us. The absence of society meant that there were no Sewing\nCircles anywhere where peoples' reputations were pulled apart while\nunder-clothes for alleged heathen were put together. Nobody ever\ndescended upon us at unreasonable hours with unwelcome Surprise\nParties eating us out of house and home and compelling us to stay up\nall night dancing the Virginia Reel when we were so sleepy we could\nhardly keep our eyes open. We didn't have to give dinners to people we\ndidn't like, or make calls on persons in whom we took no earthly\ninterest whatever. There was no question of Woman's Suffrage to make\nan everlasting breach between Adam and myself; no church squabbles\nover whether the new carpet should be pink or green, and as for\npolitics, there was not anything even remotely resembling a politic in\nthe whole broad land. If Adam or I felt the need of a law now and\nthen, we'd make it, and if it didn't work, we'd repeal it, so that\nthere were no endless discussions on such subjects, involving hard\nfeeling, acrimonious correspondence, and an endless chain of Chapters\nof the Ananias Club all over creation. And when the children came\nalong I was permitted to bring them up according to my own ideas,\nthanks to the entire absence from the country of inspired old-maids,\nand omniscient editors, ceaselessly endeavoring to reduce a natural\nmaternal function to an arbitrary science. It has been said that I did\nnot have much to be proud of in the results of my efforts to bring up\nmy children right, and I suppose that in the case of Cain and Abel I\nmust admit that I have not; but I am not so sure that things would\nhave turned out any different if I had reared them after a Fireside\nCompanion pattern for the making of a panne velvet posterity. I will\ngo so far as to say that after looking over the comic supplements of\nthe Sunday Newspapers, I believe Cain would have killed Abel ten years\nearlier than he did if he had had the example of the Katzenjammer Kids\nand Buster Brown before him in the formative years of his life. So, on\nthat score, I am comfortable in my mind, much as I regret the\ndisastrous climax of the lives of those two boys. In connection with\nthis matter of the bringing up of children I believe, too, that\ndespite the narrowness of our outlook, the primitive conditions were\nbetter than those which now exist. I never heard of my boys running\nloose about town waking up the whole community with their cheers\nbecause their college football team had crippled eleven other boys\nfrom another college for life; and hard to manage as Cain and Abel\nwere at times, Adam and I never had to put them to bed at five\no'clock in the morning because they had paralyzed their throats at a\ncollege banquet announcing to an exasperated world that they were Sons\nof a Gambolier. In fact, the educational problem of those early days\nwas an educational problem and not a social one. We did not spend our\ntime teaching boys to speak seventeen languages, without any ideas to\nexpress in any one of them, but went in for the ideas first. We\nregarded speech merely as a vehicle for the expression of ideas, and\nwent at it from that point of view, rather than the other way around\naccording to modern notions. Cain and Abel didn't have to go to a\nmilitary school to learn how to haze each other, and no young man of\nthat day ever thought of qualifying for his A. B. by compelling\nanother young man to sip Tabasco sauce through a straw. What they\nlearned, they learned by experience, and not through the pages of a\nbook. If we felt it well to teach one of them that water was wet, we\ndid not subject his young mind to a nine months course of lectures by\na Professor on Hydropathy, but took him out and dropped him in the\nduck-pond and let him draw his own conclusions; and when it came to\nBotany, we found that either one of them could get a more\ncomprehensive idea of the habits of growing plants from weeding a\nten-acre lot than he could get out of a four years' course at a\nCorrespondence School. The result was that when he came to graduate\nand go out into the world he was ready for business, and didn't have\nto serve as an Office-Boy on a salary of nothing a week for\nseventy-five or a hundred years before he was able to earn his own\nliving.\"\n\nIt surely was an idyllic picture that the dear old lady drew, and I\nhave often wished myself amid the rush and roar of modern life, that\nwe might go back to the simpler methods of those Arcadian days.\n\nOn the subject of dress, Eve was entirely out of accord with her\nhusband. She viewed Adam's theories on that subject with toleration,\nhowever, and always laughed when they were mentioned.\n\n\"He's just like a man,\" she smiled. \"He really has no objection to\nfetching costumes when they are worn by other people. He merely does\nnot wish to be bothered with such things himself. He has just as much\nof an eye for a daintily dressed little bit of femininity as anybody\nelse, but he is eternally afraid that if I go in for that sort of\nthing he will be turned into a lady's maid. The idea of a hook-and-eye\nfills him with horror. His eyesight is not as good as it used to be,\nand he dreads the notion that if I come out in one of these\nnew-fangled waists that hook up at the back he will be compelled to\nput in an hour or two fastening it up for me every time I put it on,\nand I don't blame him. It seems to me that if there is anything in\nthis world that is unbefitting the glorious manhood of a true\nmasculine being it is to have to sit down in a chair for an hour\nbefore dinner looking for a half million hooks and eyes, or\ncloth-covered buttons and loops, on the back of his wife's gown, and\ntrying to fasten them up properly without the use of language unsuited\nto a lady's ears. When you think that the hand of man was made to\nwield the sceptre of imperial power over this magnificent world, it\nbecomes a gross impropriety to divert it from the path of destiny into\nso futile an effort as hooking up a mere bit of fuss, feathers and\nfallals. You might just as well hitch up a pair of thoroughbred\nelephants to a milk wagon. It will do, as Adam says, for the\nMollycoddle and the meticulous weakling, but never for a real man\nworthy of the name. But after all that is no reason why woman should\nbe shorn of one of her chief glories, and I totally disagree with him\nin his condemnation of all clothes just because some of them are\nconceived in foolishness. Dresses can be made to button up at the\nside, or in front, and when I think of some of the new fall styles\nthat are coming in I find myself regretting that I am over five\nhundred years old, and cannot with strict propriety, go in for them\nmyself. Take those little chiffon--\"\n\nAnd so the dear old lady went on into an enthusiastic disquisition on\nthe glories of dress that was so intimately feminine that I hesitate\nto attempt to quote her words in this place, knowing little as I do on\nthe subject, and hardly able myself to tell the difference between a\ngimp and a caf\u00e9 parfait. I will merely close this chapter by quoting\nEve's last remark on the subject.\n\n\"All I can say is,\" she observed, \"that Adam makes a great mistake in\nobjecting to woman's thinking so much about her clothes, for I can\ntell him that if she didn't think about her own clothes she would\nbegin to think about his, and if that were to happen it wouldn't be\nlong before all men in creation would be going about looking as if\nsomebody had picked them off a Christmas tree. In the matter of\nclothes woman is the court of last resort, and it is better for men\nthat she should concentrate all her attention on herself!\"\n\nIncidentally let me add that when someone once asked Eve if she hadn't\noften wished she had been a man, she replied:\n\n\"Lord no! In that case there would have been two of us, and goodness\nknows one was enough!\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER V\n\nSOME NOTES ON CAIN AND ABEL\n\n\nMy acquaintance with my great-uncles, Cain and Abel, was not\nparticularly intimate and in later years they are seldom spoken of by\nmembers of the family for reasons sufficiently obvious to need no\nmention here. Every family must sooner or later develop an undesirable\nor two, and on the whole I think that we have done tolerably well in\nhaving up to this time only one portrait in our Rogues' Gallery. Just\nwhat has become of Cain no one at this writing is aware, but wherever\nhe is I hope when these memoirs of mine are published he will read\nthem far enough to note that one member of the family at least holds\nhim in pleasant recollection for the fun he has afforded him in the\npast. The two first boys of creation were not bad fellows at all,\nalthough as was natural, their bringing up resulted in a general\ncondition of pure cussedness that at times became appalling to their\nparents. The fact that there had never been any other boys in the\nworld before placed Adam and Eve at a considerable disadvantage in\nrearing these two youngsters. There were no precedents to go by, and\nas a consequence the lads were permitted to do a good many things that\nour modern boys would not dream of doing. There were no schools to\nsend them to, and no Sunday Newspapers with Woman's Pages to instruct\nEve in the Complete Science of Motherhood, so that when Cain and Abel\ncame along to bless the world with their presence, neither their\nfather nor their mother knew what on earth to do with them. Then,\ntoo, Eve's household duties were such that they very nearly absorbed\nall her time, and for years the youthful scions of this first family\nin the land were left to the tender mercies of a kindly old Gorilla\nwho, however amiable and willing she may have been, was hardly the\nkind of person a modern mother would choose as an influence in the\nformative years of her children's development. I am quite aware that\nin some sections of the country to-day this oldtime custom of leaving\nthe young to the care of servants still prevails, and in some cases it\nhas its distinct advantages considering the moral characteristics of\nthe parents who so leave them, but as a social custom to be commended\nit is an entire failure, and was adopted by Eve not from choice, but\nfrom necessity. It was not through any desire to shine in society as a\nconstant attendant at the Five O'Clock teas of her time, or, because\nshe deemed that her duty lay in trying to secure the alleged\nEmancipation of her Sex from imaginary shackles at the expense of her\nhome life and its responsibilities; or, because she believed that the\nprimary duty of a mother was to provide her offspring with a maternal\nrelative who could expound the