A House-Boat on the Styx Part 13

"Shall I send for a physician?" put in Boswell, looking anxiously at his chief, the situation was so extraordinary.

Solomon and Carlyle giggled; and the Doctor having politely requested Boswell to go to a warmer section of the country, Shem resumed.

"I caught him in the act of swallowing five cows and Ham's favorite trotter, sulky and all."

Baron Munchausen rose up and left the room.

"If they're going to lie I'm going to get out," he said, as he pa.s.sed through the room.

"What became of Fido?" asked Boswell.

"The sulky killed him," returned Shem, innocently. "He couldn't digest the wheels."

Noah looked approvingly at his son, and, turning to Barnum, observed, quietly:

"What he says is true, and I will go further and say that it is my belief that you would have found the show business impossible if I had taken that sort of creature aboard. You'd have got mightily discouraged after your Antediluvians had chewed up a few dozen steam calliopes, and eaten every other able-bodied exhibit you had managed to secure. I'd have tried to save a couple of Discosaurians if I hadn't supposed they were able to take care of themselves. A combination of sea-serpent and dragon, with a neck twenty-two feet long, it seemed to me, ought to have been able to ride out any storm or fall of rain; but there I was wrong, and I am free to admit my error. It never occurred to me that the sea- serpents were in any danger, so I let them alone, with the result that I never saw but one other, and he was only an illusion due to that unhappy use of stimulants to which, with shocking bad taste, you have chosen to refer."

"I didn't mean to call up unpleasant memories," said Barnum. "I never believed you got half-seas over, anyhow; but, to return to our muttons, why didn't you hand down a few varieties of the Therium family to posterity? There were the Dinotherium and the Megatherium, either one of which would have knocked spots out of any leopard that ever was made, and along side of which even my woolly horse would have paled into insignificance. That's what I can't understand in your selections; with Megatheriums to burn, why save leopards and panthers and other such every- day creatures?"

"What kind of a boat do you suppose I had?" cried Noah. "Do you imagine for a moment that she was four miles on the water-line, with a mile and three-quarters beam? If I'd had a pair of Dinotheriums in the stern of that Ark, she'd have tipped up fore and aft, until she'd have looked like a telegraph-pole in the water, and if I'd put 'em amids.h.i.+ps they'd have had to be wedged in so tightly they couldn't move to keep the vessel trim. I didn't go to sea, my friend, for the purpose of being tipped over in mid-ocean every time one of my cargo wanted to s.h.i.+ft his weight from one leg to the other."

"It was bad enough with the elephants, wasn't it, papa?" said Shem.

"Yes, indeed, my son," returned the patriarch. "It was bad enough with the elephants. We had to s.h.i.+ft our ballast half a dozen times a day to keep the boat from travelling on her beam ends, the elephants moved about so much; and when we came to the question of provender, it took up about nine-tenths of our hold to store hay and peanuts enough to keep them alive and good-tempered. On the whole, I think it's rather late in the day, considering the trouble I took to save anything but myself and my family, to be criticised as I now am. You ought to be much obliged to me for saving any animals at all. Most people in my position would have built a yacht for themselves and family, and let everything else slide."

"That is quite true," observed Raleigh, with a pacificatory nod at Noah.

"You were eminently unselfish, and while, with Mr. Barnum, I exceedingly regret that the Saurians and Therii and other tribes were left on the pier when you sailed, I nevertheless think that you showed most excellent judgment at the time."

"He was the only man who had any at all, for that matter," suggested Shem, "and it required all his courage to show it. Everybody was guying him. Sinners stood around the yard all day and every day, criticising the model; one scoffer pretended he thought her a ca.n.a.l-boat, and asked how deep the flood was likely to be on the tow-path, and whether we intended to use mules in shallow water and giraffes in deep; another asked what time allowance we expected to get in a fifteen-mile run, and hinted that a year and two months per mile struck him as being the proper thing--"

"It was far from pleasant," said Noah, tapping his fingers together reflectively. "I don't want to go through it again, and if, as Raleigh suggests, history is likely to repeat herself, I'll sublet the contract to Barnum here, and let him get the chaff."

"It was all right in the end, though, dad," said Shem. "We had the great laugh on 'hoi polloi' the second day out."

"We did, indeed," said Noah. "When we told 'em we only carried first- cla.s.s pa.s.sengers and had no room for emigrants, they began to see that the Ark wasn't such an old tub, after all; and a good ninety per cent. of them would have given ten dollars for a little of that time allowance they'd been talking to us about for several centuries."

Noah lapsed into a musing silence, and Barnum rose to leave.

"I still wish you'd saved a Discosaurus," he said. "A creature with a neck twenty-two feet long would have been a gold mine to me. He could have been trained to stand in the ring, and by stretching out his neck bite the little boys who sneak in under the tent and occupy seats on the top row."

"Well, for your sake," said Noah, with a smile, "I'm very sorry; but for my own, I'm quite satisfied with the general results."

