We found, as Ben had said, it was a capital place to fish, for we were kept busily employed in attending to our poles. Ben, however, easily beat us all. He some way had a knack of fixing his bait and spitting on his hook, so that his line would scarcely touch the water before a fish would seize it.
The morning waned, however, and the sun had laid the shadows of the poles directly under them, when we all agreed that it was time for lunch.
We carried our basket up to the spring, which bubbled out of a large rock, and where Nature had spread us a table with a green velvet cloth. Ham sandwiches, with just enough mustard, broiled and devilled fowl, cold tongue, with the parsley between the slices, together with heaps of covered fruit pies, and mother’s especial boast, biscuit glacé, in the whitest of paper, to say nothing of a barrow full of peaches and melons which Reuben rolled down from the house, and placed to cool in a pond dammed up for the occasion; all were presented to appetites sharpened by the sport of the morning. Reversing the order of Aladdin’s feast, our viands disappeared with as wonderful celerity as his appeared. After we had fairly choked the branch with a mound of water-melon rinds and peach parings, we took our seats farther up on the grass, and left Reuben to clear up the table. Frank now drew forth his bottle of brandy and proposed that each one of us should tell a short story, entirely his own, and that he who could tell the most improbable, should have the bottle to himself. Ben stretched himself out on the grass, with his arm under his head, and said, drowsily, as he tore off with his teeth a large quid of tobacco from a twist he drew from his pocket:
“Blaze away wi’ yer lies. I’m a biled mullen stalk ef I can’t win at that game.”
Ned firmly declared he did not want any of the brandy, but said he would tell his story with the rest, merely to help out the fun. By request I was excused, that I might act as judge, and Frank, rapping on the bottle with his knife, asked Ned to begin. Ned reclined on one elbow, and said:
“I will tell you what happened in the western part of the State, for Frank’s benefit. Our family were summering at a small town near the mountains some years ago, when a circus passed through that section, stopping for a day at our town. Every wall of every house that presented surface enough had for weeks been spread over with the marvellous high colored illustrations of what were to be seen under that mighty, mystic canvas. They were the same pictures, or I should rather say works of art, combining the airy lightness and licensed fancy of Correggio with the Dutch fidelity of Rembrandt, which you have, perhaps, all seen at different times pasted, with weather-proof adherence, to any visible portion of public places. There were troops of monkeys, done in the blackest of colors, swinging from the greenest of trees, across the widest and bluest of rivers, by tails of impossible length and elasticity. There were ibexes leaping into bottomless abysses, thereby defeating the design of the artist, who would have them to alight upon their horns. There was the traditional polar bear, defending her cubs and leisurely lunching on a sandwich of two seals and a sailor. The actual bear in the circus, I have found by long experience, invariably dies at the previous stopping place, bequeathing, tenderly, its skin to the public of to-morrow, thereby undergoing a constancy of death and a multitude of bequests that would startle the profundity of a probate judge. There were pleasant side groups of men lassoing the giraffe and zebra, tripping the rhinoceros, and tearing off tigers from the very hams of elephants, on whose backs were huddled not quite a full regiment of soldiers in all stages of the manual of arms. But the chef _d’œuvre_ was the centre-piece, as large as life, representing the clown, dressed in the American flag, with stars left out, with a hat reaching too infinite a point with its peak to be measured by any rule in conic sections, and cheeks too flamingly hectic for medical aid, handing, with the utmost gravity, a dish of boiled eggs to a sedate and diminutive mule, seated on its haunches, with its fore feet up on a barrel as its table—the only position, by the way, in which I think a mule could be safely approached with anything so far from its usual bill of fare as eggs.”