most abstruse philosophies of the age\nwith her eyes shut, that led Mother Eve into an apparent neglect of\nher children. It was simply the inevitable result of the life of her\ntime. One can hardly be all that she had to be whether she wanted to\nbe it or not and at the same time fulfill all the functions of\nmotherhood. The daily labors of a large ranch such as the world\npractically was at that time were of enormous proportions, and with\nall due respect to Adam it has always been my profound belief that a\ngood ninety per cent. of them were performed by Eve. It was she who\nhad to look after the domestic details of the hour, day in and day\nout, while he after the fashion of mankind, led the freer life of the\nopen. Indeed I have never found that in the matter of manual labor\nAdam was in any wise noted. The naming of the animals was a purely\nintellectual achievement, and while, of course, he was the provider\nwhen it came to getting in the food supply, I have never observed that\nany man yet created ever regarded a day on a trout stream with a fly\nand a rod, or a chase through the forest after a venison steak, or a\npartridge, as in any way even remotely resembling work. On the\ncontrary Adam lived the life of a Naturalist and a Nimrod, while Eve\nfaithfully did the chores. It was inevitable then that the children\nwhen they first came along, should be allowed to grow wild, to\nassociate with their inferiors, and to become confirmed in habits that\nwere deplorable and reprehensible. I am entering upon no defense of\nmy Uncle Cain. I do not excuse his misbehavior in the least, but when\na censorious world holds up its hands in holy horror whenever he is\nmentioned, and uses his name as a synonym for evil, I would merely beg\nit to remember the lad's bringing up, and to ask itself whether under\nsimilar conditions it would do much better itself. Particularly do I\nask that branch of human society, now growing rather larger than I\nlike to see it, who are themselves allowing their children to grow up,\nnot only removed but far away from all parental influences whatsoever,\nif they realize that they will have only themselves to blame if they\nadd to the stock of unfortunates who bear the mark of Cain? Of course,\na woman who would rather play Bridge than rock her baby to sleep would\nbe a bad influence upon a budding soul at any time, and her child is\nto be congratulated when its mother's engagement card is full from\nSunday to Sunday, but even a mother of that sort owes it to society to\nsee that her place is filled not by any old gorilla from the handiest\nintelligence office that comes along as poor Eve was forced into\ndoing, but by some capable person in whom the love of motherhood rules\nas strong as does the passion for the grand-slam in her own breast.\n\n[Illustration: Cain's Inspiration]\n\nBut enough of this moralizing! I had not meant to preach a sermon, and\nit is only because I see so many wistful little faces of motherless\nyoungsters around me day after day--Social Orphans, whose mothers have\nnot gone to Heaven, but to Mrs. Grundy's; children who with the\nqualities of service in their souls are treading dangerously near to\nthe footsteps of the original scapegrace for lack of attention; that I\nhave been led into this garrulous homily. It must not be supposed,\neither from what I have said that there was never any discipline in\nthe Home of Adam and Eve. Later on there came to be a lot of it, and I\nam not sure that its excesses in later periods were not as evil in\ntheir influence as its utter lack at a time when ten minutes with the\nhair-brush would have done Cain more good than ten years in the county\njail.\n\nTo the world at large these two boys are interesting because of the\nfact that they introduced humor into the world. Adam never had any,\nand Eve, as we have seen, was rather too busy to joke, but not so with\nthe youngsters, who, doubtless from their constant association with\nthe monkeys bubbled over with a kind of fun that though necessarily\nprimitive, was quite appealing. It was Cain who invented that immortal\nriddle, \"When is a door not a door?\" the true answer being, \"when it\nis a bird.\" This is as far as I have been able to discover the first\nthing in the nature of a joke ever known on this planet, though\nwhether it was the one that made the original Hyena laugh I have not\nbeen able to ascertain. It is a joke that has appeared in modified\nform many times since. Even that illustrious pundit, Senator Chauncey\nM. DeMagog uses it as his most effective peroration at this season's\npublic banquets. I heard him myself get it off at The Egyptian Society\nDinner last month, as well as at the Annual Banquet of The Sons and\nDaughters of the Pre-Adamite Evolution, the month before, changing the\nanswer, however, to \"when it's a jar\"--which I personally do not\nconsider an improvement, for when a door becomes a jar I must confess\nI cannot see. A jar, as I understand it, is a vessel, a receptacle, a\njug, a sort of demijohn, or decanter that people use to store up\nwater, or to keep the juice of the grape in, like a pitcher, or an\namphora; and how by any stretch of the imagination a door could become\nsuch a thing is beyond my ken, although I must say that the jest when\ntold by the Senator in his own inimitable way, was received with\nshouts of laughter every time he got it off. For my own part I think\nthat Cain's version is infinitely more humorous and instructive as\nwell, because a \"door is not a door\" when it is a \"daw,\" which is,\nindeed, as Cain's answer to the riddle claims it to be, a bird. It is,\nof course, a great compliment to Cain that the Senator and a hundred\nothers I might name like him should go back to him for their humor,\nbut I think they would do better if they took his jests exactly as\nthey found them instead of trying to improve them to their\ndestruction.\n\nI find also in our family records that it was Abel who first asked the\nquestion, \"Why is an elephant like an oyster? Because it cannot climb\na tree,\" a jest that similarly to Cain's riddle, possesses not only\ntrue humor but is at the same time educational, as the best humor must\nalways be, in that it teaches the young certain indubitable facts in\nthe Science of Natural History, viz., that neither the pachyderm nor\nthe bivalve, in common with several other carnivorous botanical\nspecimens, is gifted similarly to the squirrel, the ant, or the\ngrizzly bear.\n\nMother Eve, who always took a na\u00efve delight in the droll sayings of\nher offspring, used to tell with great glee of Cain's persistent habit\nof asking questions of his father, some of which used to tax all the\nold gentleman's powers of invention to answer intelligently. One of\nthese that I recall most vividly was as follows:\n\n\"Say, Pa,\" said Cain, one Saturday afternoon, when the whole family\nwere off on a picnic together, \"did you have any sisters?\"\n\n\"No, my son,\" replied Adam, plucking a bottle of olives from a\nneighboring tree, and placing them on the outspread table-cloth on the\ngrass.\n\n\"Well, did Ma have any sisters?\" persisted Cain.\n\n\"No,\" said Adam. \"Your mother had no sisters, either. Why do you ask?\"\n\n\"Oh, nothin',\" replied the lad with a puzzled expression coming over\nhis face as he scratched his back. \"I was just wonderin' where the\nAnts came from.\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nIt was Abel on the other hand who asked his father why he had not\nnamed the male ants uncles, a question that to this day has not been\nsatisfactorily answered. Indeed I have frequently found myself\nregretting that there was nobody at hand to ask Adam these very\npertinent questions earlier in his life, and before it was too late\nto instil in his mind the idea that a little more consistency would be\ndesirable in his selection of names for the creatures he was called\nupon to christen. Zo\u00f6logy might have been a far simpler science in the\nmatter of nomenclature than it is now ever likely to become, had Adam\nbeen surrounded at the beginning with inquiring minds like those of\nCain and Abel, not necessarily to dispute his conclusions or his\njudgments, but to seek explanations. Why, for instance, should a\ncreature that is found chiefly on the Nile, and never under any\ncircumstances on the Rhine, be called a Rhinoceros? And why should a\nCaribou be called a Caribou entirely irrespective of its sex? There\nare Caribou of both sexes, when we might have had Caribou for one and\nBillibou for the other, and yet Adam has feminized the whole Bou\nfamily with no apparent thought about the matter at all. Then there\nis the animal which he called the Bear. He is not bare at all--on the\ncontrary he wears the shaggiest coat of all the animals, except\npossibly the Buffalo, who, by the way, is not buff, but a rather dirty\ndull brownish black in color. The Panther does not wear pants, and the\nMonkey far from suggesting the habits of a Monk is a roystering,\nphilanderous old rounder that would disgrace a heathen temple, much\nless adorn a Monastery. And finally if there is anything lower than a\nHyena, or less coy than a Coyote, I don't know what it is.\n\nThere is considerable evidence in Mother Eve's Garden Book, in which\nshe jotted down now and then little notes of her daily life that most\nof these points, or at least similar ones, were brought to Adam's\nattention at one time or another by his sons, and not always in a way\nthat was pleasing to him. Indeed, as we read these notes we observe a\ngrowing tendency on Adam's part to be irritated by the enquiries which\nseem to have formed an inevitable part of the family conversation. At\nrandom I select the following:\n\n_August 3rd_, 5569. Cain spanked and put to bed without his supper for\nasking his father why he had not called the male Kangaroo a\nKangarooster.\n\n_September 5th_, 5567. Cain sentenced to the wood-pile for four hours\nfor enquiring of Adam why he called the Yak a Yak when everybody knew\nhe looked more like a Yap. Adam is getting very nervous under this\npersistent questioning.\n\n_January 4th_, 5565. Adam has just retired to the wood-shed with poor\nAbel on what he termed a \"whaling-expedition,\" to explain why he had\nnamed the elephant of the sea a whale instead of a sealephant. I\njudge from Abel's blubbering that his father is giving him an object\nlesson in the place where it is most likely to impress itself forcibly\non his understanding, though I must say I think the child's idea a\nrather good one, and I often wish my dear husband would not be so\nsensitive on the subject of his possible mistakes.