“Oh, that’s poetic license!”
“May I be Shakespearean a moment?” asked Lord Bacon.
“You cannot, even for a moment,” declared the Bard of Avon. “I allow no infringements on my copyright.”
“Don’t get excited,” returned milord. “All shades look alike to me and it would be a poor expert who couldn’t prove you were somebody else by your signature. Besides, who is Shakespeare anyway? The sweets of notoriety are not for you. You have never been interviewed, your picture does not figure in any patent-medicine advertisement, and no phonograph record repeats your blankety-blank verse without variation. Why, Bill, in these days you couldn’t pass an examination in Shakespeare without the assistance of half a dozen books of notes, a glossary, and five professors to tell you what you meant. To be the writer of a coon song is to be famous; to pen ‘Hamlet’ is simply to provide food for bookworms.”
“Let’s arbitrate,” suggested Æsop.
“None of your fables for mine,” said Shakespeare, slangily. “You would designate two dogs; I would select two cats; they would call in a fox for the odd. The arbitrators would come to talk it over. I would smile and rub the cats’ fur the right way. You would fill the dogs with porterhouse steak rare, broiled till the air for miles around would be rich with the odor, and served with butter gravy. I would cram the cats with liver and cream. You would turn the fox loose in the chicken yard and give him the run of the goose pasture. Oh, I know how arbitrations are run, whether they be conducted by cats or by capital!”
“This is no occasion for petty jealousies,” remonstrated Izaak Walton. “I would rather cull flowers just now from the banks of a trout stream than train for a prize fight. Hip! hip! hip! for the Hippodrome! Have you forgotten that you are going to exchange Hades for New York, where you can pull the sky over you for cover, use the moon in place of an incandescent light, the four points of the compass for bed posts and a morning shower for an alarm clock? We are going to find rest near the heart of Nature, where bookmakers are unknown and politicians have no higher ambition than to sit on a rail fence and dream of whittling down the salaries of the school teachers when they get a place on the board of education.”
“Boss” Tweed smiled for the first time since his election as janitor of the hall of fame.
“Noah may have a map of the road to the millennium,” he said, “but he has gotten side-tracked if he thinks New York is one of the stations along that route!”
THE MAN WITH THE MEGAPHONE.