"I have," said Montgomery, turning back his sleeve, and displaying a very broad and ugly scar. "I didn't get this for nothing, for the brave fellow who made me a present of it I repaid with a gash across the skull!"
The Frenchman bent down his head, parted his hair with his hands, and said:
"You did: you may look at the receipt."
The next moment they were in each other's arms.
Now this story seems a little problematical; and yet it is vouched for on what ought to be considered reliable authority. In short, it is true in every respect.
Some ambitious juvenile once sung, with an aspiration "peculiar to our institutions,"
"I wish I was the President
Of these United States,
I never would do nothing
But swing on all the gates."
He little knew the miseries, the ennui, the mental dyspepsia, which afflicts the wretch who has nothing to do. One of these unhappy mortals it is, who says, in the bitterness of his spirit:
"Sir, I have no books, and no internal resources. I can not draw, and if I could, there's nothing that I want to sketch. I don't play the flute, and if I did there's nobody that I should like to have listen to me. I never wrote a tragedy, but I think I am in that state of mind in which tragedies are written. Any thing lighter is out of the question. I whistle four hours a day, yawn five, smoke six, and sleep the rest of the twenty-four, with a running accompaniment of swearing to all these occupations except the last, and I'm not quite sure that I don't sometimes swear in my dreams.