\n\n_May 25th_, 5563. Adam has forbidden the children to ask any more\nquestions about the names of the animals, Cain having exasperated him\nby asking how much a guinea was worth.\n\n\"About five dollars,\" said Adam.\n\n\"Gee!\" cried Cain. \"You must have got stung on the guinea-pigs, then.\nThey're dear at a dollar a dozen.\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nIt may interest modern readers who seem to have created a demand for\nwhat is known as the Mother-in-Law joke that this style of humor\nfound its origin in an early remark of Abel's, if his mother's Diary\nis to be believed. A visitor once interrupted him in the midst of a\nball game that he was playing with Cain and a number of his Simian\nfriends, to ask him how his grandmother was.\n\n\"Never had one,\" replied Abel, with a grin.\n\n\"Poor boy,\" sympathized the visitor. \"And don't you wish you had?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Abel. \"I think a Mother-in-Law around the house would have\ndone Pa good!\"\n\nI will close my remarks concerning these famous boys with a little\npoem which their mother had clipped from an Egyptian paper and pasted\nin her book. It seems to me to be a pretty accurate picture of two\nvery interesting figures in our family history.\n\n    I don't suppose that Cain and Abel\n    Were very mannerly at table.\n    From what I've read by those that knew 'em\n    They'd speak when none had spoken to 'em,\n    And in a manner unbefittin'\n    Upon their shoulders they'd be sittin',\n    And sundry dinosaurs be treating\n    With scraps the while themselves were eating.\n    I fear they smacked their lips while pickin'\n    The bones of tarpon and spring chicken,\n    And each the other would be hazin'\n    To see who got the final raisin.\n    The notion in my brain-pan lingers\n    They ate their flapjacks with their fingers--\n    Not that their mother fair assented,\n    But knives and forks were not invented.\n    When there was pie, I fear they grabbed it,\n    Unless their Pa'd already nabbed it;\n    And that in fashion most unmoral\n    O'er cakes and puddings they would quarrel.\n    I don't believe that either chapkin\n    E'er thought at lunch to fold his napkin,\n    And if one biscuit graced the platter\n    'Twas ever less than fighting matter,\n    Or if they'd beans--no doubt they had 'em--\n    They failed to snap a few at Adam.\n    I fear me as they ate their salade\n    They hummed some raw primeval ballad,\n    And when the Serpent came to dinner,\n    They made remarks about the sinner.\n    No doubt they criticised the cooking\n    And hooked the fruit when none was looking,\n    And when they'd soup--O my! O Deary!\n    The very notion makes me weary.\n    About these youngsters let's stop writing\n    And turn to subjects more inviting!\n\nI have never been able to ascertain the authorship of this poem, but\nif the poet ever sees this I hope he will be glad to know that I\nheartily agree with Mother Eve's memorandum written underneath the\nclipping in her book,\n\n\"I guess this scribe has had boys of his own!\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VI\n\nHE CONFESSES TO BEING A POET\n\n\nI do not know whether it is a part of the programme mapped out for me\nthat I am to live forever or not, and I realize the danger that a man\nruns in writing his memoirs if he put aught down in them which shall\nsavor of confession. They say that confession is good for the soul,\nbut I have not yet discovered anybody who was profited by it to any\nmaterial extent. On the contrary, even the virtuous have suffered from\nit, as witness the case of my dear old Uncle Zekel. In his extreme\nyouth Zekel went out one summer's day, the call of the wild proving\ntoo much for his boyish spirit, and ere night fell had done a certain\namount of mischief, although intrinsically he came nearer to being a\nperfect child than anyone yet known to the history of the human race.\nThoughtlessly the lad had chopped down one of his father's favorite\ndate trees, the which when his father observed it, caused considerable\nconsternation.\n\n\"Who did this thing?\" he cried angrily, summoning the whole family to\nthe orchard.\n\n\"Father,\" said Zekel, stepping forward, pale, but courageous, \"I\ncannot tell a lie, I did it with my little tomahawk.\"\n\n\"Very well, my son,\" said the old gentleman, pulling a switch from the\nfallen tree, and seizing Zekel by the collar, \"in order to impress\nthis date more vividly upon your mind, we will retire to the barn and\nindulge in a little palmistry.\"\n\nWhereupon he withdrew with Zekel from the public gaze and\nadministered such a rebuke to the boy that forever afterwards the\nmere association of ideas made it impossible for Zekel to sit under a\npalm tree with any degree of comfort.[2]\n\n[Footnote 2: Editor's Note: It is very interesting to find this story\nin the Memoirs of Methuselah owing to its marked resemblance to an\nanecdote related of General Washington, in which the youthful father\nof his country is represented as having acted in a like manner upon a\nlater occasion.]\n\nI realize, however, that in writing one's memoirs one should not\nwithhold the truth if there is to be any justification in the eyes of\nposterity for their existence, so I am not going to conceal anything\nfrom my readers that has any important bearing upon my character. Let\nme therefore admit here and now, apropos of the charming lines with\nwhich my last chapter was brought to a close, that I have myself at\ntimes written poetry. It is the lamentable fact that in this day and\ngeneration poets are not held in that high esteem which is their due.\nWe have unfortunately had a number of them in this vicinity of late\nyears who have not been any too particular about paying their board\nbills, and whether their troth has been plighted to our confiding\nmaidens, or to our trustful tailors, the result has been the\nsame--they have not been conspicuously present at the date of maturity\nof their promises. One very distinguished looking old gentleman in\nparticular, who registered from Greece, came here several centuries\nago and secured five hundred subscriptions to his book of verses,\ncollected the first instalment, and then faded from the scene and\nneither he nor his verses have been heard from since. The consequence\nhas been that when any of the young of this community show the\nslightest signs of poetic genius their parents behave as though the\nmeasles had broken out in the family, and do all they can spiritually\nand physically to stamp out the symptoms. My cousin Aminidab indeed\nwent so far while he was in the Legislature here, to introduce a bill\nmaking the writing of poetry a misdemeanor, and ordering the police\nimmediately to arrest all persons caught giving way in public or\nprivate to an inspiration. The bill only failed to become a law by the\nexpiration of the session before it had reached its final reading. It\nmay be readily imagined, therefore, why until this I have never\nacknowledged my own proneness to expressing myself in verse. Only two\nor three of my most intimate friends have been aware of the tendency,\nand they have been so ashamed of it that as my friends they have\nsought rather to suppress than to spread the report.\n\nI quite remember the consternation with which my first effort was\nreceived in the family. Father Adam had been reminiscing about the\nGarden Days, and he had made the remark that when some of the animals\ncame up to be christened they were such extraordinary looking\ncreatures he was afraid they were imaginary.\n\n\"Take the Ornithorhyncus, for instance,\" he said, \"and the Discosaurus\nCarnegii--why, when they came ambling up for their tickets I could\nhardly believe my eyes, and I turned to Eve and asked her with real\nanxiety, whether or not she saw anything, and, of course, her answer\nreassured me, but for a minute I was afraid that the grape-juice we\nhad had for lunch was up to its old tricks.\"\n\nThis anecdote amused me tremendously, for I had myself thought the\nDiscosaurus about the funniest looking beast except the shad, I had\never seen, and I promptly constructed a limerick which I handed over\nto my father. It ran this way:\n\n    There was an old fellow named Adam,\n    Who lived in the Garden with Madam.\n      When the critters they came\n      All demanding a name\n    He thought for a minute he \"had 'em!\"\n\nI don't think I shall ever forget the result of my father's horrified\nreading of the lines. All my grandfathers back to Adam himself were\nthere, and wrath, fear, and consternation were depicted on every\ncountenance when the last line was delivered, and then every eye was\nturned on me. If there had been any way of disappearing I should have\nfaded away instantly, but alas, every avenue of escape was closed, and\nbefore I left the room each separate and distinct ancestor had turned\nme over his knee and lambasted me to his heart's content. In spite of\nall this discipline, which one would have thought effective enough to\ntake me out of the lists of Parnassus forever, it on the contrary\nserved only to whet my thirst for writing, and from that time until\nnow I have never gotten over my desire to chisel out sonnets,\ntriolets, rondeaux and lyrics of one kind or another.\n\nOne little piece that I recall had to do with the frequency with which\nI was punished for small delinquencies. It was called\n\n\nWHEN FATHER SPANKED ME\n\n    My Father larruped me, and yet\n    I could but note his eyes were wet,\n      When lying there across his knee\n      I got what he had had for me--\n    It seemed to fill him with regret.\n\n    \"It hurt me worse than you,\" he said,\n    When later on I went to bed,\n    And I--the truth would not be hid--\n    Replied, \"I'm gug-gug-glad it did!\"\n\nThere were other verses written as I grew older that, while I do not\nregard them as masterpieces, I nevertheless think compare favorably\nwith a great deal of the alleged poetry that has crept into print of\nlate years. A trifle dashed off on a brick with a piece of charcoal\none morning shortly after my hundredth birthday, comes back to me. The\noriginal I regret to say was lost through the careless act of one of\nmy cousins, who flung it at a pterodactyl as it winged its flight\nacross our meadows some years after. I reproduce it from memory.\n\n\nTHE JUNE-BUG\n\n    The merry, merry June-bug\n      Now butts at all in sight.\n    He butts the wall o' mornings,\n      He rams the ceil at night.\n\n    He caroms from the book-case\n      Off to the window-pane,\n    Then bounces from my table\n      Back to the case again.