upon the marble floors, kerflop! Samantha's cousin, Mary Ann, has hooked up with the plumber man, a gent of industry and peace, whose face is often black with grease. They dwell together in a cot surrounded by a garden plot, and there she raises beans and tripe, while he is fixing valve and pipe. He takes his money, like a man, and hands it o'er to Mary Ann, and she is salting down his wage where it will help them in old age. O reader, who has made a fluke? Samantha with her pallid duke, or fat and sassy Mary Ann, who gathered in the plumber man? [Pg 72] [Pg 72] Human Hands There's the man whose hand is clammy as a fish that lately died, and to grasp it sends a shudder percolating through your hide, and you feel its cold impression in your muscles and your glands, and you wish he'd wear an oven on his blamed antarctic hands. There's the man with hands so horny that they feel like chunks of slate, and when he is shaking with you, you can feel them grind and grate; and he nearly breaks your fingers, and you mutter through your hat: "I would run them through a smelter if my hands were hard as that!" There's the man whose hands are always pawing, pawing while he talks; they are fussing with your whiskers, they are reaching for your socks; they are patting on your bosom, they are clawing on your arm, and you'd like to meet their owner on the Mrs. Gunness farm. There's the man whose hands are always sliding down into his jeans, to relieve some broken pilgrims of their miseries and pains; and such hands, that in their giving, never falter, never tire, in the golden time a-coming will be twanging at a lyre! [Pg 73] [Pg 73] The Lost Pipe Upon the joyous New Year's day I threw my briar pipe away. I said, with conscious rectitude: "The smoking habit's base and lewd; it taints the breath and soils the teeth, and often stains the chin beneath; the smoker's tongue is badly seared, and he has clinkers in his beard; of nicotine he is so full no self-respecting cannibull would eat him raw, well done or rare; and e'en his neckties and his hair, his hat, his breath, and trouserloons, suggest plug-cut and cuspitoons. And so I throw my pipe away, upon this gladsome New Year's day; my friends no more will have to choke and wheeze in my tobacco smoke." Since then the days drag slowly on; it seems as though ten years have gone; I walk the floor the long night through, and, jealous, watch the kitchen flue—for
Prev.
Back
Top