“Why,” replied Knox, with one of these expressions of an almost unreadable face—something between a leer and overdone sincerity—“why, I was busy in your way,—keen in the study of natural history. No place in the world excels the Cape for curious objects in that department; will you believe it, Professor, I have made an extraordinary discovery?”
“Discovery! ah, you interest me.”
“And well I may,” he continued, as the light of the one orb expressed the new-born zeal of the naturalist. “I have found a new species of animal. Yes, sir, altogether new, and at a world’s-wide distance from any congeners with which you are acquainted—quite an irreproducible phœnix.”
“Then we must identify it with your name,—some adjective connected with night, but not darkness.”
“And that I have done, too,” continued the naturalist.
“Why, then, the description will form an excellent article for our journal. I could wish that you write it out and send it to me. It will be something grand, to shew the Southerners we are en avant.”
“I will do it,” was the reply; “and you shall have it for the next number.”
Nor was Knox worse in this instance than his word, if he could be, for by and by there came to the Professor a spirited, if not elaborate description of the new species, which, having been approved of by the simple Professor, flared brilliantly among the heavy articles of his beloved work. But unhappily for the discoverer, no less than for the editor, the article fell under the eye of Dr Buckland, who soon found out the whole affair to be an excellent hoax. Often afterwards Jameson looked for his contributor to administer a reproof in his gentle way, but this opportunity never awaited him, for Knox, though with one eye, had a long sight when there was danger ahead, and the Professor in the distance sent him down the nearest close with even more than his usual celerity.
Those who knew the man would have no hesitation in placing such an example of his recklessness to the credit of his rampant egotism,[2] certainly not to that of practical joking, a species of devil’s humour not always dissociated from a bonhommie to which the earnest mind of the man was a stranger. Even the bitterness of soul towards competitors was not sufficiently gratified by the pouring forth of the toffana-spirit of his sarcasm. He behoved to hold the phial with refined fingers, and rub the liquid into the “raw” with the soft touch of love. The affected attenuation of voice and forced retinu of feeling, sometimes degenerating into a puppy’s simper, bore such a contrast to the acerbity of the matter, that the effect, though often ludicrous, was increased tenfold. We may now read such a passage as we subjoin,[3] serving merely as a solitary example of the style; but it would be vain to try to estimate the effect from the mere allocation of vocables disjoined from the acrimony they collected in their passage through the ear and carried to the brain.