“Boswell, what have I said on that subject,” asked Dr. Johnson. “I hate to repeat myself, but having said everything that’s worth saying, it’s up to Boswell.”
“If every Johnson had his Boswell, Washington might come into his own,” said that general. “But I suppose I ought to be satisfied, for am I not the father of my country?”
“You seem to think you are the father of the whole world,” snapped Adam, who was jealous of the American. “That distinction belonged to me when your country was still shrouded in the mists of the unknown. I have talked with all the historians and as far as I can learn, you are the father of no one and certainly not of your country. You aren’t even a Pilgrim Father and if all Americans followed in the footsteps of their first president, vital statistics would be less satisfactory to Roosevelt than they are. Now, when I was a boy—”
“Listen to the oldest inhabitant,” jeered Washington. “Adam recalls his boyhood days with extraordinary vividness for a man who never had any.”
“You may have been first at banquets and first in the hearts of your countrymen,” continued Adam, “but you weren’t first in the heart of your wife. As you married a widow, some man must have been ahead of you there.”
“Then there’s that old cherry tree fable which ought to have been uprooted from the school-books long ago,” said Ananias, who also had an axe to grind. “It’s unfortunate for the perpetuation of truthfulness that the only offspring of the father of his country is a chestnutty cherry tree, with a few chips lying on the ground.”
Baron Munchausen gave George Washington a resounding slap on the back.
“You ought to give up being a pattern of veracity and take to writing fiction,” he said. “An historical novel by General Washington would be the Great American Novel which publishers have announced for the last hundred years and which many authors have thought themselves bald-headed trying to produce.”
“I understand that after the ball game, Tennyson will write ‘The Charge of the Eleven.’”
“Isn’t he wrong in his numeral? Baseball is a nine, which is somewhat of a discrepancy.”