One afternoon he was officiating at a match between Georgetown, which, as everybody knows, is a Catholic institution, and a team representing a Southern university. In an interval one of the Southern players limped up to Maxwell.
“Mr. Referee,” he said, “I want to make a protest. There’s one of those Georgetown men that seems to have a private grudge against me. Every time we two get in a scrimmage together he bites me. Yes, sir, he just hauls off and bites me. I don’t want to start any rough house stuff, but I’m getting good and tired of having that big Irishman biting on me. What had I better do?”
“I should advise,” said Maxwell, “that you play him only on Fridays.”
§ 79 An Echo from 1865
I rather guess they have been telling this one ever since the War between the States. Indeed, for all I know to the contrary it may date back as far as the first and second Punic wars. For a good story never really dies. It merely goes into retirement for a season or a decade or a century and rises up again when occasion suits, with its youth miraculously restored.
The narrative runs that in the last days of the war a ragged, wornout, hungry, half-crippled, half-dead Confederate straggler was limping along a Virginia highway striving to catch up with his command. Where there was a puddle in the ruts he stopped to bathe his bruised and bleeding feet. As he sat at the roadside dabbling his swollen toes in the water a Union skirmisher, well fed and lusty, stepped from behind a tree with his musket raised to his shoulder and yelled out exultantly:
“Now I got you!”
“Yas,” drawled the Southerner, “an’ a hell of a git you got!”
§ 80 There’d Be a Popular Uprising
The revivalist was the mouthpiece of a new cult. In his interpretations of the Scriptures he saw no possible hope for any member of the human family who refused to accept his particular brand of religion.