Nature and Human Nature

by Thomas Chandler Haliburton

“What do you think of the bow now?” said he in triumph. “Come, Captain, do you and Mr Slick try your luck, and see what sort of shots you can make.” The captain, who was an experienced hand with the gun, after a few attempts to ascertain the power and practice necessary, made capital play with the bow, and his muscular arm rendered easy to him that which required of me the utmost exertion of my strength. Jessie and her sister now stept forward, and measuring off a shorter distance, took their stations. Their shooting, in which they were quite at home, was truly wonderful. Instead of using the bow as we did, so as to bring the arrow in a line with the eye, they held it lower down, in a way to return the elbow to the right side, much in the same manner that a skilful sportsman shoots from the hip. It seemed to be no sort of exertion whatever to them, and every arrow was lodged in the inner circle. It seemed to awaken them to a new existence, and in their excitement I observed they used their mother tongue.

“Beg your pardon, Sir,” said Jackson to the doctor, putting his hand to his forehead, “if our sharp-shooters in Spain ad ad bows like yours, in their scrimmages with the French light troops, they would ave done more service and made less noise about it than they did.” And saluting me in the same manner, he said in an under-tone,

“If I ad ad one of them at Badajoz, Sir, I think I’d a put a pen in that trooper’s mouth to write the account of the way he lost his elmet. A shower of them, Sir, among a troop of cavalry would have sent riders flying, and horses kicking, as bad as a shower of grape. There is no danger of shooting your fingers off with them, Sir, or firing away your ramrod. No, there ain’t, is there, Sir?”

“Tom, do’ee put on your hat now, that’s a good soul,” said his attentive wife, who had followed him out a third time to remind him of his danger. “Oh, Sir,” said she, again addressing me, “what signifies a armless thing like an harrow; that’s nothin but a little wooden rod to the stroke of the sun, as they calls it. See what a dreadful cut it’s given him.”

Tom looked very impatient at this, but curbed in his vexation, and said “Thankee, Betty,” though his face expressed anything but thanks. “Thankee, Betty. There, the doctor is calling you. She is as good a creature, Sir, as ever lived,” he continued; “and has seen a deal of service in her day. But she bothers me to death about that stroke of the sun. Sometimes I think I’ll tell her all about it; but I don’t like to demean myself to her. She wouldn’t think nothin’ of me, Sir, if she thought I could have been floored that way; and women, when they begin to cry, throw up sometime what’s disagreeable. They ain’t safe. She would perhaps have heaved up in my face that that dragoon had slapped my chops for me, with his elmet. I am blowed, Sir, if I can take a glass of grog out of my canteen, but she says, ‘Tom, mind that stroke of the sun.’ And when I ave a big D marked agin my name in the pension book, she’ll swear, to her dying day, I was killed by that are stroke.”

“Why don’t you put it on then,” I said, “just to please her.”

“Well, Sir, if I was at head-quarters, or even at han hout-post, where there was a detachment, I would put it hon; because it wouldn’t seem decent to go bare-headed. But Lord bless you, Sir, what’s the use of a hat in the woods, where there is no one to see you?”

Poor fellow, he didn’t know what a touch of human nature there was in that expression, “what’s the use of a hat in the woods, where there is no one to see you?”

The same idea, though differently expressed, occurs to so many. “Yes,” said I to myself, “put on your hat for your wife’s sake, and your own too; for though you may fail to get a stroke of the sun, you may get not an inflammation of the brain, for there ain’t enough of it for that complaint to feed on, but rheumatism in the head; and that will cause a plaguey sight more pain than the dragoon’s helmet ever did, by a long chalk.”

But, to get back to my story, for the way I travel through a tale is like the way a child goes to school. He leaves the path to chase a butterfly, or to pick wild strawberries, or to run after his hat that has blown off, or to take a shy at a bird, or throw off his shoes, roll up his trousers, and wade about the edge of a pond to catch polly-wogs; but he gets to school in the eend, though somewhat of the latest, so I have got back at last, you see.