English as She is Wrote Part 5

A farmer's daughter expresses herself in the following terms:

"Dear Miss:

"The energy of the race prompts me to a.s.sure you that my request is forbidden, the idea of which I awkwardly nourished, notwithstanding my propensity to reserve. Mr. T will be there--Let me with confidence a.s.sure you that him and brothers will be very happy to meet you and brothers. Us girls cannot go, for reasons. The attention of cows claims our a.s.sistance this evening.

"Unalterably yours."

The following is probably the longest sentence ever written, containing, as it does, eight hundred words:

"I propose, then, to give your readers some description of this old yet still strange and wild country, that has been settled for three hundred years, and is not yet inhabited--a land of s.h.i.+fting sand and deep mud--a land of n.o.ble rivers that rise in swamps and consist merely of chains of shallow lakes, some of them twenty miles long and two miles across, and only twelve feet deep--of wide, sandy plains, covered with solemn-sounding pines--of spots so barren that nothing can be made to grow upon them, and yet with a soil so fertile that if you tickle it with a hoe, it will laugh out an abundant harvest of sugar, cotton, and fruit--a land of oranges, lemons, pomegranates, pineapples, figs, and bananas; whose rivers teem with fish, its forests with game, and its very air with fowl; where everything will grow except apples and wheat; where everything can be found except ice; yet where the people, with a productive soil, a mild climate and beautiful nature, affording every table luxury, live on corn-grist, sweet potatoes, and mola.s.ses; where men possessing forty thousand head of cattle never saw a gla.s.s of milk in their lives, using the imported article when used at all, and then calling it consecrated milk; where the very effort to milk a cow would probably scare her to death, as well as frighten a whole neighborhood by the unheard of phenomenon; where cabbages grow on the tops of trees, and you may dig bread out of the ground; where, below the frost-line, the castor-oil plant becomes a large tree of several years' growth, and a pumpkin or bean-vine will take root from its trailing branches, and thus spread and live year after year; where cattle do not know what hay is, and refuse it when offered, so that the purchase of a yoke of oxen is not considered valid if the animals will not eat in a stable; and where in the mild winter, when the land gra.s.s is dried up, horses and cattle may be seen wading and swimming in the ponds and streams, plunging their heads under water gra.s.ses and moss; where many lakes have holes in the bottom and underground communication, so that they will sometimes shrink away to a mere cupful, leaving many square miles of surface uncovered, and then again fill up from below and spread out over their former area; where some of them have outlets in the ocean far from sh.o.r.e, bursting up a perpetual spring of fresh water in the very midst of the briny saltness of the sea; where in times of low water, during a long exhaustive dry season, men have gone under ground in one of these subterranean rivers, from lake to lake, a distance of eight miles; where the ground will sometimes sink and the cavity fill with water, until tall trees, that had stood and sunk upright, will have their topmost branches deeply covered; where rivers will disappear in the earth and rise again, thus forming natural bridges, some of them a mile in breadth; where, instead of spring, summer, autumn, and winter, there are two seasons only--eight months summer, and four months warm weather; where the winter is the dry season, and the summer almost a daily rain; where, in order to take a walk, you first wade through a light sand ankle deep and then get into a mud-puddle, and some of these mud-puddles cover a whole county; where no clay is found fit for brick-making, and people build houses without chimneys; where to make a living is so easy a task, that every one possesses the laziness of ten ordinary men, every one you wish to employ in labor says he is tired and would seem to have been born so; where ague would prevail if the people would take the trouble to shake; where a large orange-tree will bear several thousand oranges--leaves, buds, blossom, half-grown and full-grown fruit, all at once--and every twenty-five feet square of sand will sustain such a tree; where, in many parts, cold weather is an impossibility, and perpetual verdure reigns; where the Everglades are found, covering many large counties with water from one to six feet deep, with a bottom, mud covered, yet underneath solid and firm, from which gra.s.ses grow up to the surface--a sea of green, and with islands large and small scattered over the surface, covered with live oaks and dense vegetation; where alligators, or gators as they are called in Florida parlance, possess undoubted aboriginal rights of citizens.h.i.+p, and mosquitoes pay constant visits and are instructive and even penetrating in their attention to strangers."

