Funny stories are endurable, in moderation, if only the teller is perfectly frank in introducing them for their own sake and not pretending that they have any conceivable relationship to the endowment fund of Wellesley College, or the present condition of the silk business in America. To such length has hypocrisy gone, that there is now at large and dining out, a gentleman who makes a practice of kicking the leg of the table and then remarking, "Doesn't that sound like a cannon?—Speaking of cannon, that reminds me——"
Another young man of our own acquaintance has been using the same anecdote for all sorts of occasions for the last four years. His story concerns an American soldier who drove a four-mule team past the first line trench in the darkness and started rumbling along an old road that led across no-man's-land. He had gone a few yards when a doughboy jumped up out of a listening post and began to signal to him. "What's the matter?" shouted the driver.
"Shush! Shush!" hissed the outpost with great terror and intensity. "You're driving right toward the German lines. For Heaven's sake go back and don't speak above a whisper."
"Whisper, Hell!" roared the driver. "I've got to turn four mules around."
It may be that there actually was such an outpost and such a driver, but neither had any intention of acting as a perpetual symbol and yet we know positively that this particular story has been introduced as an argument for buying another Liberty Bond of the fourth issue; as a justification for the vehemence of the American novelists of the younger generation; and as a reason for the tendency to overstatement in the dramatic and literary criticism of New York newspapers. We are also under the impression that it was used in a debate concerning the propriety of a motion picture censorship in New York state.
Indeed the speaker whom we have in mind never failed to use the mule story, no matter what the nature of the occasion, unless he substituted the one about the man who wanted to go to Seville. He was a farmer, this man, and he lived some few miles away from Seville in a little ramshackle farm house. It had been his ambition of a lifetime to go to Seville and upon one particular morning he came out of the house carrying a suitcase.
"Where are you going?" asked his wife.
"To Seville," replied the farmer.
His wife was a very pious woman and she added by way of correction, "You mean, God willing."
"No," objected the farmer, dogmatically, "I mean I'm going to Seville."