The tribe to which he belonged was transcendental, heterodox, habitually untruthful, and characterised by a belief that the affections resided in the heart. So, when this poor chieftain found that he was getting too good and kind (ah, how many of us have felt like that!—I often have), he concluded that something must be wrong with his heart, and went to a medicine man or fakir. And he said: “O fakir, would you fake me up a tin heart? For the heart which I have is too unpleasantly soft, and I want a metal one.” The fakir agreed to make the change for twelve ducats. But just at this time an accident happened to the budget of this tribe, and a tax of ten ducats per pound was put on plumbum album—no, my boy, not white lead: it means tin. So it was quite clear to the fakir that he could not afford to give the man a tin heart, and yet he had signed the document. Besides, he wanted those twelve ducats.
So he gave the man chloroform, removed his heart, and then proceeded to do his best with a cheap substitute. But the cheap substitute refused to be faked, and the fakir was still hard at work trying to make something which should do quite as well as a tin heart and last longer, when he noticed signs of reviving consciousness in the chieftain. He had no more chloroform to give him, and no time to lose. So he hurriedly sewed up the incision, and left the man with no heart at all, neither of flesh, nor of tin, nor of cheap substitute.
Then the chieftain started off home, and he looked very cheerful indeed. He tripped up two blind men, and threw their sulfura down a grating. Then he went into a public-house, and spent his week’s stipendium. Finally, he reeled home, kicked his wife, smoked two cigars in the drawing-room, broke his mother-in-law’s head, forgot to wipe his boots, said he wanted some tea, and went to sleep with his feet on the crimson plush mantelpiece.
Now, next day another Gaul was going down the street when he saw two goats being harnessed to a milk-cart. It at once occurred to him that it would be as well to throw off the Roman yoke. So another insurrection was started, and the Gallic chieftain who had no heart was put in the forefront of the battle.
Just as the trumpets sounded for a charge, this Gallic chieftain remembered that he had left his handkerchief in the tent, and went to look for it in a hurry, and got himself disliked. But as the rest of the tribe were mostly killed in the charge, he did not mind that much. The survivors said: “Our noble chief has begun to be a coward.” But he was not afraid of his wife, and used bad language in her presence during mealtimes. One of the survivors went so far as to run a lance through the place where the chieftain’s heart ought to have been. The chieftain smiled, and said sarcastically that he was not an umbrella-stand.
Death is connected with the stoppage of the heart’s action; consequently this chieftain never died, and it is argued that during the Syro-Phœnician attempt to——
Here there is a hiatus in the manuscript. A scribe has added a note in the margin pallido atramento, “The chieftain is still alive. I have seen him. I have written his name at the foot of the manuscript.” I have looked there, and simply found the words “Venditus iterum.”
But the other day I bought a cigar which was all case and no inwards. The tobacconist who sold it me said it was a Regalia Gallica; and he looked as if he had been in this world a long time, and had seen the wickedness of it. I simply mention this as a coincidence. There may be nothing in it, like the cigar. But it is a curious case, if nothing else—also like the cigar.