STEPS RE-TRACED.
Catherine de Medicis made a vow, that if some concerns which she had undertaken terminated successfully, she would send a pilgrim on foot to Jerusalem, and that at every three steps he advanced, he should go one step back.
It was doubtful whether there could be found a man sufficiently strong and patient to walk, and go back one step at every third. A citizen of Verberie, who was a merchant, offered to accomplish the queen’s vow most scrupulously, and her majesty promised him an adequate recompense. The queen was well assured by constant inquiries that he fulfilled his engagement with exactness, and on his return, he received a considerable sum of money, and was ennobled. His coat of arms were a cross and a branch of palm-tree. His descendants preserved the arms; but they degenerated from their nobility, by resuming the commerce which their ancestor quitted.[107]
[107] Nouv. Hist. de Duch. de Valois.
Street Circulars.
No. I.
For the Table Book.
WHISTLING JOE.
He whistles as he goes for want of bread.[108]
Old books declare,—in Plutus’ shade,
Whistling was once a roaring trade,—
Great was the call for nerve and gristle;
That Charon, with his Styx in view,
Pierced old Phlegethon through and through,
And whist-led in the ferry-whistle—
That Polyphemus whistled when
He p-layed the pipe r in a pen,
And sought Ulysses’ bark to launch;
That Troy, King Priam had not lost,
But for the whistlers that were horsed[109]
Within the horse’s wooden paunch.
Jupiter was a whist-ling wight,
And Juno heard him with delight;
And Boreas was a reedy swain,
Awak’ning Venus from the sea:
But of the Moderns?—Joe is he
That whistles in the streets for gain.
You wonder as you hear the tone
Sound like a herald in a zone
Distinctly clear, minutely sweet;
You list and Joe is dancing, now
You laugh, and Joe returns a bow
Returning in the crooked street.
He scrapes a stick across his arm
And knocks his knees, in need, to charm;[110]
Instead of tabor and a fiddle,
Et omne solis,—on his sole!
He, solus omnis, like a pole
Supports his body in the middle.
Thus, of the sprites that creep, or beg,
With wither’d arm, or wooden leg,
Uncatalogued in Bridewell’s missal;
Joe is the fittest for relief,
He whistles gladness in his grief,[111]
And hardly earns it for his whistle.
J. R. P.
[108] Vide Dryden’s Cymon,
“He whistled as he went for want of thought.”
[109] This word rhymes with lost, to oblige the cockneys.
[110] Like the punning clown in the stocks, that whistled Over the wood laddie!
“Whistle! and I will come to thee, my love.”