I don’t say that the sun and I are great friends. I have too much respect for my courteous readers (including those who get their reading for nothing, by borrowing this book instead of buying it) to permit myself the slightest and most harmless of falsehoods where they are concerned. I am not a friend of the sun’s, because I do not esteem him. That way he has of shining indiscriminately on all,—of working in partnership with everybody, from the photographer who forges bank-notes, to the laundress and the plasterer, seems to me to show a lamentable want of dignity in the Prime Minister of Nature. Besides, I remember that, many years ago, he was kept under arrest for twelve hours by a gendarme of antiquity, Captain Joshua, who must have had his reasons for taking so momentous a step.
Perhaps he was set at liberty again, because no grounds could be discovered for taking proceedings; but, at the same time, entirely respectable people do not, as a rule, get arrested for nothing!
However, the sun and I live so very far apart from one another, that I cannot say I see the necessity of breaking with him altogether. Every year, about the middle of spring, I take a run down to the Ardenza, stop on the sea-shore, pass respectfully in front of the villas and palaces of the neighbourhood, and return home with an easy conscience, and the feeling of having left my card at summer’s door. So that, later in the season, when I meet the July sun, a sun which is quite Livornese, a municipal sun (the Corporation are extremely proud of it), we greet each other like old acquaintances!...
The July sun is a great benefactor to the Livornese. If gratitude were still the fashion, he ought to be made syndic of the city, and his painted image ought to figure on the municipal shield, instead of the present device of the two-towered fortress in the midst of the sea.
P. C. Ferrigni.
WHEN IT RAINS.
Suppose for a moment—and note, that when a man says suppose, he is perfectly sure of his ground, and woe be to any who contradicts him—suppose, then, for one moment, that man is really a rational animal.
The bizarre originality of being rational, which constitutes the last term of the definition, does not prejudice the wisely general character of the first term, which is this: Man is an animal.
Now, I ask, what use is reason to a man, if it does not make him take an umbrella when it rains? It is all very well for you to think yourself superior to all other created beasts,—to be proud of your learning, your science, your experience, your laws, your noble blood, or your ample income;—if you find yourself out in the rain without an umbrella, you will always be the most contemptible figure in creation.
Let us be just;—humanity is not lovely when seen through the falling drops of rain, by the cold, dull light of a sunless day, under a dull, leaden, low, foggy sky, resting like a cover on the circle of the horizon. All men wear faces of portentous length; one can see that they bear an undying grudge against meteorologic science, on account of that phenomenon of aqueous infiltration which is so deadly to new hats and old boots. They go their ways dripping along the rows of houses, under the deluges from the water-pipes, picking their way between the puddles, with countenances cloudier than the skies, muttering the devil’s litanies between their teeth with a muffled murmur like the gurgling of a boiling saucepan. At every corner, such accidents as making too close an acquaintance with the ribs of an umbrella coming the other way, getting splashed with liquid mud by a passing horse, or spoiling the freshness of a new pair of trousers by means of an overflowing gutter, provoke a glance which, if looks could kill, would be downright murder,—a contraction of the facial muscles which recalls the grin of the ancestral ape in a bad temper, and an explosion of sotto voce ejaculations, expressing a pious desire to see one’s neighbours in general attached to the muzzle of a breech-loading mitrailleuse in full activity.