\n\n    He whacks against the door-jamb\n      And tumbles on the mat;\n    Then on the grand-piano\n      He strikes a strident flat;\n\n    Then to the oaken stair-case\n      He blindly flops and jumps,\n    And on the steps for hours\n      He blithely bumps the bumps.\n\n    They say that he is foolish,\n      And has no brains. No doubt\n    'Tis well for if he had 'em\n      He'd surely butt them out.\n\nAs I say, this is mere a trifle, but it is none the less beautifully\ndescriptive of a creature that has always seemed to me to be worthy of\nmore attention than he has ever received from the poets of our age. I\nhave been unable to find in the literature of Greece, Egypt or the\nOrient, any reference to this wonderful insect who embodies in his\nfrail physique so much of the truest philosophy of life, and who,\ndespite the obstacles that seem so persistently to obstruct his path,\nbuzzes blithely ever onward, singing his lovely song and uttering no\ncomplaints.\n\n[Illustration: Noah brings disgrace upon the family.]\n\nIn the line of what I may call calendar poetry, which has always been\npopular since the art of rhyming began, none of the months escaped my\nattention, but of all of my efforts in that direction I never wrote\nanything that excelled in descriptive beauty my\n\n\nODE TO FEBRUARY\n\n    Hail to thee, O Februeer!\n    It is sweet to have you here,\n    Lemon-time of all the year!\n    Making all our noses gay\n    With the influenziay;\n    Flinging sneezes here and yon,\n    Rich and poor alike upon;\n    Clogging up the bronchial tubes\n    Of the Urbans and the Roobs;\n    Opening for all your grip\n    With its lavish stores of pip;\n    Scattering along your route\n    Little gifts of Epizoot;\n    Time of slush and time of thaw,\n    Time of hours mild and raw;\n    Blowing cold and blowing hot;\n    Stable as a Hottentot;\n    Coaxing flowers from the close\n    Just to nip them on the nose;\n    Calling birdies from their nests\n    For to freeze their little chests;\n    Springtime in the morning bright,\n    With a blizzard on at night;\n    Chills and fever through the day\n    Like a sort of pousse caf\u00e9;\n    Time of drift and time of slosh!\n    Season of the ripe golosh;\n    Running rivers in the street,\n    Frozen toes, and soaking feet;\n    Take this wreath of Poesie\n    Dedicated unto thee,\n    Undiluted stream of mush\n    To the Merry Month of Slush!\n\nI preferred always, of course, to be original, not only in the matter\nof my thought, but in the manner of my expression as well, but like\nall the rest of the poetizing tribe, I sooner or later came under the\nGreek influence. This is shown most notably in a little bit written\none very warm day in midsummer, back in my 278th year. It was\nentitled\n\n\nTO PAN IN AUGUST\n\n    I don't wish to flout you, Pan.\n    Tried to write about you, Pan.\n    Tried to tell the story, Pan,\n    Of your wondrous glory, Pan;\n    But I can't begin it, Pan,\n    For this very minute, Pan,\n    All my thoughts are tumid, Pan,\n    'Tis so hot and humid, Pan,\n    And for all my trying, Pan,\n    There is no denying, Pan,\n    I can't think, poor sighing Pan,\n    Of you save as frying, Pan.\n\nIt was after reading the above, when it dropped out of my coat pocket\nduring one of our visits to the wood-shed, that Adam expressed the\nprofound conviction that I was born to be hanged, but as I have\nalready intimated, neither his sense of justice, nor his sense of\nhumor was notable.\n\nOnce in awhile I tried a bit of satire, and when my son Noah first\nbegan to show signs of mental aberration on the subject of a probable\nflood that would sweep everything before it, and put the whole world\nout of business save those who would take shares in his International\nMarine and Zoo Flotation Company, I endeavored to dissuade him in\nevery possible way from so suspicious an enterprise. Failing to\nimpress my feelings upon him in one way, I fell back upon an\nanonymously published poem, which I hoped would bring him to his\nsenses. The lines were printed in red chalk on the board fence\nsurrounding his Ship-Yard, and ran as follows:\n\n\nMARINE ADVICES\n\n    O Noah he built himself a boat,\n      And filled it full of animiles.\n    He took along a billie-goat,\n      A pug and two old crocodiles.\n\n    A pair of very handsome yaks\n      A leopard and hyenas two;\n    A brace of tender canvas-backs,\n      A camel and a kangaroo.\n\n    A pair of guinea-pigs were placed\n      In state-rooms off the main saloon,\n    Along with several rabbits chaste,\n      A 'possum and a gray raccoon.\n\n    Now all went well upon that cruise,\n      And they were happy as could be,\n    Until one morning came the news\n      That filled old Noah with misery.\n\n    Those guinea-pigs--O what a tide!--\n      Were versed in plain Arithmetic;\n    The way they upped and multiplied\n      Made Captain Noah mighty sick.\n\n    And four days out he turned about,\n      And made back to the pier once more\n    To rid himself of all that rout,\n      And put the guinea-pigs ashore.\n\n    And where there were but two of these\n      When starting on that famous trip,\n    When they got back from off the seas,\n      Three hundred thousand left the ship!\n\nPoor Noah! He took this publication so much to heart that he offered a\nreward of a thousand dollars, and a first-class passage on his cruise\nto the top of Mount Ararat to any one who could give him the name of\nthe miscreant who had written the lines, but he has never yet found\nout who did them, and until he reads these memoirs after I have\npassed away, he will never know from how near home they came.\n\nFinally let me say that in a more serious vein as a Poet I was not\nwanting in success--that is in my own judgment. As a mystic poet\nnothing better than the following came from my pen:\n\n    O arching trees that mark the zenith hour,\n    How great thy reach, how marvellous thy power,\n    So lavishly outpouring all thy rotund gifts\n    On mortal ways, in superhuman shifts\n    That overtax the mind, and vex the soul of man,\n    As would the details of some awful plan,\n    Jocund, mysterious, complex, and yet withal\n    Enmeshed with Joy and Sorrow, as a pall\n    Envelops all the seas at eventide, and brings\n    New meaning to the song the Robin sings\n    When from her nest matutinal she squirms\n    And hies her forth for adolescent worms\n    With which her young to feed, yet all the time\n    With heart and soul laments my dulcet rhyme!\n\nOf this I was naturally quite proud, and when under the title of\n\"Maternity\" I read it once in secret to my Aunt Jerusha, she burst\ninto tears as I went on, and three days later read it as a New Thought\ngem before the Enochsville Society of Ethical Culture. It was there\npronounced a great piece of symbolic imagery, and prediction was made\nthat some day in some more advanced age than our own, a Magazine would\nbe found somewhere that would print it. This may be so, but I fear I\nshall not live to see it.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VII\n\nTHE INTERNATIONAL MARINE AND ZOO FLOTATION COMPANY\n\n\nI have never yet been quite able to make up my mind with any degree of\ndefiniteness in regard to the sanity of my son Noah. In many respects\nhe is a fine fellow. His moral character is beyond reproach, and I\nhave never caught him in any kind of a wilful deception such as many\nparents bewail in their offspring, and I know that he has no bad\nhabits. He has no liking for cigarette smoking, and he keeps good\ncompany and good hours. His sons Shem, Ham and Japhet, are great\nfavorites with all of us, and as far as mere respectability goes there\nis no family in the land that stands higher than his, but the\ncomplete obsession of his mind by this International Marine and Zoo\nFlotation Company of his is entirely beyond my comprehension, and his\nattempts to explain it to me are futile, because its utter\nimpracticability, and the reasons advanced for its use seem so absurd\nthat I lose my temper before he gets half way through the first page\nof his prospectus. From his boyhood up he has been fond of the water,\nand when the bath-tub was first invented we did not have to drive him\nto it, as most parents have to do with most boys, but on the contrary\nwe had all we could do to keep him away from it. I don't think any one\nin my household for five hundred years was able to take a bath on any\nnight of the week without first having to clear away from the tub the\nevidence of Noah's interest in marine matters. Nothing in the world\nseemed to delight his spirit more as a child than to fill the tub\nfull of water, turn on the shower at its fullest speed, and play what\nhe called flood in it, with a shingle or a chip, or if he could not\nfind either of these, with a floating leaf. Many a time I have found\nhim long after he was supposed to have gone to bed sitting on the\nbath-room floor singing a roysterous nautical song like \"Rocked in the\nCradle of the Deep,\" or \"A Life On the Ocean Wave,\" while he pushed a\nfloating soap dish filled with ants, spiders and lady-bugs up and down\nthat overflowing tub; and later in his life, when more manly sports\nwould seem to be more to any one's tastes, while his playmates were\nout in the open chasing the Discosaurus over the hills, or trapping\nPterodactyls in the bull-rushes, he would go off by himself into the\nwoods where he had erected what he called his ship-yard, and whittle\nout gondolas, canoes, battle-ships, arks and other marine craft day\nin and day out until one could hardly walk in the dark without\nstubbing his toe on some kind of a boat. I recall once coming upon him\non the farther slopes of Mount Ararat, putting the finishing touches\nto as graceful a cat-boat as any one ever saw--a thing that would have\nexcited the envy of mariners in all parts of the world, but in spite\nof my admiration for his handicraft, it worried me more than I can say\nwhen I thought of all the labor he had expended on such a work miles\naway from any kind of a water course. It did not seem to square with\nmy ideas as to what constituted sense.\n\n\"It is very beautiful, my son,\" I observed, after inspecting the\nvessel carefully for a few moments. \"Her lines are perfect, and the\nmodel indicates that she will prove a speedy proposition, but it seems\nto me that you have left out one of the most important features of a\npermanently successful sailing vessel.\"\n\nNoah looked at me patronizingly, and shrugged his shoulders as much as\nto inquire what on earth I knew about boat-building.\n\n\"If you refer either to the bowsprit or to the flying balloon-jib,\" he\nreplied coldly, and acting generally as if he were very much bored,\n\"you are entirely wrong. This isn't a sloop, or a catamaran, or a\ncaravel. Neither is it a government transport, an ocean gray-hound, or\na ram. It's just a cat-boat, nothing more.