Ah Ying had vanished. My door was still locked. It had all been a dream.
20.
No, my boy, I am not a candidate for the Presidency. This is no hook baited with the Chinese question. My object is merely to explain how you happen to have almond eyes. And if you don’t, you will understand that it is no fault of mine. The Welsh rarebit dream overcame the canned lobster vision,—that’s all. And having made this clear to you, as I hope, the time has come for me to say a few words about myself.
21.
When this book shall be, on your twenty-first birthday, laid beside your plate, at breakfast, by your thoughtful yellow father, I have no doubt that you will ask him, before even you begin to play your chopsticks, who wrote it. Now, what will it avail you for him to say that it was written by John Bouche Whacker, of the Richmond bar? Who was John Bouche Whacker? And that question means (at least since Mr. Charles Darwin wrote) who was the father and who the mother of J. B. W.; and the father and mother of this pair, and so on, and so on.
Now, I suppose that if I were to push the inquiry into prehistoric times, it would turn out that I was related to the entire Indo-Germanic race; but I shall content myself with indicating to you the three chief strains of blood which mingle in my veins, leaving to you, as you read chapter after chapter, this entertaining ethnological puzzle: Who spoke there? The Dane? or was it the Saxon? As to my Huguenot blood, there will be no hiding that. It will always be on fire, at the merest suggestion of a dogma of theology.
22.
I.—THE WHACKERS.
Every school-boy knows that, no sooner had their brave Queen Boadicea perished, than the Britons lost all stomach for fighting, and gave themselves up wholly to roast beef and plum pudding. Nor is it a secret, that when the Roman legions, to whom they had learned to look for protection, were withdrawn from the island, the Picts and Scots, grown weary of oatmeal, began to trouble the more sumptuous feasts of their neighbors. Remonstrances proving fruitless, they sent for the Jutes and the Saxons and the Angles (so called, respectively, from a valuable plant, a fine variety of wool, and a singular devotion to fishing). These sturdy braves crossed the water with their renowned battle-axes, as every school-boy knows. But what even our very learned young friend does not, perhaps, suspect, is that, along with Hengist and Horsa, there sailed, on this historical occasion, two twin brothers, named respectively Ethelbert and Alfred Whacker,—or Hvaecere, as they themselves would have spelled it, had they thought spelling, of any sort, worth their heroic while; which, haply, they did not. Now, from these twins I am lineally descended, as you shall see duly set forth in the Whacker Records, herewith transmitted. You will find in these family annals, too, some details not sufficiently elaborated, perhaps, in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and other authorities for this period. There is the barest allusion, for instance, to the brave death of Ethelbert Hvaecere, the eldest of the twins, which occurred as follows:
23.
When the English (for such recent historians have shown that they were, and not Germans, as they themselves, absurdly enough, supposed themselves to be)—when the English reached the Wall of Severus, they found that earth-work lined, for miles, with Picts and Scots. So, at least, they were named in Pinnock’s Goldsmith’s England, which I read at school. So, too, you will find they are called in the Whacker Records. Recent historical research, however, has demonstrated that the so-called Picts were, in reality, painted Scotchmen, while the alleged Scots were neither more nor less than Irishmen. And I must confess that when I re-read the Whacker Records by these modern lights, I was ashamed that I had not made this discovery myself.