- end_line
- 4484
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:26.981Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 4422
- text
- 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 in 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 stayed 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.
Hallo! here come the calves, the two-year-olds, just turned out of the
barn into the pasture, after six months of cold victuals. What a
miserable-looking set, to be sure! A breaking up of a hard winter,
that’s certain: sharp bones sticking out like elbows; all quilted with a
strange stuff dried on their flanks like layers of pancakes. Hair worn
quite off too, here and there; and where it ain’t pancaked, or worn off,
looks like the rubbed sides of mangy old hair-trunks. In fact, they are
not six two-year-olds, but six abominable old hair-trunks wandering
about here in this pasture.
Hark! By Jove, what’s that? See! the very hair-trunks prick their ears
at it, and stand and gaze away down into the rolling country yonder.
Hark again! How clear! how musical! how prolonged! What a triumphant
thanksgiving of a cock-crow! ‘_Glory be to God in the highest!_’ It says
those very words as plain as ever cock did in this world. Why, why, I
begin to feel a little in sorts again. It ain’t so very misty, after
all. The sun yonder is beginning to show himself: I feel warmer.
Hark! There again! Did ever such a blessed cock-crow so ring out over
the earth before! Clear, shrill, full of pluck, full of fire, full of
fun, full of glee. It plainly says--‘_Never say die!_’ My friends, it is
extraordinary, is it not?
Unwittingly, I found that I had been addressing the two-year-olds--the
calves--in my enthusiasm; which shows how one’s true nature will betray
itself at times in the most unconscious way. For what a very
two-year-old, and calf, I had been to fall into the sulks, on a hill-top
too, when a cock down in the lowlands there, without discourse of
reason, and quite penniless in the world, and with death hanging over
him at any moment from his hungry master, sends up a cry like a very
laureate celebrating the glorious victory of New Orleans.
Hark! there it goes again! My friends, that must be a Shanghai; no
domestic-born cock could crow in such prodigious exulting strains.
Plainly, my friends, a Shanghai of the Emperor of China’s breed.
- title
- Chunk 20