\"\n\n\"No,\" said I. \"I refer to nothing of the sort. I don't know much about\nboats, but I know enough to be aware without your telling me, that\nthis affair is not a battle-ship, tug, collier, brig, lugger, barge or\ngravy-boat. Neither is it a dhow, gig or skiff. But that does not\naffect the validity of my criticism that you have forgotten an\nimportant factor in her successful use as a sailing craft.\"\n\n\"What is it?\" he demanded, curtly.\n\n\"An ocean,\" said I. \"How the dickens do you expect to sail a boat like\nthat off here in the woods, where there isn't enough water to float a\nparlor-match?\"\n\nHe laughed quietly as I advanced this objection, and for the first\ntime in his life gave evidence of the haunting idea that later took\ncomplete possession of his mind.\n\n\"Time enough for that,\" said he. \"There'll be more ocean around here\nsome day than you can keep off with a million umbrellas, and don't you\nforget it.\"\n\nSomehow or other his reply irritated me. The idea seemed so\npreposterously absurd. How on earth he ever expected to get an ocean\nout there, half way up the summit of our highest mountain, no sane\nperson could imagine, and I turned the vials of my wrathful satire\nupon him.\n\n\"You ought to start a Ferry Company from the Desert of Sahara to the\ntop of Mount Ararat,\" I observed, as dryly as I knew how.\n\n\"The notion is not new,\" he replied instantly. \"I have already given\nthe matter some thought, and it isn't impossible that the thing will\nbe done before I get through. There will be a demand for such a thing\nall right some day, but whether it will be a permanent demand is the\nquestion.\"\n\nIt may interest the public to know that it was at this period that I\ninvented a term that has since crept into the language as a permanent\nfigure of speech. Speaking to my wife on the subject of the day's\nadventure that very evening, after I had expressed my determination to\napply for the appointment of a Commission De Lunatico Enquirendo on\nNoah's behalf, she endeavored to quiet my anxiety on the score of his\ngood sense by saying:\n\n\"Don't worry, dear. He is very serious in this matter. He has always\nhad a great storm in his mind ever since he was a baby.\"\n\n\"I guess it's a brain-storm,\" I interjected contemptuously, for I\ncould not then, and I cannot now conceive of any kind of a shower that\nwill make the boy's habit of building caravels in the middle of\nten-acre lots, and submarines on fifteen-by-twenty fish ponds, and\nschooner yachts on mill-dams only three feet deep at high tide a\nreasonable bit of procedure.\n\nOccasionally one of my neighbors would call upon me to remark somewhat\ncritically on this strange predilection of my son, and several of them\nadvised me to take the matter seriously in hand before it was too\nlate.\n\n\"If you lived on the seaboard, it would be a fine thing to have such\na son,\" they said, \"but off here in the lumber district it would be\nfar more to the point if he went in for the breeding of camels, or\nsome other useful vehicle of transportation, instead of constructing\nferry-boats that never can be launched, and building arks in a spot\nwhere the nearest approach to an ocean is a leak in the horse-trough.\"\n\nI could not but admit that there was justice in these criticisms, but\nwhen it came to the point I never felt that I could justify myself in\ninterfering with the boy's hobby until it was too late, and the lad\nhaving passed his three hundredth birthday, was no longer subject to\nparental discipline. I reasoned it out that after all it was better\nthat he should be building dories and canal-boats out under the apple\ntrees, and having what he called \"a caulking good time,\" in an\ninnocent way, than spending his time running up and down the Great\nWhite Way, between supper-time and breakfast, making night hideous\nwith riotous songs, as many youths of his own age were doing; and when\nour family physician once tried to get him to join a football eleven\nat the Enochsville High School in order to get this obsession of a\ndeluge out of his mind, I was not a little impressed by the\nimpertinent pertinence of his ready answer.\n\n\"No rush-line for mine, Doctor,\" he said, firmly. \"I'd rather have\nwater on the brain than on the knee.\"\n\nI had hoped that as the years passed on he would outgrow not only his\nconviction of the imminence of a disastrous deluge by which the world\nwould be overwhelmed, and the predilection for nautical construction\nthat the belief had bred in him, but alas for all human expectation,\nit grew upon him, instead of waning, as I had hoped. Our prosperous\nfarm was given over entirely to the demands of his ship-yard, and\nwhen his sons, Shem, Ham and Japhet came along he directed all their\neducation along lines of seamanship. He fed them even in their tender\nyears upon hard-tack and grog. Up to the time when they were two\nhundred years old he made them sleep in their cradles, which he kept\nrocking continuously so that they would get used to the motion, and\nwould be able to go to sea when the time came without suffering from\nsea-sickness. All clocks were thrust bodily out of his house, and if\nanybody ever stopped at the farm to inquire the time of day he was\ninformed that it was \"twenty minutes past six bells,\" or \"nineteen\nminutes of three bells,\" or some other unmeaning balderdash according\nto the position of the sun. When the farmhouse needed painting,\ninstead of renewing the soft and lovely white that had made it a\ngrateful sight to the eye for centuries, Noah had it covered with\npitch from roof to cellar, until the whole neighborhood began to smell\nlike a tar barrel. And then he began his work upon this precious ark\nof his--Noah's Folly, the neighbors called it; placed in the middle of\nour old cow-pasture, twenty-five miles from the sea; about as big as a\nsummer hotel, and filled with stalls instead of state-rooms! He\nmortgaged the farm to pay the first instalment on it, and when I asked\nhim how on earth he ever expected to liquidate the indebtedness he\nsmilingly replied that the deluge would take care of everything that\nstood in need of liquidation when the date of maturity came round. He\nwas even flippant on the subject.\n\n\"Don't talk about falling dew,\" he remarked. \"There'll be something\ndewing around here before many days that will make you landlubbers\nwish your rubbers were eight or nine million sizes larger than the\nones you bought last February; and as for liquidation--well, father\ndear, you can take my word for it that when this mortgage of mine is\npresented at my office for payment by its present holder there will be\nliquid enough around to float a new bond issue in case I can't pay in\nspot cash. If that is not satisfactory to my creditors, you still need\nnot worry. I have a definite fund in mind that will take care of\nthem.\"\n\n\"That is a relief,\" said I, innocently. \"But may I ask what fund you\nrefer to?\"\n\n\"Certainly, father dear,\" he replied. \"I refer to the Sinking Fund\nwhich will be in full working order the minute the deluge arrives.\"\n\nThis was about all the satisfaction I was ever able to get out of my\nson on the subject of his Ark, and after two or three hundred years I\nstopped arguing with him on the futile extravagance of his course. As\nwe have seen in the last chapter of my memoirs, I did write a bit of\nverse on the subject which made him very angry, but beyond that I did\nnothing, and then the great scandal came!\n\n[Illustration: Noah regrets having shipped guinea pigs.]\n\nIt was the blackest hour of my life when it came to be rumored in and\nabout Enochsville that Noah, now grown to independent estate, had\nmethod in his madness, and was about to embark upon a questionable\nfinancial enterprise. One of the yellow journals of the day--for we\nhad them even then, although they were not put forth from printing\npresses, but displayed on board fences in scare-head letters six or\neight feet high--one of the yellow journals of the day, I say, issued\na muck-raking Extra, exposing what it termed _The International Marine\nand Zoo Flotation Company_, and most unfortunately there was just\nenough truth in the story in so far as its details went, to lend\ncolor to its sensational accusations. It could not be denied, as was\nstated in _The Enochsville Evening Gad_, that Noah had built a large,\nunwieldy vessel of his own designing in the old pasture up back of our\nEnochsville farm, miles away from tide-level. That it resembled what\n_The Gad_ called a cross between a cow-barn and a Lehigh Valley\nCoal-Barge, was evident to anybody who had merely glanced at it. But\nwhat was its apparent purpose? asked the reporter of _The Gad_. Stated\nto be the housing of a menagerie during a projected cruise of\nforty-odd days! \"What philanthropy!\" ejaculated the editor of _The\nGad_. What a kindly old soul was the projector of this wonderful\nenterprise, that he should take a couple of tired old elephants off on\na Mediterranean trip out of the sheer kindness of his heart! Was it\nnot the acme of generosity for a man who had lately been so hard up\nthat he had mortgaged his farm to go to the expense of building a\nhuge floating barge on which the gorillas, giraffes, and rhinoceri of\nthe land, having lately shown signs of enfeebled health, might take a\nwinter's trip to the Riviera, or to the recuperative sands of the\nSahara?\n\nThe article was indeed a scathing arraignment, a masterpiece of\nridicule, but as it went on it became even worse, for it now got down\nto the making of serious charges against my son's integrity.\n\n\"Such are the alleged purposes of this project,\" said _The Gad_. \"Let\nus now consider its real purpose, far more insidious than any one has\nhitherto suspected, but which is now seen to be that of _separating\nthe widows and orphans of this land from their accumulated savings_,\nand diverting them into the _pockets of Noah and his family_!\"\n\nI thought I should sink through the floor when this met my eyes, and\nI was appalled when I read on and realized how many thousands of\npeople would believe the plausible tale of villany _The Gad_ had\nmanaged to construct out of a few innocent facts. Noah's plan was in\nbrief stated to be a scheme for the impoverishment of innocent\ninvestors, by selling them shares of stock, both common and preferred,\nin his International Marine and Zoo Flotation Company. According to\nthe writer of this infamous libel, immediately the vessel was finished\nat a cost of about $79.50, it was Noah's intention to incorporate his\nenterprise with himself as President and Treasurer, and Shem, Ham and\nJaphet as his Board of Directors, the capital being placed at the\nenormous sum of $100,000,000.