Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor

by Unknown

THE TROUT, THE CAT AND THE FOX

A Fable

(Anonymous)

A fine full-grown Trout for had some time kept his station in a clear stream, when, one morning, a Cat, extravagantly fond, as cats are wont to be, of fish, caught a glimpse of him, as he glided from beneath an overhanging part of the bank, toward the middle of the river; and with this glimpse, she resolved to spare no pains to capture him. As she sat on the bank waiting for the return of the fish, and laying a plan for her enterprise, a Fox came up, and saluting her, said:

"Your servant, Mrs. Puss. A pleasant place this for taking the morning air; and a notable place for fish, eh!"

"Good morning, Mr. Reynard," replied the Cat. "The place is, as you say, pleasant enough. As for fish, you can judge for yourself whether there are any in this part of the river. I do not deny that near the falls, about four miles from here, some very fine salmon and other fish are to be found."

At this very moment, very inappositely for the Cat's hint, the Trout made his appearance; and the Fox looking significantly at her, said:

"The falls, madam! Perhaps this fine Trout is on his way thither. It may be that you would like the walk; allow me the pleasure of accompanying you?"

"I thank you, sir," replied the Cat, "but I am not disposed to walk so far at present. Indeed, I hardly know whether I am quite well. I think I will rest myself a little, and then return home."

"Whatever you may determine," rejoined the Fox, "I hope to be permitted to enjoy your society and conversation; and possibly I may have the great gratification of preventing the tedium which, were you left alone, your indisposition might produce."

In speaking thus, the crafty Fox had no doubt that the only indisposition from which the Cat was suffering was an unwillingness to allow him a share of her booty; and he was determined that, so far as management could go, she should catch no fish that day without his being a party to the transaction. As the trout still continued in sight, be began to commend his shape and color; and the Cat, seeing no way of getting rid of him, finally agreed that they should jointly try their skill and divide the spoil. Upon this compact, they both went actively to work.

They agreed first to try the following device: A small knob of earth covered with rushes stood in the water close to the bank. Both the fishers were to crouch behind these rushes; the Fox was to move the water very gently with the end of his long brush, and withdraw it so soon as the Trout's attention should have been drawn to that point; and the Cat was to hold her right paw underneath, and be ready, so soon as the fish should come over it, to throw him out on the bank. No sooner was the execution of this device commenced than it seemed likely to succeed. The Trout soon noticed the movement on the water, and glided quickly toward the point where it was made; but when he had arrived within about twice his own length of it, he stopped and then backed toward the middle of the river. Several times this maneuver was repeated, and always with the same result, until the tricky pair were convinced that they must try some other scheme.

It so happened that whilst they were considering what they should do next, the Fox espied a small piece of meat, when it was agreed that he should tear this into little bits and throw them into the stream above where they then were; that the Cat should wait, crouched behind a tuft of grass, to dash into the river and seize the Trout, if he should come to take any piece of meat floating near the bank; and that the Fox should, on the first movement of the Cat, return and give his help. This scheme was put into practice, but with no better success than the other. The Trout came and took the pieces of meat which had floated farthest off from the bank, but to those which floated near he seemed to pay no attention. As he rose to take the last, he put his mouth out of the water and said, "To other travelers with these petty tricks: here we are 'wide awake as a black fish' and are not to be caught with bits and scraps, like so many silly gudgeons!"

As the Trout went down, the Fox said, in an undertone: "Say you so, my fine fellow; we may, perhaps, make a gudgeon of you yet!"

Then, turning to the Cat, he proposed to her a new scheme in the following terms:

"I have a scheme to propose which cannot, I am persuaded, fail of succeeding, if you will lend your talent and skill for the execution of it. As I crossed the bridge, a little way above, I saw the dead body of a small dog, and near it a flat piece of wood rather longer than your person. Now, let us throw the dead dog into the river and give the Trout time to examine it; then, let us put the piece of wood into the water, and do you set yourself upon it so that it shall be lengthwise under you, and your mouth may lean over one edge and your tail hang in the water as if you were dead. The Trout, no doubt, will come up to you, when you may seize him and paddle to the bank with him, where I will be in waiting to help you land the prey."

