Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town - Stephen Leacock (best ebook reader under 100 TXT) 📗

the Northern Star mine and the oyster supper and the Mariposa band. It is strange how quiet these things look, the other way round.

You remember the Cuban Land frauds in New York and Porforio Gomez shooting the detective, and him and Maximo Morez getting clear away with two hundred thousand? No, of course you don’t; why, even in the city papers it only filled an inch or two of type, and anyway the names were hard to remember. That was Jeff’s money⁠—part of it. Mullins got the telegram, from a broker or someone, and he showed it to Jeff just as he was going up the street with an estate agent to look at a big empty lot on the hill behind the town⁠—the very place for these incurables.

And Jeff went back to the shop so quiet⁠—have you ever seen an animal that is stricken through, how quiet it seems to move?

Well, that’s how he walked.

And since that, though it’s quite a little while ago, the shop’s open till eleven every night now, and Jeff is shaving away to pay back that five hundred that Johnson, the livery man, sent to the Cubans, and⁠—

Pathetic? tut! tut! You don’t know Mariposa. Jeff has to work pretty late, but that’s nothing⁠—nothing at all, if you’ve worked hard all your lifetime. And Myra is back at the Telephone Exchange⁠—they were glad enough to get her, and she says now that if there’s one thing she hates, it’s the stage, and she can’t see how the actresses put up with it.

Anyway, things are not so bad. You see it was just at this time that Mr. Smith’s caff opened, and Mr. Smith came to Jeff’s Woman and said he wanted seven dozen eggs a day, and wanted them handy, and so the hens are back, and more of them, and they exult so every morning over the eggs they lay that if you wanted to talk of Rockefeller in the barber shop you couldn’t hear his name for the cackling.

III The Marine Excursions of the Knights of Pythias

Half past six on a July morning! The Mariposa Belle is at the wharf, decked in flags, with steam up ready to start.

Excursion day!

Half past six on a July morning, and Lake Wissanotti lying in the sun as calm as glass. The opal colours of the morning light are shot from the surface of the water.

Out on the lake the last thin threads of the mist are clearing away like flecks of cotton wool.

The long call of the loon echoes over the lake. The air is cool and fresh. There is in it all the new life of the land of the silent pine and the moving waters. Lake Wissanotti in the morning sunlight! Don’t talk to me of the Italian lakes, or the Tyrol or the Swiss Alps. Take them away. Move them somewhere else. I don’t want them.

Excursion Day, at half past six of a summer morning! With the boat all decked in flags and all the people in Mariposa on the wharf, and the band in peaked caps with big cornets tied to their bodies ready to play at any minute! I say! Don’t tell me about the Carnival of Venice and the Delhi Durbar. Don’t! I wouldn’t look at them. I’d shut my eyes! For light and colour give me every time an excursion out of Mariposa down the lake to the Indian’s Island out of sight in the morning mist. Talk of your Papal Zouaves and your Buckingham Palace Guard! I want to see the Mariposa band in uniform and the Mariposa Knights of Pythias with their aprons and their insignia and their picnic baskets and their five-cent cigars!

Half past six in the morning, and all the crowd on the wharf and the boat due to leave in half an hour. Notice it!⁠—in half an hour. Already she’s whistled twice (at six, and at six fifteen), and at any minute now, Christie Johnson will step into the pilot house and pull the string for the warning whistle that the boat will leave in half an hour. So keep ready. Don’t think of running back to Smith’s Hotel for the sandwiches. Don’t be fool enough to try to go up to the Greek Store, next to Netley’s, and buy fruit. You’ll be left behind for sure if you do. Never mind the sandwiches and the fruit! Anyway, here comes Mr. Smith himself with a huge basket of provender that would feed a factory. There must be sandwiches in that. I think I can hear them clinking. And behind Mr. Smith is the German waiter from the caff with another basket⁠—indubitably lager beer; and behind him, the bartender of the hotel, carrying nothing, as far as one can see. But of course if you know Mariposa you will understand that why he looks so nonchalant and empty-handed is because he has two bottles of rye whiskey under his linen duster. You know, I think, the peculiar walk of a man with two bottles of whiskey in the inside pockets of a linen coat. In Mariposa, you see, to bring beer to an excursion is quite in keeping with public opinion. But, whiskey⁠—well, one has to be a little careful.

Do I say that Mr. Smith is here? Why, everybody’s here. There’s Hussell the editor of the Newspacket, wearing a blue ribbon on his coat, for the Mariposa Knights of Pythias are, by their constitution, dedicated to temperance; and there’s Henry Mullins, the manager of the Exchange Bank, also a Knight of Pythias, with a small flask of Pogram’s Special in his hip pocket as a sort of amendment to the constitution. And there’s Dean Drone, the Chaplain of the Order, with a fishing rod (you never saw such green bass as lie among the rocks at Indian’s Island), and with a trolling line in case of maskinonge, and a landing net in case of pickerel, and with his eldest daughter, Lilian Drone,