\n\n\"This capitalization,\" said the exposure, \"will be divided into fifty\nmillions of preferred stock, and fifty millions of common, all of\nwhich will be sold to the public at par; subject to a first mortgage\nalready existing, and held by Noah and his sons, which it is intended\nto foreclose, and the company reorganized, the minute the $100,000,000\nof the public's money has passed into the treasurer's hands.\n\n\"Talk about your _deluge_!\" continued the article. \"This is indeed the\nbiggest thing in _deluges_ this little old world has ever known. The\nPreadamite Steel Trust is a dewdrop alongside of it. Noah gets the\n_salvage_, but the _people_ get the _water_!\"\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nSuch was the attitude of the public toward my son's great project, and\nall I could ever get him to say in reply to these and other equally\nnefarious charges was, while he had intended to have quarters for\nevery kind of beast on board his boat, he had now definitely decided\nto leave out Mastodons, Muck-Rakers and Yellow Journalists!\n\nVerily there seems to be some foundation to the belief that devotion\nto the life of a seaman makes a man callous to assaults on his\npersonal reputation!\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VIII\n\nON THE EXTINCTION OF THE MASTODON\n\n\nThe recent visit of King Ptush to our wild districts in search of a\nfresh hunting-ground for himself and his son, Prince Ptutt, brought\nabout a very serious condition of affairs in respect to the mastodon,\nor what some persons refer to as the Antediluvians. This most\ndistinguished personage, wearying of the affairs of state in his own\nland, gave over the reins of government for a while to his Grand\nVizier, and on behalf of the Nimrodian Institution, a Museum of\nNatural and Unnatural History in his own capital city, came hither to\nstudy the fauna and flora of our district, and incidentally to take\nback with him a variety of stuffed specimens of our more conspicuous\nwild beasts for exhibition purposes. Entirely unaware of His Majesty's\nunerring aim in hitting large surfaces at short range, we welcomed him\ncordially to our midst, and rather unwisely presented him with the\nfreedom of the jungle, a ceremony which carried with it the privilege\nof bagging anything he could hit with his slungshot, in season or out\nof it. The results of His Majesty's visit were appalling, for he had\nnot been with us more than six weeks before his enthusiasm getting the\nbetter of his sportsmanship he turned the jungle into a zoological\nshambles, from which it is never likely to recover. On his first day's\nouting, to our dismay he brought down thirty-seven ring-tailed\nornithorhyncusses, eighteen pterodactyls, three brace of dodo, and a\ndomesticated diplodocus, and then assured us that he didn't know what\ncould be the matter with his aim that he had missed so many. The next\nday he rose early, and while the rest of his suite were sleeping went\nout unattended, returning before breakfast was over with a tally-card\nshowing a killing of thirteen dinosaurs, twenty-seven megatheriums,\nand about six tons of chlamy-dophori, not to mention a mammoth\njack-rabbit that some idiot had told him was the only specimen in the\nworld of the monodelphian mollycoddle. The situation became very\nembarrassing to us because we were on excellent terms with King Ptush\nand his subjects, and we did not wish to do anything to offend either\nof them, but here was a case where in the interests of our own fauna\nsomething had to be done. Going on at the rate in which he had begun\nit was easy to see that unless somebody got out an injunction\nrestraining him from shooting between meals it would not be many days\nbefore there wasn't a prehistoric beast left in the whole country. It\nwas a mighty ticklish position for all of us. If we withdrew the\nfreedom of the jungle His Majesty might go home in a huff and declare\nwar against us, and with Noah's Ark as the sum total of our navy, and\nthat built in a ten-acre lot thirty miles from the coast, and no army\nof any sort standing or sitting, we could hardly afford a complication\nof that kind. Our wisest counsellors were called together to consider\nthe situation, but they were all men given to many words and lovers of\ndisputation, so that what with the framing of the original resolution,\nand the time consumed in debating the amendments offered thereto, it\nwas quite three months before any definite conclusion was reached, and\nit was then found when the resolution came up to its final vote that\nit had nothing whatever to do with the subject the conference was\ncalled to discuss, but had been transformed into an Act providing for\nan increased duty on guinea-pigs imported from Sumatra. From that day\nto this I have had little belief in that kind of popular government\nwhich provides for the election of public servants whose chief end and\naim seems to be to thwart the public will.\n\n[Illustration: EXTRA!!]\n\nIt was then that my fellow-citizens, availing themselves of a certain\ndiplomacy of method which I was said to possess, called upon me to\nundertake a personal interview with King Ptush, and to see what could\nbe done to stay his voracious appetite for the slaying of our\nmammalia. Always ready to serve my fellows in their hour of need, I\nundertook the mission, and appeared bright and early one morning at\nhis encampment, unannounced, thinking it better to seem to happen in\nupon him in a neighborly fashion than to make a national affair of my\nmission by coming formally and with official pomp into his presence.\nAt the hour of my arrival the great king was standing on the stump of\na red cedar, delivering a lecture to his entourage upon \"The Whole\nDuty of Man, With a Few Remarks About Everything Else.\" But even then\nhe was not neglectful of his opportunities as a Nimrod, for every now\nand then he would punctuate his sentences with a shot at a casual bit\nof fauna passing by, either on the earth or flying, never pausing in\nhis lecture, but nevertheless bringing to an untimely end thirty-eight\ngriffins, seven paralellopipedon, a gumshurhynicus, forty google-eyed\nplutocratid\u00e6, and a herd of June-bugs grazing in a neighboring\npasture--the latter wholly domesticated, by the way, and used by their\nowner as spile-drivers for a dike he was building in apprehension of\nNoah's predicted flood. It was then that I began to get some insight\ninto the character of this wonderful person, for as I sat there\nlistening to his discourse, delivered at the rate of five hundred\nwords a minute, and apparently covering seven or eight subjects not\nnecessarily corollary or collateral to each other, at once, and\nwatched him simultaneously bringing down with unerring aim this\ntremendous bag of game, something of the man's intrinsic nature was\nrevealed to me. His strength, of which we had heard much from\ntravelers in his own land, lay in an almost scientific lack of\nconcentration, backed up by a vocabulary of tremendous scope, and a\ncondition of optical near-sightedness that enabled him to see but\nobscurely further than the end of his nose. These attributes gave him\nthe power to discuss innumerable subjects coeternally, if not\ncoherently, using his vocabulary with such skill that his meaning\ndepended entirely upon the interpretation of his remarks by individual\nhearers, while the limitations of vision caused him, on the sudden\nappearance of masses of any sort, to shoot at them impulsively,\nregardless of such minor details as consequences. As a result of these\ngifts he was ever hitting something with either the arrows of speech\nor the slungshot, which produced a public impression of ceaseless\nactivity and of material accomplishment. In addition to this it was\nhis wont to do all things smiling with an almost boyish manifestation\nof pleasure, so that he endeared himself to the people and was\npronounced in some respects likeable even by his enemies.\n\nWhen his lecture was over he descended from his improvised platform\nand greeted me most cordially.\n\n\"Deeee-lighted!\" was the exact word he used as he took my hand and\nshook it until my arm worked indifferently well in its socket.\n\nI was not aware that His Highness had ever heard of me before, but it\nwas not long before I was more than glad that I had come, for it\ntranspired that I was the one person in all creation that he had most\nwished to meet, though for what particular purpose he did not make\nclear. In any event, so cordial was his reception of me that for three\nor four weeks I had not the heart to mention the particular object of\nmy mission, and even then I was not permitted to do so because at any\ntime when I felt that the psychological moment had been reached he\nwould talk of other things, his scientific lack of concentration of\nwhich I have already spoken enabling him with much grace to be\nreminded of an experience in the Transvaal by a chance allusion of my\nown to the peculiar habits of the Antillean Sardine. In the meanwhile\nthe work of slaughter was going on apace, and whole species were\ngradually becoming extinct. Exactly five weeks after my arrival the\nlast Diplodocus in the world breathed its last. Two days later the\nworld's visible supply of Pterodactyls passed into the realms of the\nannihilated. The Dodo, the largest and sweetest song-bird I have ever\nknown, the only bird in all the primeval forests possessed of a\ndiaphragm capable of expressing harmonies of what for want of a better\nterm I may call a Wagnerian range, quickly followed suit, and in its\ntrain, alas! went the others, Creosauri, Dicosauri, Thracheotomi,\nMegacheropod\u00e6, Manicurid\u00e6, and the Willumjay, the latter a gigantic\nparrot with a voice like silver that rang continuously through the\nforests like a huge fire bell. At the end of the tenth week of my\nmission a message was received from Noah.\n\n    \"Dear Grandpa,\" he wrote: \"Can't you do something to stave\n    off King Ptush? In making up my passenger-list I can't get\n    hold of enough mammals to fill an inside room. I have been\n    through the country with a fine-tooth comb, and as far as I\n    can find out there isn't a prehistoric beast left in\n    creation. If this thing goes on much longer I shall be\n    compelled to load up with a cargo of coon-cats, armadillos,\n    hippopotami and Plymouth rocks. Get a move on!\n\n    \"NOAH.