“That very next day.”
“Indeed,” said the lawyer; “then why did you wait nearly two years to begin taking steps to bring suit against him?”
“Well, suh,” stated the prospective plaintiff, “ontil that there Ringling Brothers’ circus showed yistiddy in Knoxville an’ I went down fur to see it I hadn’t never seen no hippopotamus.”
§ 16 As Translated into the English
One night at dinner in honor of a distinguished visiting Englishman I was reminded of a yarn. I told it, and it went very well. It had to do with a prospector in Oklahoma who, on a Saturday night, bought a quart of moonshine whiskey and took it to his lonely cabin, anticipating a pleasant Sunday. But as he crossed the threshold he stumbled and fell, dropping his precious burden and smashing the bottle, so that its contents were wasted upon the floor. Depressed by his misfortune, the unfortunate man went to bed. As he lay there, a mangy, furtive, half-grown rat with one ear and part of a tail, emerged timorously from a hole in the baseboard, sat up, sniffed the laden air and then, darting swiftly to where the liquor made a puddle in a depression of the planking, ran out its tiny pink tongue, took one quick sip of the stuff and fled in sudden panic to its retreat. But it didn’t stay; shortly it again appeared, and now a student of rats would have discerned that a transition had taken place in the spirits of this particular rat. Suddenly it had grown cocky, debonair, almost reckless. It traveled deliberately back to the liquor and imbibed again. Seemingly satisfied it started for home but, changing its mind, it returned and partook a third time of the refreshment. Immediately then its fur stood on end, its eyes burned red, like pigeon-blood rubies, and straightening itself upon its hind legs it waved its forepaws in a gesture of defiance and shrilly cried out:
“Now, bring on that dad-blamed cat!”
No one seemed to enjoy my story more than did the guest of the evening. After the party broke up he made me tell it to him all over again. I could read from his expression that he was trying to memorize it. In fact, he confessed to me that he expected to use it when he got home as a typical example of American humor.
Six months later I was in London. I attended a dinner. My English friend was the toastmaster. Perhaps my presence recalled to him the anecdote he had so liked. At any rate, he undertook to repeat it.
His version ran for perhaps twenty minutes. He entered into a full exposition of the potency of the illicit distillation known among the Yankees, he said, as “shining moon.” He went at length into the habits of rats, pointing out that inasmuch as rats customarily did not indulge in intoxicants a few drops of any liquor carrying high alcoholic content would be likely, for the time being at least, to alter the nature of almost any rat. At length he reached his point. It ran like this:
“And then, this little rodent, being now completely transformed by its repeated potations, reared bolt upright and, voicing the pot-valor of utter intoxication both in tone and manner, it cried out in a voice like thunder: