“Eggsactly,” said I.
Then began what the Doctor called a “battle of the spurs,”—I trying to “crow” over the Doctor, and he endeavoring to upset my “cackle-ations”; urging me meanwhile to “scratch away,” till at last I told him, if he made another pun on that “lay,” he would knock me off the roost.
“Oh, then,” said the Doctor, finally feathering his nest, “Sha’n’t I clear?!”
An equally fowl pun of the Doctor’s was perpetrated in cold blood, or rather in very cold water, down at Rockport, Massachusetts. Thither every summer season were wont to congregate, for their vacation, such celebrated clergymen as Starr King, Dr. Chapin, and others, mainly for the fine sea-bathing there. One season Dr. Chapin arrived at least a fortnight behind the rest; and, when they went down bathing together, the acclimated visitors pronounced the water to be “delightful,” “just right,” and so on.
“But isn’t it cold?” asked Dr. Chapin.
“Oh, no,” replied Starr King; “you have only to go down and up twice, and you are warm enough.”
“Ah, I see how it is,” said Dr. Chapin, who tried the experiment and came up half frozen; “you are warm after down and up twice? Why, that’s a pair o’ ducks!”
Fowls naturally suggest the market, and this brings to mind a neighbor of mine in New York who keeps two things,—a boarding-house, and “bad hours.” His wife justly suspected him of gambling; but he generally managed to get in before midnight, and always had money enough in his pocket to go to market with in the morning. On one occasion, however, after gambling all night, he did not come home till six o’clock in the morning, when, after a sound scolding from his wife for staying out all night and “gambling,” as she insisted, he was sent to market to get something for breakfast. Returning, he was again berated by his wife for gambling, he protesting all the while that he had been “spending the night with a sick friend.”
His wife might have believed him, if he had not sat down at the head of the table, half asleep, and solemnly passed the bread to the nearest boarder with the exclamation,—
“Cut!”