\"\n\nMy first impulse was to hand this letter without a word to His\nMajesty, but on second thoughts I decided not to do this, since it\nmight involve me in a humiliating explanation of my grandson's foolish\nobsession about the impending flood. I had too much pride to wish\nKing Ptush to know that I had a human brain-storm on the list of my\nposterity, so I threw the brick upon which the letter was engraved\ninto a neighboring fish-pond, and resolved to get rid of His Majesty\nby strategy. For three nights I pondered over my plan of operations,\nand then the great method came to me like the dawning of the sun after\na night of abysmal darkness. I went to the royal tent and discovered\nHis Majesty hard at work chiseling out an article on \"How I Brought\nDown My First Proterosaurus\" on a slab of granite he had brought with\nhim. As I approached he smiled broadly, and with a wave of his hand\ncalled my attention to the previous day's bag. It covered a ten-acre\nlot.\n\n\"There isn't sawdust enough in creation to stuff half of these\nbeasts,\" he remarked proudly. \"I hardly know what I shall do about\nthat.\"\n\n\"Better bury them in the mud,\" I suggested, \"and let them petrify.\"\n\nHe seemed pleased with the idea, and later put it into operation.\n\n\"Fossils are not so susceptible to moths,\" he observed as he gave\norders for their immersion in a Triassic mud-puddle of huge\nproportions. \"That was a good idea of yours, Methuselah.\"\n\n\"I have a better one than that,\" I returned, seeing at last an opening\nfor my strategic movement. \"Why should a man of Your Majesty's prowess\nwaste his time on such insignificant creatures as these, when the\nwhole country is ringing with complaints of an animal a thousand times\nas large, and that no one hereabouts has ever dared attempt to\npursue?\"\n\nHe was on the alert instantly.\n\n\"What animal do you refer to?\" he demanded, his interest becoming so\ndeep that he put four pairs of eyeglasses upon his royal nose, so that\nhe could see me better.\n\n\"It belongs to the family of Rodents,\" I replied. \"It is without any\nexception the biggest rat in the history of our mammals. It is a\ncombination of the Castorid\u00e6, the Chinchillid\u00e6, the Dodgastid\u00e6, and\nthe Lagomydian Leporid\u00e6, with just a dash of the Dippydoodle on the\nmaternal side.\"\n\nHis Majesty gave a sigh of disappointment, and resumed his writing.\n\n\"I haven't come here to shoot rats,\" he observed coldly, removing the\nthree extra pairs of spectacles from his nose. \"I am a huntsman, not a\ntrapper.\"\n\n\"Your Majesty does not understand that this is no ordinary rat,\" I\nreturned calmly. \"If I may be permitted to continue, what would Your\nHighness think of a rat that was several thousand feet higher than\nthe pyramids, that has lived continuously for thousands of years, and\nis as fresh and green in spirit as on the day it was born? Suppose I\nwere to tell you that so great is its strength that I have myself seen\na whole herd of aboriginal elephants lying asleep upon its broad back?\nWhat would you say if I told you that its epidermis is so thick that\nif there were such a thing as a steam-drill in creation six hundred of\nthem could bore away at it night and day for as many years without\nmaking any visible impression thereon?\"\n\nHe again put down his chisel, and laid the hammer aside, as he ranged\nthe extra eyeglasses along the bridge of his nose.\n\n\"Colonel Methuselah,\" he said, incisively biting off his words, \"if\nyou told me anything of the kind I should say that you are what\nposterity will probably call a nature faker, and one of a\nperniciously invidious sort.\"\n\n\"I can bring affidavits to prove it, Your Majesty,\" said I.\n\n\"It is strange that I have never heard of it before,\" he mused.\n\n\"We are not particularly proud of it,\" I explained. \"One may boast of\nthe number of Discosauri one finds in one's hunting preserves, or the\nmarvelous fish in one's lakes, or the birds of wondrous plumage that\ndwell in one's forests, but none ever ventures to speak of the number\nor quality of rats that infest the locality.\"\n\n\"You say it overtops a pyramid?\" he demanded.\n\n\"I do,\" I replied. \"The exact estimate of its height is sixteen\nthousand nine hundred and sixty-four feet!\"\n\n\"Great Snakes!\" he cried. \"Why, he must be a perfect mountain!\"\n\n\"He is,\" I replied. \"He is so tall that summer and winter the top of\nhis head is covered with snow.\"\n\nThis was too much for King Ptush. He rose up immediately from his seat\nand summoned his entourage.\n\n\"You will make ready for a strenuous afternoon,\" he said to them\nsharply. \"I am going after the biggest game that history records.\nColonel Methuselah has just told me of a quarry alongside of which all\nthat we have landed in the past months sinks into insignificance.\"\n\n\"You do well to call it a quarry,\" I cried. \"There never was a\nbetter--and it is only ten miles from here as the griffin flies.\"\n\nThe king's face flushed with joy at the prospect, but suddenly a look\nof perplexity came into his eyes.\n\n\"By the way,\" he said, \"how shall we bring him down--with a slungshot\nor a catapult?\"\n\n[Illustration: Gr't. Gr't. Gr't. Grandfather Adam as a\ndisciplinarian.]\n\nI laughed.\n\n\"No ordinary ammunition will serve Your Majesty's purpose here,\" I\nsaid. \"The only thing for you to do is to steal quietly up to him\nwhile he sleeps. Surround him in the silence of some black night, and\nbuild a barbed-wire fence around him. Once you succeed in doing this\nhe will not try to get away, and you can have him removed at Your\nMajesty's pleasure.\"\n\n\"We go at once,\" cried the king, his enthusiasm aroused to the highest\npitch. \"My friends,\" he added, drawing himself up to the full of his\nsoldierly height, \"we go to capture the--the--the er--by the way,\nColonel, what do you call this creature?\"\n\n\"The Ararat,\" I replied.\n\nHe repeated the word after me, sprang lightly into the saddle of\nGriffin we had presented to him upon his arrival, and, followed by\nhis entourage, was off on the greatest hunt of his life. What happened\nsubsequently we never knew, for none of the party ever returned; but\nwhat I do know is that my stratagem came too late.\n\nA subsequent investigation of our preserves showed that all our\ntreasured mastodons from the Jurassic, Triassic, and other periods of\nhistory, had been killed off, root, stock and branch, by our honored\nguest, and poor Noah was reduced to the necessity of drumming up trade\namong such commonplace creatures as the Rhinoceri, the Yak, the\nDromedary, and that vain but ornamental combination of fuss and\nfeathers known as the Hen.\n\nThe Ararat we still have with us, and as for me, I am inclined to\nthink that it will remain, flood or no flood, for any creature that\nhas successfully withstood a campaign against it by King Ptush cannot\nbe removed from the scene by anything short of a convulsion of\nNature.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER IX\n\n    (This Chapter of the Autobiography of Methuselah is made up\n    entirely of fragments. The manuscript of the preceding\n    chapters was found in fine condition, and entirely\n    unobliterated by the passage of the centuries since it was\n    written, but beginning at this point cracks appear, and in\n    some places such complete fractures as make the continuity of\n    the narrative impossible. The fragments have been as\n    carefully deciphered as the complete chapters, however, and\n    are here presented for what they are worth.)\n\nAS TO WOMEN\n\n\nThe position of woman among us will doubtless prove of interest to\nposterity. Our matrimonial laws are not all that they should be, in\nmy judgment, though there are men who consider them as nearly perfect\nas they can be made. The idea that the best way for a young man to\ndeclare his love for a young girl is to hit her on the head with a\nwooden club and then run off with her before she regains consciousness\nhas never received my approval, and never will. Something should be\nleft for the post-nuptial life, and I cannot see how after it has been\nused as an instrument of courtship a club can take its place as it\nought to as an instrument of discipline in the household. My own wives\nI have invariably caught in a trap, so that later on in life, when I\nhave found it desirable to emphasize my authority in my home by means\nof a stout stick, that emblem of power has had no glamor about it to\nweaken its force as an argument.... Then as to the number of wives\nthat a man should be permitted to have, I am in distinct disagreement\nwith the majority of my neighbors, who maintain that it is entirely a\nmatter of individual choice as to whether a man should have five, ten\nor a thousand. I should not advocate the limitation to an arbitrary\nnumber, but I believe that the question of one's actual needs should\nrule. If a man's possessions enable him to maintain a large\nestablishment requiring the services of a cook, a laundress, two\nwaitresses and four upstairs girls, eight wives would be sufficient;\nbut on the other hand, for a young man beginning his career who needs\nonly a general house-worker, one is enough. Individual cases should\nregulate the law as applied to the individual, and those who claim\nthat they may marry any number of women, whether they need them or\nnot, entirely regardless of whether or not they can keep them\noccupied, should be told that no man is entitled to more of the good\nthings of this life than he can avail himself of in his daily\nprocedure. Any other course than this will sooner or later result in a\ngreat scarcity of nuptial raw material, and it is not impossible to\nconceive of a day when all the women in the land will become the\nproperty of a select, privileged few. A monopoly of this sort would\nenable a few men to control posterity and build up a Trust in the\nMatrimonial Industry that would engender not only a great deal of\nbitter feeling between the masses and the classes, but enforce a\nsystem of compulsory bachelorhood which ... Nevertheless, if woman\nwants to vote let her do so. In spite of all that I have just said\nabout the subtle quality of her intellect, I still say let her vote.\nWhat harm can come from permitting her to go to the polls and drop a\nballot in the box for this or that man, or for this or that measure?