‘Go ahead, now, what’s-your-name; let us hear what you can do in the shape of a yarn.’
Frank drew the fruit basket to him, searched through it for the largest peach, and, hastily peeling it, threw himself back on the grass to listen to Ben.”
Ben very deliberately rose, and tossed away his quid of tobacco, took some water to cleanse his mouth, and walked to a bush near by, from which he cut a large branch with an old horn-handle knife, out of which he blew almost a pipeful of tobacco crumbs before opening the blade. Taking his seat again, he commenced to trim up his switch and to tell his story.
BEN’S STORY.
“Your two friends, John, has both on ’em told good yarns, but they went mighty fur from home to get ’em. I’m a gwine to tell you what happened right up yonder at the house. Some time along the fust of last year mo’er took her up a house pig, to raise offen the slops and peelins. It growed and fattened a power, and was soon ‘bout the likeliest hog on the plantation, only it got so cussed tame twould’n never git outer nobody’s way, and was a continuwell being stepped on, and drug outer the house by the leg. Arter the little fool had been grown awhile, she come up one day with eleven pigs, as lively as you ever see, and pime blank like her, a squealin’ and runnin’ everywhere they hadn’t orter. I heard a riddle wonst ‘bout a pig under a gate makin’ a noise, but he ain’t a lighten-bug’s lamp to a pig when he’s hungry. The older they got the wuss they squealed, till dad said as how he could’n stand it no longer, the sow and pigs had to be moved; so me and him bilt a pen ‘bout two hundred yards from the house, and driv ’em down to it. There was a free nigger, with a yard full of children, livin’ ‘bout as fur from the pen as we did; and the fust night after we’d put ’em up, long todes bed time, I heer a pig squeal like dyin’, but I thought perhaps he’d got cut out of his suck, and I never thought on ’em agin till next morning, when I went down to feed ’em; two of the pigs was bloody behind, and, when I looked close, thare tails was gone. I knowed ‘twas the niggers, for a fried pig’s tail is the best thing a nigger knows how to eat. I tole the ole man ‘bout it soon’s I got back, and he said how we’d wait till the next mornin’. When we went to the pen agin thare was two more tails gone, and two more bloody pigs. Daddy sot on a rail sometime a studin, then he said, sudden-like:
‘Bengermin, go to the house, and fetch me a shingle an my powder horn, an the big gimblet.’
I ran off, a wond’rin’ what in the crashen the ole man was gwine to do with a gimblet and a shingle. Soon as I come back he tole me to get in the pen, and ketch one of the pigs with his tail on. When I histed one up, he tuk him and tied his tail out straight on the shingle, so it twould’n bend. He tuk the gimblet, and started in the tip end of the pig’s tail, and bored it clear out. The bloody shavins come a bilin’ up round the grooves of the gimblet, and the pig squealed till the air ‘peared to be full of hopper grasses, tryin’ to kick in my years. When daddy pulled the gimblet out, the tail looked like a holler skin quill, and would hold ‘bout a double load of powder. Daddy poured it chock full, then put a fo-penny nail, with a gun cap on the eend of it, down ‘mongst the powder, so that it’d go off if any thing totch it, and then tied it all up with horse hair. When I put him back in the pen that pig didn’t have nary a curl to his tail; it stuck out as straight and stiff as if it was a handel to tote him by. We fixed two more in the same way, and then went home. Next morning, when we went down, we found one pig dead, with his hams ready baked, and his back bone drove through his forehead six inches. His tail itself was split open like a shot fire-cracker, and bent backerds like a shelled pea hull. The other two tails had just shot straight without bustin’, but the kick of the powder had lifted up their hind legs so high they could’n git ’em down agin, and they was walkin’ round the pen on thare forefeet samer’n a circus man. When we came to zamine the pen we found three niggers’ fingers blowed off, and sticking to a rail, and little kinks of wooly hair were layin’ round as thick as if it had snowed black. Daddy and me then went up to the nigger’s house, where we found a good size boy and girl with their hands tied up, and thare heads burnt slick on top. When we asked ’em ‘bout it, the boy said the girl was a nussin the baby, and went down to the pen to keep the baby quiet, and he just went along for company like. He said they got to the pen, and was a peepin’ through the rails, when one of the pigs come to scratch hisself, and soon’s he begin to rub he busted all to pieces. They were mighty badly skeered, and, to keep ’em so, daddy tole ’em them was some thunder-tailed hogs he got from the South. We never had another hog troubled in the least, and when hog-killing time came daddy found it mighty hard to get the hands to help him. That’s the end of my yarn.”
And Ben got up and walked to the spring, where a large curved handled gourd hung on a stick cut for the purpose, and, disdaining Reuben’s offer of a glass, took the gourd, and dipping up half the spring, drank till the long crooked handle curled over his hat, and bent back like an officer’s plume in a windy parade. When he had resumed his seat on the grass all three called for my judgment, and, with an assumption of great solemnity and dignity, I proceeded to render it.
“The object, gentlemen, of a wonderful story, or yarn, as it is vulgarly called, is not only to excite wonder, but also to evoke a pleasant surprise by discovering relations between dissimilar or contrary things, which we did not think of as possibly existing. If these dissimilars or contraries are too far apart for the mind to recognize any possible relation, then the narration becomes unpleasantly absurd, and we shrink from contemplating it. If, however, apparently improbable relations are brought out in a way that renders them possible, we are surprised and pleased with the discovery. Hence, the most exaggerated narrations are not always the most entertaining, and we derive most pleasure from hearing or reading those stories where improbabilities are unexpectedly brought within the range of possibility, or if beyond it, the fact is ingeniously concealed by possible concomitants. Thus, Munchausen’s descent from the moon by a rope of cut straw is not half so pleasant a story as the firing his gun by sparks drawn from his eye with his fists. So, were you to tell an audience that you saw a mole move a mountain no one would be pleased or surprised, as the mind would have no effort to pronounce it entirely false; but if you should say you saw a fly trained to play a tune by buzzing his wings from the top to the bottom of a wine glass, the minds of your hearers would be pleasantly occupied for a while in eliminating the true from the false, and your story would be applauded.
Ned, to-day, in his story, erred by placing his relations too far apart. A spider and an elephant! There is no exercise of ingenuity in detecting the falsity of the statement, and the story, from its very improbability, is almost out of the range of competition for the prize. Frank has so mixed his that I scarcely know how to render an opinion in regard to it. The impossible parts are utterly so, and the possible are so easily probable we are not surprised. To Ben, then, I award the prize, as having produced the most entertaining story, exciting pleasant surprise in each development, and discovering possibilities in the most unthought of relations.”