And wherefore not? Who but these musty ones cares to know that the moon revolves around the earth once in every twenty-eight days, and so many odd hours and minutes. Satisfied are we to expect her coming each fourth week, and to count the hours and minutes of secondary importance.
If, gentle reader, on some delicious summer night, when the full moon is shining down upon the smiling earth, flooding it with glorious light, gilding the crests of the lake waves, silvering the leaves of the forest, casting a varying, many-colored mantle, sown with pearls, over the fields of waving grain, nodding, rustling, whispering to the coquettish zephyr like a group of silk-clad dames, if, “on such a night as this,” you care to remember that the fleecy clouds the moon seems to kiss, are nearer to you by some 239,999 miles, why, then, you are no lunatic, and not the man or woman we took you to be. Pray read no further; you are too wise to waste time on such nonsense. Light your greasy solar lamp. Shut your blinds. Draw your curtains. Take down some useful book, and compose yourself for a nap. Light reading, especially of moonlight, is not your vocation.
These stupid savans have broached some queer theories about our favorite, though, dear reader. Our favorite, we say, for we know that by this time we have shaken ourselves rid of all people who remain sensible of a moonlight night. They—the philosophers, or some of them—malign her terribly—they abuse her. Like old-fashioned doctors, in a case of fever, they sturdily refuse to allow her a drop of water; and cruel as Surajah Dowlah, to the English prisoners at Calcutta, assign her a place void of an atmosphere. Truly an arid conceit.
Can it be that, like a leaky cistern, the moon holds no water? Let us consider a moment.
If this be true, then certainly there can be no sea-views or sea-bathing in the moon. No cataracts, no cascades, no mineral springs. Of course, no watering-places and summer hotels. Flirtations are, of necessity, scarce, we must suppose; especially when we consider that the moon itself has no moon; that midshipmen are found only in maritime states, and that a fascinating foreigner must always come from beyond a sea. Runaway matches are things of rare occurrence, and there must be fewer provocations to matrimony generally than in this world. Old maids must, of course, be plentiful, though they can have no tears to shed over disappointed hopes. There may come a time when there will be only the Man in the Moon.
Turtles and soft-shelled crabs, oysters and canvas-back ducks cannot thrive in such a place. The race of aldermen must be extinct; and yet these same wiseacres of astronomers claim to have discovered cities in the moon! Cities without aldermen or oyster-saloons! What absurdity!
But, then, if this theory be correct, the country cannot be cursed with cotton manufactories, steam-engines, or foundries. The agitation of the tariff question must be dry business. The climate cannot be adapted to slave labor. The Lunars must be democrats to a man.
They drive, we presume, in open carriages. Umbrellas, over-shoes, bathing-tubs, wash-hand-basins, teapots, mops, lather-brushes, squirt-guns, and a variety of such matters, too numerous to mention, familiar and useful to us of the earth, are never enumerated in the catalogue of a Lunarian auctioneer. The ladies never clean house there. New coats and dazzling beavers are safe from the pelting of the pitiless shower, rained down from third-story windows by awkward Irish girls. How do they mix their grog? They take their spirits neat, we presume, the only neat thing they can take—fourth proof, every drop; and this is probably the origin of the term, taking a lunar, to which seamen are so much addicted. Fever-and-ague must be unknown in the moon. Dropsy an unheard of disease. Drowning a casualty never recorded in the bills of mortality. Damp sheets are things not to be dreaded; and so with a thousand ills with which water floods us of the earth. Skating cannot be a fashionable amusement, and natatory exercises, such as are practiced at Cape May, would, we presume, be unutterably shocking to the withered old maids of the chaste planet. Moreover, Priesnitz must regard the moon as a place singularly unwholesome, and yet quite unfit for the establishment of a hydropathic hospital, and it must present a most unpromising field of labor to the American Baptist Board of Foreign Missions.
Howbeit, we don’t believe all that we hear of the want of water in the moon. Tender-hearted reader, dry your eyes; we are confident that we used to hear our grandfather talk of a wet moon. To his opinion we seriously incline.
But whether the moon be a desert or an ocean, what care we? When she shines the dew falls on us. Let that suffice.