“No wonder,” said Tushmaker, “he raised his right leg.”
The jury thought so, too, but they found the roots much decayed; and five surgeons swearing that mortification would have ensued in a few months, Tushmaker was cleared on a verdict of “justifiable homicide.”
He was a little shy of that instrument for some time afterward; but one day an old lady, feeble and flaccid, came in to have a tooth drawn, and thinking it would come out very easy, Tushmaker concluded, just by way of variety, to try the machine. He did so, and at the first turn drew the old lady’s skeleton completely and entirely from her body, leaving her a mass of quivering jelly in her chair! Tushmaker took her home in a pillow-case.
The woman lived seven years after that, and they called her the “India-Rubber Woman.” She had suffered terribly with the rheumatism, but after this occurrence never had a pain in her bones. The dentist kept them in a glass case. After this, the machine was sold to the contractor of the Boston Custom-House, and it was found that a child of three years of age could, by a single turn of the screw, raise a stone weighing twenty-three tons. Smaller ones were made on the same principle and sold to the keepers of hotels and restaurants. They were used for boning turkeys. There is no moral to this story whatever, and it is possible that the circumstances may have become slightly exaggerated. Of course, there can be no doubt of the truth of the main incidents.
Bob Ingersoll relates an anecdote of a Hebrew who went into a restaurant to get his dinner. The devil of temptation whispered in his ear, “Bacon.” He knew if there was anything that made Jehovah real white mad, it was to see anybody eating bacon; but he thought, “Maybe He is too busy watching sparrows and counting hairs to notice me,” and so he took a slice. The weather was delightful when he went into the restaurant, but when he came out the sky was overcast, the lightning leaped from cloud to cloud, the earth trembled, and it was dark. He went back into the restaurant, trembling with fear, and, leaning over the counter, said to the clerk, “My God, did you ever hear such a fuss about a little piece of bacon!”
BRET HARTE
THE SOCIETY UPON THE STANISLAUS
I reside at Table Mountain, and my name is Truthful James;