An Irish paper contained this account of Mrs. Siddons's appearance:

"On Sunday, Mrs. Siddons, about whom all the world has been talking, exposed her beautiful, adamantine, soft, and lovely person, for the first time at Smock Alley Theatre in the bewitching, melting, and all tearful character of Isabella. From the repeated panegyrics of the impartial London newspapers, we were taught to expect the sight of a heavenly angel, but how were we supernaturally surprised into almost awful joy at beholding a mortal G.o.ddess! The house was crowded with hundreds more than it could hold, with thousands of admiring spectators who went away without a sight. This extraordinary phenomenon of tragic excellence! this star of Melpomene! this comet of the stage! this sun of the firmament of the Muses! this moon of blank verse! this queen and princess of tears! this Donellan of the poisoned dagger! this empress of pistol and dagger! this chaos of Shakespeare! this world of weeping clouds! this Juno commanding aspects! this Terpsich.o.r.e of the curtains and scenes! this Proserpine of fire and excitement! this Katterfelto of wonders! exceeded expectation, went beyond belief and soared above all the natural powers of description! She was nature itself! She was the most exquisite work of art! She was the very daisy, primrose, tuberose, sweet brier, furze blossom, gilliflower, wall flower, cauliflower, auricula, and rosemary! In short, she was the bouquet of Parna.s.sus! When expectations were so high, it was thought she would be injured by her appearance, but it was the audience who were injured: several fainted before the curtain drew up! When she came to the scene of parting with her wedding ring, ah! what a sight was there! the very fiddlers in the orchestra, albeit unused to melting mood, blubbered like hungry children crying for their bread and b.u.t.ter! and when the bell rang for music between the acts the tears ran from the ba.s.soon players' eyes in such plentiful showers that they choked the finger stops, and making a spout of the instrument poured in such torrents on the first fiddler's book that not seeing the overture was in two sharps, the leader of the band played it in one flat. But the sobs and sighs of the groaning audience and the noise of corks drawn from smelling bottles prevented the mistakes between sharps and flats being heard. One hundred and nine ladies fainted! forty-six went into fits! and ninety-five had strong hysterics. The world will scarcely credit the truth when they are told that fourteen children, five old men, one hundred tailors, and six common councilmen were actually drowned in the inundation of tears that flowed from the galleries, the slips, and the boxes, to increase the briny pond in the pit. The water was three feet deep. An Act of Parliament will certainly be pa.s.sed against her playing any more!"

Few poems have been more generally admired or paraphrased in the various tongues of earth than that commencing with the lines--

"Mary had a little lamb, Its fleece was white as snow, And everywhere that Mary went This lamb was sure to go."

The story is current at the national capital that Mr. Evarts, when Secretary of State, on one occasion, in a jocular crowd of his friends, was desired to condense into prose these immortal verses. Urgently solicited, Mr. Evarts yielded, and wrote as follows:

"Mary, a female, judged to be of the race of man, whose family name is unknown, whether of native or foreign birth, of lofty or lowly lineage, and whose appearance, manners, and mental cultivation are involved in the most profound mystery, which probably will never be fully ascertained unless through the most profound researches of an historian admirably trained in his profession, who shall devote the ablest efforts of his life to the investigation of the subject, uninfluenced by either pa.s.sion or prejudice, and having only in view the sacred truth, at the same time being utterly regardless of the plaudits or censures of the world, we are informed by one who, it has been stated, at one time while living in that part of the United States of America known as Ma.s.sachusetts, whose fishermen have frequently been involved in difficulties with the authorities of her Majesty Queen Victoria, Queen of Great Britain and Empress of the Indies, whose domains extended over a large share of the habitable globe, thereby endangering the peace which should so happily exist between nations of the same blood and language, had an infant sheep, of which there are many millions of various stocks and qualities now in our country, constantly adding wealth and prosperity to our republic, and enabling us to be entirely independent of all other nations for our supply of wool, now ample for the use of factories already busily employed, and for those which ere long will be constructed in all parts of our land, working both by water and steam power, and in whatever direction the said Mary traveled, this animal, whose fleece was snow-white, even as the lofty mountain-regions in the silent solitudes of eternal winter, as the ethereal vapors which oft float over an autumnal sky, 'darkly, deeply, beautifully blue' or as the lacteal fluid covered with ma.s.ses of delicate froth, found in the buckets of the rosy dairymaid, whether meandering through the meadows in midsummer, gathering the luscious strawberry, strolling in the woodland paths in search of wild flowers, visiting the church with her uncles, cousins, and aunts, to listen to the inspired words which come from the lips of the minister of the sanctuary, or when retiring to her blissful couch to seek rest and enjoy sweet repose after the cares and labors of the day; in fact, 'everywhere that Mary went' this youthful sheep, influenced doubtless by that affection which is oft so conspicuously manifested by the lower animals in their a.s.sociation with human beings, was ever observed to accompany her."

VI.

How she can be Oddly Wrote.

The following amusing rhyme clipped from an old paper shows to advantage some of the peculiarities of the English language:

SALLY SALTER.

Sally Salter, she was a young teacher, that taught, And her friend Charley Church was a preacher, who praught; Though his friends all declared him a screecher, who scraught.

His heart, when he saw her, kept sinking, and sunk, And his eyes, meeting hers, kept winking, and wunk; While she, in her turn, fell to thinking, and thunk.

He hastened to woo her, and sweetly he wooed, For his love for her grew--to a mountain it grewed, And what he was longing to do, then he doed.

In secret he wanted to speak, and he spoke: To seek with his lips what his heart had long soke; So he managed to let the truth leak, and it loke.

He asked her to ride to the church and they rode; They so sweetly did glide, that they both thought they glode, And they came to the place to be tied, and were tode.

Then "Homeward," he said, "let us drive," and they drove, As soon as they wished to arrive they arrove; For whatever he couldn't contrive she controve.

The kiss he was dying to steal, then he stole, At the feet where he wanted to kneel, there he knole, And he said, "I feel better than ever I fole."

So they to each other kept clinging, and clung, While Time his swift circuit was winging, and wung; And this was the thing he was bringing, and brung:

The man Sally wanted to catch, and had caught-- That she wanted from others to s.n.a.t.c.h, and had snaught, Was the one that she now liked to scratch, and she scraught.

And Charley's warm love began freezing and froze, While he took to teasing, and cruelly tose The girl he had wished to be squeezing and squoze.

"Wretch!" he cried, when she threatened to leave him, and left, "How could you deceive me, as you have deceft?"

And she answered, "I promised to cleave, and I've cleft!"

PLODDING CHANGES.--Some of our plodding readers may like to peruse the following curious variations of the well-known line from Gray's "Elegy,"

"The ploughman homeward plods his weary way":

The weary ploughman homeward plods his way.

The weary ploughman plods his homeward way.

The homeward ploughman plods his weary way.

The homeward ploughman, weary, plods his way.

The homeward, weary, ploughman plods his way.

The weary, homeward ploughman plods his way.

Homeward the weary ploughman plods his way.

Homeward, weary, the ploughman plods his way.

Homeward the ploughman plods his weary way.

Homeward the ploughman, weary, plods his way.

Weary, the homeward ploughman plods his way.

Weary, homeward the ploughman plods his way.

Weary, the ploughman plods his homeward way.

The ploughman plods his homeward, weary way.

The ploughman plods his weary homeward way.

The ploughman homeward, weary, plods his way.

The ploughman, weary, homeward plods his way.

The ploughman, weary, plods his homeward way.

"My Madeline! My Madeline!