And they all agreed that the patriarch had every reason to be pleased with himself.

CHAPTER XII: THE HOUSE-BOAT DISAPPEARS

Queen Elizabeth, attended by Ophelia and Xanthippe, was walking along the river-bank. It was a beautiful autumn day, although, owing to certain climatic peculiarities of Hades, it seemed more like midsummer. The mercury in the club thermometer was nervously clicking against the top of the crystal tube, and poor Cerberus was having all he could do with his three mouths snapping up the pestiferous little shades of by-gone gnats that seemed to take an almost unholy pleasure in alighting upon his various noses and ears.

Ophelia was doing most of the talking.

"I am sure I have never wished to ride one of them," she said, positively. "In the first place, I do not see where the pleasure of it comes in, and, in the second, it seems to me as if skirts must be dangerous. If they should catch in one of the pedals, where would I be?"

"In the hospital shortly, methinks," said Queen Elizabeth.

"Well, I shouldn't wear skirts," snapped Xanthippe. "If a man's wife can't borrow some of her husband's clothing to reduce her peril to a minimum, what is the use of having a husband? When I take to the bicycle, which, in spite of all Socrates can say, I fully intend to do, I shall have a man's wheel, and I shall wear Socrates' old dress-clothes.

If Hades doesn't like it, Hades may suffer."

"I don't see how Socrates' clothes will help you," observed Ophelia. "He wore skirts himself, just like all the other old Greeks. His toga would be quite as apt to catch in the gear as your skirts."

Xanthippe looked puzzled for a moment. It was evident that she had not thought of the point which Ophelia had brought up--strong-minded ladies of her kind are apt sometimes to overlook important links in such chains of evidence as they feel called upon to use in binding themselves to their rights.

"The women of your day were relieved of that dress problem, at any rate,"

laughed Queen Elizabeth.

"The women of my day," retorted Xanthippe, "in matters of dress were the equals of their husbands--in my family particularly; now they have lost their rights, and are made to confine themselves still to garments like those of yore, while man has arrogated to himself the sole and exclusive use of sane habiliments. However, that is apart from the question. I was saying that I shall have a man's wheel, and shall wear Socrates' old dress-clothes to ride it in, if Socrates has to go out and buy an old dress-suit for the purpose."

The Queen arched her brows and looked inquiringly at Xanthippe for a moment.

"A magnificent old maid was lost to the world when you married," she said. "Feeling as you do about men, my dear Xanthippe, I don't see why you ever took a husband."

"Humph!" retorted Xanthippe. "Of course you don't. You didn't need a husband. You were born with something to govern. I wasn't."

"How about your temper?" suggested Ophelia, meekly.

Xanthippe sniffed frigidly at this remark.

"I never should have gone crazy over a man if I'd remained unmarried forty thousand years," she retorted, severely. "I married Socrates because I loved him and admired his sculpture; but when he gave up sculpture and became a thinker he simply tried me beyond all endurance, he was so thoughtless, with the result that, having ventured once or twice to show my natural resentment, I have been handed down to posterity as a shrew. I've never complained, and I don't complain now; but when a woman is married to a philosopher who is so taken up with his studies that when he rises in the morning he doesn't look what he is doing, and goes off to his business in his wife's clothes, I think she is ent.i.tled to a certain amount of sympathy."

"And yet you wish to wear his," persisted Ophelia.

"Turn about is fair-play," said Xanthippe. "I've suffered so much on his account that on the principle of averages he deserves to have a little drop of bitters in his nectar."

"You are simply the victim of man's deceit," said Elizabeth, wis.h.i.+ng to mollify the now angry Xanthippe, who was on the verge of tears. "I understood men, fortunately, and so never married. I knew my father, and even if I hadn't been a wise enough child to know him, I should not have wed, because he married enough to last one family for several years."

"You must have had a hard time refusing all those lovely men, though,"

sighed Ophelia. "Of course, Sir Walter wasn't as handsome as my dear Hamlet, but he was very fetching."

"I cannot deny that," said Elizabeth, "and I didn't really have the heart to say no when he asked me; but I did tell him that if he married me I should not become Mrs. Raleigh, but that he should become King Elizabeth.

He fled to Virginia on the next steamer. My diplomacy rid me of a very unpleasant duty."

Chatting thus, the three famous spirits pa.s.sed slowly along the path until they came to the sheltered nook in which the house-boat lay at anchor.

"There's a case in point," said Xanthippe, as the house-boat loomed up before them. "All that luxury is for men; we women are not permitted to cross the gangplank. Our husbands and brothers and friends go there; the door closes on them, and they are as completely lost to us as though they never existed. We don't know what goes on in there. Socrates tells me that their amus.e.m.e.nts are of a most innocent nature, but how do I know what he means by that? Furthermore, it keeps him from home, while I have to stay at home and be entertained by my sons, whom the Encyclopaedia Britannica rightly calls dull and fatuous. In other words, club life for him, and dulness and fatuity for me."

"I think myself they're rather queer about letting women into that boat,"