The scheme pleased the Cat so much that, in spite of her repugnance to the wetting, which it promised her, she resolved to act the part which the cunning Fox had assigned to her. They first threw the dead dog into the river and, going down the stream, they soon had the satisfaction of seeing the Trout glide up close to it and examine it. They then returned to the bridge and put the piece of wood into the water, and the Cat, having placed herself upon it and taken a posture as if she were dead, was soon carried down by the current to where the Trout was. Apparently without the least suspicion, he came up close to the Cat's head, and she, seizing him by one of his gills, held him in spite of all his struggles. The task of regaining the bank still had to be performed, and this was no small difficulty, for the Trout struggled so hard, and the business of navigation was so new to the Cat, that not without great labor and fatigue did she reach the place where the Fox was waiting for her. As one end of the board struck the bank, the Fox put his right forepaw upon it, then seizing the fish near the tail, as the Cat let it go, he gave the board a violent push which sent it toward the middle of the stream, and instantly ran off with the Trout in his mouth toward the bridge.

It had so happened that after the Fox had quitted the bridge the last time, an Otter had come there to watch for fish, and he, seeing the Trout in the Fox's mouth, rushed toward him, and compelled him to drop the fish and put himself on the defensive. It had also happened that this Otter had been seen in an earlier part of the day, and that notice of him had been given to the farmer to whom the Cat belonged, and who had more than once declared that if ever he found her fishing again she should be thrown into the river with a stone tied to her neck. The moment the farmer heard of the Otter, he took his gun, and followed by a laborer and two strong dogs, went toward the river, where he arrived just as the Cat, exhausted by the fatigue of her second voyage, was crawling up the bank. Immediately he ordered the laborer to put the sentence of drowning in execution; then, followed by his dogs, he arrived near the bridge just as the Fox and the Otter were about to join battle. Instantly the dogs set on the Fox and tore him to pieces; and the farmer, shooting the Otter dead on the spot, possessed himself of the Trout, which had thus served to detain first one, then the other of his destroyers, till a severe punishment had overtaken each of them. Moral.—The inexperienced are never so much in danger of being deceived and hurt as when they think themselves a match for the crafty, and suppose that they have penetrated their designs and seen through all their stratagems. As to the crafty, they are ever in danger, either by being overreached one by another or of falling in a hurry into some snare of their own, where, as commonly happens, should they be caught, they are treated with a full measure of severity.—Aesop, Jr., in America.

Robert C. Sands

A MONODY

Made on the Late Mr. Samuel Patch, by an Aadmirer of the Bathos

By water he shall die and take his end.—Shakespeare

Toll for Sam Patch! Sam Patch, who jumps no more,
This or the world to come. Sam Patch is dead!
The vulgar pathway to the unknown shore
Of dark futurity, he would not tread.
No friends stood sorrowing round his dying bed;
Nor with decorous woe, sedately stepp'd
Behind his corpse, and tears by retail shed—
The mighty river, as it onward swept,
In one great wholesale sob, his body drowned and kept.

Toll for Sam Patch! he scorned the common way
That leads to fame, up heights of rough ascent,
And having heard Pope and Longinus say
That some great men had risen by falls, he went
And jumped, where wild Passaic's waves had rent
The antique rocks—the air free passage gave—
And graciously the liquid element
Upbore him, like some sea-god on its wave;
And all the people said that Sam was very brave.

Fame, the clear spirit that doth to heaven upraise,
Let Sam to dive into what Byron calls
The hell of waters. For the sake of praise,
He wooed the bathos down great waterfalls;
The dizzy precipice, which the eye appals
Of travelers for pleasure, Samuel found
Pleasant as are to women lighted halls,
Crammed full of fools and fiddles; to the sound
Of the eternal roar, he timed his desperate bound.

Sam was a fool. But the large world of such
Has thousands—better taught, alike absurd,
And less sublime. Of fame he soon got much,
Where distant cataracts spout, of him men heard.
Alas for Sam! Had he aright preferred
The kindly element, to which he gave
Himself so fearlessly, we had not heard
That it was now his winding sheet and grave,
Nor sung, 'twixt tears and smiles, our requiem for the brave.

He soon got drunk with rum and with renown,
As many others in high places do—
Whose fall is like Sam's last—for down and down,
By one mad impulse driven, they flounder through
The gulf that keeps the future from our view,
And then are found not. May they rest in peace!
We heave the sigh to human frailty due—
And shall not Sam have his? The muse shall cease
To keep the heroic roll, which she began in Greece—

With demigods who went to the Black Sea
For wool (and if the best accounts be straight,
Came back, in Negro phraseology,
With the same wool each upon his pate),
In which she chronicled the deathless fate
Of him who jumped into the perilous ditch
Left by Rome's street commissioners, in a state
Which made it dangerous, and by jumping which
He made himself renowned and the contractors rich—

I say the muse shall quite forget to sound
The chord whose music is undying, if
She do not strike it when Sam Patch is drowned.
Leander dived for love. Leucadia's cliff
The Lesbian Sappho leapt from in a miff,
To punish Phaon; Icarus went dead
Because the wax did not continue stiff;
And, had he minded what his father said,
He had not given a name unto his watery bed.

