"
Among the sins of my youth, which I confess with "shame and confusion
of face" were the pranks played by me and some fellow-sinners upon our
nearest neighbors. These worthies consisted of an old man and what
appeared to be his much older daughter, the two most unaccountable
cranks that dame nature ever presented to my notice.
The father was possessed of the insane hallucination that he was the
greatest poet that ever lived. Often I have seen him drop his hoe in
the potato field, and run for the house so that you could hardly see
his heels for dust, looking for all the world like an animated pair of
tongs. As he expressed it, "an idee had struck him," and all mankind
would die of intellectual starvation unless he at once embodied said
"idee" in a poem.
His greatest delight was to gather about him of an evening a crowd
of young folks and read to us his preposterous "lines." On such
occasions, some of us would quietly steal away up into his garret, and
roll down over the stairs, with a thunderous uproar, a huge gilded
ball which had decorated a post outside a tavern where he formerly
dispensed much "fire water," to the impoverishment of his customers
and to the enrichment of himself.
Then our host, with much profanity, would rush to the rescue armed
with an ancient bayonet and a fish trumpet which, like the bugle-horn
of Roderic Dhu, summoned all the neighbors to his assistance; but some
sympathizing friend would always upset the table holding the candle so
that they could never decide who were the guilty absentees.
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