Читать книгу Facts and fancies for the curious from the harvest-fields of literature - Charles C. Bombaugh - Страница 50

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The most skilful gauger we ever knew was a maligned cobbler, armed with a poniard, who drove a pedler’s wagon, using a mullein-stalk as an instrument of coercion, to tyrannize over his pony shod with calks. He was a Galilean Sadducee, and he had a phthisicky catarrh, diphtheria, and the bilious intermittent erysipelas. A certain Sibyl, with the sobriquet of “Gypsy,” went into ecstasies of cachinnation at seeing him measure a bushel of peas; and separate saccharine tomatoes from a heap of peeled potatoes, without dyeing or singeing the ignitible queue which he wore, or becoming paralyzed with a hemorrhage. Lifting her eyes to the ceiling of the cupola of the Capitol to conceal her unparalleled embarrassment, making a rough courtesy, and not harassing him with mystifying, rarefying, and stupefying innuendoes, she gave him a couch, a bouquet of lilies, mignonette, and fuchsias, a treatise on mnemonics, a copy of the Apocrypha in hieroglyphics, daguerreotypes of Mendelssohn and Kosciusko, a kaleidoscope, a dramphial of ipecacuanha, a teaspoonful of naphtha, for deleble purposes, a ferrule, a clarionet, some licorice, a surcingle, a carnelian of symmetrical proportions, a chronometer with a movable balance-wheel, a box of dominoes, and a catechism. The gauger, who was also a trafficking rectifier and a parishioner of a distinguished ecclesiastic, preferring a woollen surtout (his choice was referable to a vacillating occasionally occurring idiosyncrasy), wofully uttered this apothegm: “Life is checkered; but schism, apostasy, heresy, and villany shall be punished.” The Sibyl apologizingly answered, “There is a ratable and allegeable difference between a conferrable ellipsis and a trisyllabic diæresis.” We replied in trochees, not impugning her suspicion.