His favorite contribution to the entertainment when the children sat around like little wooden puppets, half-frightened to death by the Moloch presiding over them, was the demand, accompanied by an indulgent toe-tapping: “Who can tell a funny story or sing a funny song?” But ten-year-olds who wanted to play “Copenhagen” or “Drop the Pillow” were rather deficient in the matter of volunteering comic anecdotes or rendering humorous ballads. And whereas Johnathan’s repertoire was rather limited along those lines also, the party was not all it might have been.
That night in bed an exasperated wife “started in her same old tirade” and ended her excoriation by kicking her loving husband in the shins. Johnathan exhibited the black and blue spot to Nathan in the week ensuing to prove to the son that his father had married a virago. There never was another party.
And now Nathan, the offspring of a God-fearing male and an unholy female, was upsetting all his father’s unassailable calculations and becoming known throughout our part of New England as a celebrity. Just what should Johnathan do about it? Not being in a position to do much of anything about it, the father concluded it best to pursue a policy of watchful waiting.
So matters drifted—with Nathan performing rather indefinite tasks in the tannery, the vague nature of which bothered his father not a little bit, but which nevertheless brought in six dollars a week—until the disturbing young coot “up and wrote ‘The Pagans.’”
III
To speak truthfully, our prune-and-prism community received a shock. Sam Hod, proprietor of the Telegraph, undoubtedly wanted to administer a shock. Anyhow, he not only printed what the precocious rhymster had composed but called attention to its moral excellence in his editorial column that night.
“THE PAGANS
“We bought two slaves on the Block of Life,
Out-crying the bidders all;
Two slaves as rare as the maids of Punt,