And Helle's case was all an accident,
As everybody knows. Why sing of these?
Nor would I rank with Sam that man who went
Down into Aetna's womb—Empedocles,
I think he called himself. Themselves to please,
Or else unwillingly, they made their springs;
For glory in the abstract, Sam made his,
To prove to all men, commons, lords, and kings,
That "some things may be done, as well as other things."

I will not be fatigued, by citing more
Who jump'd of old, by hazard or design,
Nor plague the weary ghosts of boyish lore,
Vulcan, Apollo, Phaeton—in fine
All Tooke's Pantheon. Yet they grew divine
By their long tumbles; and if we can match
Their hierarchy, shall we not entwine
One wreath? Who ever came "up to the scratch,"
And for so little, jumped so bravely as Sam Patch?

To long conclusions many men have jumped
In logic, and the safer course they took;
By any other they would have been stumped,
Unable to argue, or to quote a book,
And quite dumbfounded, which they cannot brook;
They break no bones, and suffer no contusion,
Hiding their woful fall, by hook and crook,
In slang and gibberish, sputtering and confusion;
But that was not the way Sam came to his conclusion.

He jumped in person. Death or victory
Was his device, "and there was no mistake,"
Except his last; and then he did but die,
A blunder which the wisest men will make.
Aloft, where mighty floods the mountains break,
To stand, the target of the thousand eyes,
And down into the coil and water-quake,
To leap, like Maia's offspring, from the skies—
For this all vulgar flights he ventured to despise.

And while Niagara prolongs its thunder,
Though still the rock primeval disappears
And nations change their bounds—the theme of wonder
Shall Sam go down the cataract of long years:
And if there be sublimity in tears,
Those shall be precious which the adventurer shed
When his frail star gave way, and waked his fears,
Lest, by the ungenerous crowd it might be said,
That he was all a hoax, or that his pluck had fled.

Who would compare the maudlin Alexander,
Blubbering because he had no job in hand,
Acting the hypocrite, or else the gander,
With Sam, whose grief we all can understand?
His crying was not womanish, nor plann'd
For exhibition; but his heart o'erswelled
With its own agony, when he the grand,
Natural arrangements for a jump beheld.
And measuring the cascade, found not his courage quelled.

His last great failure set the final seal
Unto the record Time shall never tear,
While bravery has its honor—while men feel
The holy natural sympathies which are
First, last and mightiest in the bosom. Where
The tortured tides of Genesee descend,
He came—his only intimate a bear—
(We know now that he had another friend),
The martyr of renown, his wayward course to end.

The fiend that from the infernal rivers stole
Hell-drafts for man, too much tormented him;
With nerves unstrung, but steadfast of his soul,
He stood upon the salient current's brim;
His head was giddy, and his sight was dim;
And then he knew this leap would be his last—
Saw air, and earth, and water, wildly swim,
With eyes of many multitudes, dense and vast,
That stared in mockery; none a look of kindness cast.

Beat down, in the huge amphitheatre,
"I see before me the gladiator lie,"
And tier on tier, the myriads waiting there
The bow of grace without one pitying eye—
He was a slave—a captive hired to die—
Sam was born free as Caesar; and he might
The hopeless issue have refused to try;
No! with true leap, but soon with faltering flight—
"Deep in the roaring gulf, he plunged to endless night."

But, ere he leapt, he begged of those who made
Money by this dread venture, that if he
Should perish, such collection should be paid
As might be picked up from the "company"
To his Mother. This, his last request, shall be—
Tho' she who bore him ne'er his fate should know—
An iris, glittering o'er his memory—
When all the streams have worn their barriers low,
And, by the sea drunk up, forever cease to flow.

On him who chooses to jump down cataracts,
Why should the sternest moralist be severe?
Judge not the dead by prejudice—but facts,
Such as in strictest evidence appear.
Else were the laurels of all ages sere.
Give to the brave, who have passed the final goal—
The gates that ope not back—the generous tear;
And let the muse's clerk upon her scroll
In coarse, but honest verse, make up the judgment roll.

Therefore it is considered that Sam Patch
Shall never be forgot in prose or rhyme;
His name shall be a portion in the batch
Of the heroic dough, which baking Time
Kneads for consuming ages—and the chime
Of Fame's old bells, long as they truly ring,
Shall tell of him; he dived for the sublime,
And found it. Thou, who, with the eagle's wing,
Being a goose, would'st fly—dream not of such a thing!