“I asked Mother Eve about her childhood the other day, and she seemed lamentably ignorant of her younger days.”
“If Adam hadn’t gone to sleep there would have been no women in the world,” I put in. Having a reputation as a confirmed misogynist, I felt that I must live up to it whenever occasion offered.
“The queer part of it,” mused Cain, “is that he never woke up when the surgical operation was being performed and that, too, in the days when anæsthetics kept themselves hid in unpressed poppy pods. Catch a woman letting anybody take a rib from her without her knowing it!”
“If woman is so wide-awake, how was it that Eve lost her certificate of character by getting drunk on apple cider?”
“With the permission of Darwin and the rest, I will give you a revised version of the creation by the first higher critic—Cain, son of Adam and Eve:
“In the beginning chaos created Cosmos.
“And Cosmos continued to apply cosmetics to the face of the Globe and—Darwin was too busy to take notice.
“And it came to pass that without Darwin to hold the universe in check, revolution arose; from revolution came evolution and evolution evolved into molecules which came into contact with protoplasm and by natural selection the latter survived and became a plastic cell which in turn threw a fit and degenerated into the primordial germ, which is the germ of truth. This selection was so unnatural that it did not survive protogene and to swallow this up there came an ocean of eocene.
“And it came to pass that in the aeon of eocene there was enwombed in the chaotic chasm, later called Siam, a Simiad who was to show his relationship to the octopus by embracing the earth. And this Simiad grew according to his own fancy and—Darwin still slumbered.
“And the merry morn tagged the shadows of night and became ‘it’. The number of the evening hours was eleven and of the day was twelve. Eleven and twelve make twenty-three—that’s the sum that spells ‘skidoo’. And the night departed in haste.