\nIt will please her to be allowed to do this, and by granting her\npetition for the suffrage we shall put an end to an otherwise endless\ndisputation. I am quite sure that as long as her votes are kept\nseparate from the men's votes, and are _not_ counted, no possible harm\ncan come from a little complacency in the face of ... Personally I\nhave no objection to divorce. If a man marries a woman under the\nimpression that she is a good cook, and after the waning of the\nhoneymoon finds that she does not know the difference between\nsponge-cake and a plain common garden sponge, why should he be forced\nforevermore to court dyspepsia on her account? I fail to see either\njustice or reason in this, though as to the method of divorce I\ncannot agree with those who claim that as the man has married the\nwoman by hitting her with a club, as I have already shown, the proper\nmethod of divorce is for the woman to return the blow with a\nrolling-pin. The proper way to do is for the husband to be permitted\nto return the girl to her parents as not up to the specifications, or\nif she have no parents to dispose of her at the best bargain possible\nto one of his neighbors who may happen to be in need of a girl of that\nsort at that particular time.... But these Newport separations, as I\nbelieve they are called, are apt to prove embarrassing, particularly\nwhen the divorc\u00e9es all happen to be present at the same dinner-table.\nA lady whose hostess is the wife of her former husband, finding\nherself sitting opposite the divorced wife of her present husband, who\nhas at one time or another been married to two or three other ladies\nat the board, is not likely to be able to comport herself with that\ndegree of _savoir faire_ that is the ear-mark of the refined....\n\nAs for the mother-in-law, for certain reasons of a private nature I\nwas not going to speak of her in these memoirs, but after mature\nreflection upon the subject I deem it my duty to posterity to say\nthat....\n\n\nSOME LONG-FELT WANTS\n\nI have often wished that in my youth I had studied science a little\nmore carefully. It is growing very obvious to me the longer I live\nthat there are a number of little things that we need in this world to\nmake life more comfortable. It does not seem to me beyond reason to\nthink that by the use of a proper mechanism these thunderbolts that\nplay about the heavens can be made to do errands for us. It angers me\nto see so much light going to waste in the heavens from the flash of\nthe lightning, when it might be stored up for use instead of these\nintolerable axle-grease dips that we are forced to use to light us on\nour way to bed. I don't see why some one cannot entrap one of these\nbolts on a wire, just as we catch a rat in a trap, and keep it running\nround and round a loop, giving out its light until it is exhausted....\nIt would be pleasant, too, to have a kind of carriage that would go of\nits own power. I cannot quite reason the thing out, but I believe that\nthe time will come when there will be something of the sort. I\nremember back in my four-hundred-and-fifty-second year finding one of\nmy father's farm wagons on the top of the hill back of the cow\npasture. I wheeled it to the edge of the descent, and was much\ndelighted to see it go speeding down to the base of the hill,\ngathering momentum at every turn of the wheels, and ending up by\nhitting the back door of Uncle Zibb's cottage with such force that it\ncame out of the front parlor window before stopping. This seemed to\nindicate that under certain circumstances a wheeled vehicle could be\nmade to go without a horse, but in what precise way it can be brought\nabout the limitations of my mechanical training prevent me from\ndetermi ... I was watching the heated vapor rising from our tea-kettle\nthe other night, and was much diverted to notice that it made a\nwhistling sort of sound as it emerged from the nozzle of the pot. It\nran from B sharp to high C, and was loud enough to be heard on the\nother side of the room. It has occurred to me that there may be in\nthis some hidden principle that will some day enable man to make this\nvapor do his work for him, especially along musical lines. Surely if\nthis misty substance can make a tea-kettle squeak, why should it not,\nif multiplied in volume and run through a trombone, afford us a\ncapable substitute for Bill Watkins, who plays second base on our\nVillage Band?\n\n\nAS TO PROPHECIES\n\nIf our Prophets would only confine themselves to probabilities I am\ninclined to think we should take more stock in the things they\nforetell. I am impelled to the making of this reflection by the\npresence in our town of an Astrologer who is setting all the women by\nthe ears by prophesying a day when they will not have to do their own\nhousework, and will thrive in many lines of endeavor now open solely\nto men. He is an interesting old fellow, in spite of the foolishness\nof his predictions; but when he tells the women's clubs that in some\nfar off century women will be found writing novels, and adorning\nthemselves with rich fabrics, and surrounded by a class of paid\ntoilers who will do nothing but minister to their ease and comfort, I\nlose all patience with him. It is filling their minds with socialistic\nnotions that are impairing their usefulness, and I have had to\nchastise seven of my own fair helpmeets this past week for neglecting\ntheir duties and treating my instructions with contempt. A curious\nthing about his prophecies is their confirmation of Adam's fears as to\nthe ultimate result of these new-fangled ideas as to dress, and, what\ninterested me more than anything else, he predicted a machine called a\nMoh-Thor-Cah, that not only runs along without outside assistance,\nbut is propelled entirely by the same vapor that I have spoken of\nbefore as striking the high C in the nozzle of my tea-kettle. He goes\ntoo far with this, as well as with his other prophecies, for he says\nthat there will be a time when ships larger than Noah's Ark will be\nforced across great bodies of water by this same power. The idea of\nanybody, after Noah's experience, being foolish enough to build a\ncraft of that kind, to say nothing of working it with a tea-kettle, is\npreposterously abs ... In one of his visions he claims to have seen a\ngathering of people, called a city, in which there are to be more than\nfour million souls, and governed not by the virtuous, as in our own\nday, but by the most desperate political malefactors that ever banded\ntogether for plunder, and this at the direct request of the people\nthemselves! I am perfectly aware that human nature is weak, and given\nover at times to strange delusions, but that any body of\nself-respecting persons should deliberately and of their own free will\nturn the management of their affairs over to those who would more\nproperly grace a jail than a City Hall, surpasses belie ...\n\n\nMISCELLANEOUS FRAGMENTS\n\n... cannot be denied that a daily newspaper would be an interesting\nthing, if it were possible to print it, but I doubt its real value. I\ndislike gossip, and I do not see how the newspaper could fill up\nwithout it. What advantage is it to me to know that Hiram\nWigglesworth, of Ararat Corners, who is unknown to me, was arrested on\nThursday evening for beating his wife? Why should I be called upon to\nimpair the value of my eyes by reading in small type all the\nscandalous details of the separation proceedings between two people I\nnever saw and would not permit to enter my front door if they came to\ncall? It is nothing to me that Mrs. Zebulon Zebedee, of Enochsville,\nhas spent thirty thousand clam-shells a year on bottled grape-juice,\nand run up bills against her husband's account at the diamond-quarries\nfor two or three hundred thousand tons of wampum, and if she chooses\nto go joy-riding on a Diplodocus with a gentleman from the Circus, it\nis Zebulon Zebedee's business, not mine, and a newspaper that insisted\nupon dumping this unsavory mess on my breakfast-table every morning\nwould sooner or later become an unmitigated nuis ...\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\n... but he pays no attention to my protestations. I think the oldtime\nmethod of walloping them every Sunday morning, on the principle that\nthey deserved it for something they had done during the past week, was\na good one. Shem and Japhet are not so bad, but since Ham came back\nfrom the Ararat Academy of Higher Learning he has been about as\nuseless a member of the community as we have ever had. What he doesn't\nknow would fill six hundred volumes of the Triassic Cyclop\u00e6dia. I\ncaught him only the other night trying to teach his grandmother to\nsuck eggs, although my estimable wife was a past-mistress of that art\nfour hundred years before he was born. He has absolutely no respect\nfor age, and frequently refers to me as \"the old boy,\" criticizes my\nclothes, and remarks apropos of my patriarchal garments that\nnight-shirts as an article of dress for a five o'clock tea went out a\nthousand years ago. Indeed, so disrespectful is he that I sometimes\nwonder if he is not a foundling. I note two suspicious things in\nrespect to him. The first is that he is getting blacker in the face\nevery day, which suggests that there is in him somewhere a strain of\nthe \u00c6thiopian, none of which he gets from me or his grandmother, who\nwas an Albino. And the second is that his father will not allow him to\nbe spanked, a very strange inhibition, I think, unless that operation\nwould disclose the boy's possession of the Missing Link. Indeed, I\nshould not be at all surprised to discover that the lad is either an\n\u00c6thiopian, or a direct descendant of Adam's old friend and neighbor,\nCol. Darwin J. Simian, of Coacoa-on-Nut. In all of my reflections on\nthe subject of the training of the young, manual training has always\nseemed to me the most efficacious, especially if in applying the hand\nyou do not restrain its force, and are not loath to use the hair-brush\nor a good leathern trunk-strap as an auxiliary. And in order to\nensure their freedom from evil associations, and to keep them from\nmaking the night hideous by their raucous yells, I have never heard of\nanything better than the method of Doctor Magog Rodd, of the\nEnochsville Military Academy, who kept his students in cages and\ncorked them up every night before they retir ...\n\n[Illustration: The Head Nurse of the Adam Family.]\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\n... so no more at present. My manuscript already weighs three hundred\nand forty tons, and every word of it has been gouged out with my own\nhands--a difficult operation for a man of my years. I am painfully\naware of its shortcomings, but such as it is it is, and so it must\nremain. There is no time left for its revision, and, indeed, a man\nwho has just celebrated his nine hundred and sixty-ninth birthday can\nhardly be expected ...","title":"The Autobiography of Methuselah","tradition":"scripture-revelation","translated_text":null,"word_count":27324}