- end_line
- 4422
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:47:56.336Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 4368
- text
- and her groom, and an innocent little infant, were all disembarked
into the grim hulk of Charon, who ferried them over, all baggageless,
to some clinkered iron-foundry country or other. Yet what's the use
of complaining? What justice of the peace will right this matter?
Yea, what's the use of bothering the very heavens about it? Don't the
heavens themselves ordain these things--else they could not happen?
A miserable world! Who would take the trouble to make a fortune in it,
when he knows not how long he can keep it, for the thousand villains
and asses who have the management of railroads and steamboats, and
innumerable other vital things in the world. If they would make me
Dictator in North America awhile I'd string them up! and hang, draw,
and quarter; fry, roast and boil; stew, grill, and devil them like so
many turkey-legs--the rascally numskulls of stokers; I'd set them to
stokering in Tartarus--I would!
Great improvements of the age! What! to call the facilitation of death
and murder an improvement! Who wants to travel so fast? My grandfather
did not, and he was no fool. Hark! here comes that old dragon
again--that gigantic gadfly of a Moloch--snort! puff! scream!--here
he comes straight-bent through these vernal woods, like the Asiatic
cholera cantering on a camel. Stand aside! Here he comes, the chartered
murderer! the death monopolizer! judge, jury, and hangman all together,
whose victims die always without benefit of clergy. For two hundred
and fifty miles that iron fiend goes yelling through the land, crying
"More! more! more!" Would fifty conspiring mountains fall atop of him!
and, while they were about it, would they would also fall atop of that
smaller dunning fiend, my creditor, who frightens the life out of me
more than any locomotive--a lantern-jawed rascal, who seems to run on a
railroad track too, and duns me even on Sunday, all the way to church
and back, and comes and sits in the same pew with me, and pretending to
be polite and hand me the prayer-book opened at the proper place, pokes
his pesky bill under my nose in the very midst of my devotions, and
so shoves himself between me and salvation; for how can one keep his
temper on such occasions?
I can't pay this horrid man; and yet they say money was never so
plentiful--a drug on the market; but blame me if I can get any of the
drug, though there never was a sick man more in need of that particular
sort of medicine. It's a lie; money ain't plenty--feel of my pocket.
Ha! here's a powder I was going to send to the sick baby in yonder
hovel, where the Irish ditcher lives. That baby has the scarlet fever.
They say the measles are rife in the country too, and the varioloid,
and the chicken-pox, and it's bad for teething children. And after all,
I suppose many of the poor little ones, after going through all this
trouble snap off short; and so they had the measles, mumps, croup,
scarlet-fever, chicken-pox, cholera-morbus, summer-complaint, and all
else, in vain! Ah! there's that twinge of the rheumatics in my right
shoulder. I got it one night on the North River, when, in a crowded
boat, I gave up my berth to a sick lady, and staid on deck till morning
in drizzling weather. There's the thanks one gets for charity! Twinge!
Shoot away, ye rheumatics! Ye couldn't lay on worse if I were some
villain who had murdered the lady instead of befriending her. Dyspepsia
too--I am troubled with that.
- title
- Chunk 2