Unaweza kufanya nini What Can You Do

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UNAWEZA KUFANYA NINI?
Terry ako na marafiki wawili, Dobby and Dibby.
Dibby anaweza kuendesha baiskeli. - Dobby hawezi kuendesha
baiskeli.
Dibby anaweza kupaka rangi katika picha. - Dobby hawezi kupaka
rangi katika picha.
Dibby anaweza kucheza gita. - Dobby hawezi kucheza gita.
Dibby anaweza kuruka. - Dobby hawezi kuruka.
Dibby anaweza kuogelea. - Dobby hawezi kuogelea.
Dobby anaweza kulala.
Dibby hawezi kulala.
Kwa sababu Dobby anakoroma wakati anapolala.
Unaweza kufanya nini?
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 Now then, notice this. About the end of August, 1846, a
change came over me and I resolved to lead a better life, so I
reformed; but it was just as well, anyway, because they had got
to having guns and dogs both. Although I was reformed, the
perturbations did not stop! Does that strike you? They did not
stop, they went right on and on and on, for three weeks, clear up
to the 23d of September; then Neptune was discovered and the
whole mystery stood explained. It shows that I am so sensitively
constructed that I perturbate when any other planet is disturbed.
This has been going on all my life. It only happens in the
watermelon season, but that has nothing to do with it, and has
no significance: geologists and anthropologists and horticulturists
all tell me it is only ancestral and hereditary, and that is what I
think myself. Now then, I got to perturbating again, this summer--
all summer through; all through watermelon time: and where, do
you think? Up here on my farm in Connecticut. Is that
significant? Unquestionably it is, for you couldn’t raise a
watermelon on this farm with a derrick.
That perturbating was caused by the new planet. That
Washington Observatory may throw as much doubt as it wants
to, it cannot affect me, because I know there is a new planet. I
know it because I don’t perturbate for nothing. There has got to
be a dog or a planet, one or the other; and there isn’t any dog
around here, so there’s got to be a planet. I hope it is going to be
named after me; I should just love it if I can’t have a
constellation.
 MARJORIE FLEMING, THE WONDER
CHILD

M arjorie has been in her tiny grave a hundred years; and still
the tears fall for her, and will fall. What an intensely human
little creature she was! How vividly she lived her small life; how
impulsive she was; how sudden, how tempestuous, how tender,
how loving, how sweet, how loyal, how rebellious, how
repentant, how wise, how unwise, how bursting with fun, how
frank, how free, how honest, how innocently bad, how natively
good, how charged with quaint philosophies, how winning, how
precious, how adorable--and how perennially and indestructibly
interesting! And all this exhibited, proved, and recorded before
she reached the end of her ninth year and “fell on sleep.”
Geographically considered, the lassie was a Scot; but in fact
she had no frontiers, she was the world’s child, she was the
human race in little. It is one of the prides of my life that the first
time I ever heard her name it came from the lips of Dr. John
Brown--his very own self--Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh--Dr. John
Brown of Rab and His Friends--Dr. John Brown of the beautiful
face and the sweet spirit, whose friends loved him with a love
that was worship--Dr. John Brown, who was Marjorie’s
biographer, and who had clasped an aged hand that had
caressed Marjorie’s fifty years before, thus linking me with that
precious child by an unbroken chain of handshakes, for I had
shaken hands with Dr. John. This was in Edinburgh thirty-six
years ago. He gave my wife his little biography of Marjorie, and I
have it yet.
Is Marjorie known in America? No--at least to only a few.
When Mr. L. MacBean’s new and enlarged and charming
biography[17] of her was published five years ago it was sent over
here in sheets, the market not being large enough to justify
recomposing and reprinting it on our side of the water. I find that
there are even cultivated Scotchmen among us who have not
heard of Marjorie Fleming.
She was born in Kirkcaldy in 1803, and she died when she
was eight years and eleven months old. By the time she was five
years old she was become a devourer of various kinds of
literature--both heavy and light--and was also become a quaint
and free-spoken and charming little thinker and philosopher
whose views were a delightful jumble of first-hand cloth of gold
and second-hand rags.
When she was six she opened up that rich mine, her journals,
and continued to work it by spells during the remainder of her
brief life. She was a pet of Walter Scott, from the cradle, and
when he could have her society for a few hours he was content,
and required no other. Her little head was full of noble passages
from Shakespeare and other favorites of hers, and the fact that
she could deliver them with moving effect is proof that her
elocution was a born gift with her, and not a mechanical
reproduction of somebody else’s art, for a child’s parrot-work
does not move. When she was a little creature of seven years,
Sir Walter Scott “would read ballads to her in his own glorious
way, the two getting wild with excitement over them; and he
would take her on his knee and make her repeat Constance’s
speeches in King John till he swayed to and fro, sobbing his fill.”
[Dr. John Brown.]
“Sobbing his fill”--that great man--over that little thing’s inspired
interpretations. It is a striking picture; there is no mate to it. Sir
Walter said of her:
“She’s the most extraordinary creature I ever met with, and her
repeating of Shakespeare overpowers me as nothing else does.”
She spent the whole of her little life in a Presbyterian heaven;
yet she was not affected by it; she could not have been happier if
she had been in the other heaven.
She was made out of thunderstorms and sunshine, and not
even her little perfunctory pieties and shop-made holiness could
squelch her spirits or put out her fires for long. Under pressure of
a pestering sense of duty she heaves a shovelful of trade
godliness into her journals every little while, but it does not
offend, for none of it is her own; it is all borrowed, it is a
convention, a custom of her environment, it is the most innocent
of hypocrisies, and this tainted butter of hers soon gets to be as
delicious to the reader as are the stunning and worldly sincerities
she splatters around it every time her pen takes a fresh breath.
The adorable child! she hasn’t a discoverable blemish in her
make-up anywhere.
Marjorie’s first letter was written before she was six years old;
it was to her cousin, Isa Keith, a young lady of whom she was
passionately fond. It was done in a sprawling hand, ten words to
the page--and in those foolscap days a page was a spacious
thing:

“My Dear Isa--

“I now sit down on my botom to answer all the kind & beloved
letters which you was so so good as to write to me. This is the
first time I ever wrote a letter in my life.
“Miss Potune, a lady of my acquaintance, praises me
dreadfully. I repeated something out of Deen Swift & she said I
was fit for the stage, & you may think I was primmed up with
majestick Pride, but upon my word I felt myself turn a little birsay-
-birsay is a word which is a word that William composed which is
as you may suppose a little enraged. This horid fat Simpliton
says that my Aunt is beautifull which is intirely impossible for that
is not her nature.”

Frank? Yes, Marjorie was that. And during the brief moment
that she enchanted this dull earth with her presence she was the
bewitchingest speller and punctuator in all Christendom.
The average child of six “prints” its correspondence in rickety
and reeling Roman capitals, or dictates to mamma, who puts the
little chap’s message on paper. The sentences are labored,
repetitious, and slow; there are but three or four of them; they
deal in information solely, they contain no ideas, they venture no
judgments, no opinions; they inform papa that the cat has had
kittens again; that Mary has a new doll that can wink; that Tommy
has lost his top; and will papa come soon and bring the writer
something nice? But with Marjorie it is different.
She needs no amanuensis, she puts her message on paper
herself; and not in weak and tottering Roman capitals, but in a
thundering hand that can be heard a mile and be read across the
square without glasses. And she doesn’t have to study, and
puzzle, and search her head for something to say; no, she had
only to connect the pen with the paper and turn on the current;
the words spring forth at once, and go chasing after each other
like leaves dancing down a stream. For she has a faculty, has
Marjorie! Indeed yes; when she sits down on her bottom to do a
letter, there isn’t going to be any lack of materials, nor of fluency,
and neither is her letter going to be wanting in pepper, or vinegar,
or vitriol, or any of the other condiments employed by genius to
save a literary work of art from flatness and vapidity. And as for
judgments and opinions, they are as commodiously in her line as
they are in the Lord Chief Justice’s. They have weight, too, and
are convincing: for instance, for thirty-six years they have
damaged that “horid Simpliton” in my eyes; and, more than that,
they have even imposed upon me--and most unfairly and
unwarrantably--an aversion to the horid fat Simpliton’s name; a
perfectly innocent name, and yet, because of the prejudice
against it with which this child has poisoned my mind for a
generation I cannot see “Potune” on paper and keep my gorge
from rising.
In her journals Marjorie changes her subject whenever she
wants to--and that is pretty often. When the deep moralities pay
her a passing visit she registers them. Meantime if a cherished
love passage drifts across her memory she shoves it into the
midst of the moralities--it is nothing to her that it may not feel at
home there:
“We should not be happy at the death of our fellow creatures,
for they love life like us love your neighbor & he will love you
Bountifulness and Mercifulness are always rewarded. In my
travels I met with a handsome lad named Charles Balfour Esge
[Esqr.] and from him I got offers of marage--ofers of marage did I
say? nay plainly [he] loved me. Goodness does not belong to the
wicked but badness dishonor befals wickedness but not virtue,
no disgrace befals virtue perciverence overcomes almost al
difficulties no I am rong in saying almost I should say always as it
is so perciverence is a virtue my Csosin says pacience is a
cristain virtue, which is true.”
She is not copying these profundities out of a book, she is
getting them out of her memory; her spelling shows that the book
is not before her. The easy and effortless flow of her talk is a
marvelous thing in a baby of her age. Her interests are as wide
and varied as a grown person’s: she discusses all sorts of books,
and fearlessly delivers judgment upon them; she examines
whomsoever crosses the field of her vision, and again delivers a
verdict; she dips into religion and history, and even into politics;
she takes a shy at the news of the day, and comments upon it;
and now and then she drops into poetry--into rhyme, at any rate.
Marjorie would not intentionally mislead anyone, but she has
just been making a remark which moves me to hoist a danger-
signal for the protection of the modern reader. It is this one: “In
my travels.” Naturally we are apt to clothe a word with its
present-day meaning--the meaning we are used to, the meaning
we are familiar with; and so--well, you get the idea: some words
that are giants to-day were very small dwarfs a century ago, and
if we are not careful to take that vast enlargement into account
when we run across them in the literatures of the past, they are
apt to convey to us a distinctly wrong impression. To-day, when a
person says “in my travels” he means that he has been around
the globe nineteen or twenty times, and we so understand him;
and so, when Marjorie says it, it startles us for a moment, for it
gives us the impression that she has been around it fourteen or
fifteen times; whereas, such is not at all the case. She has
traveled prodigiously for her day, but not for ours. She had
“traveled,” altogether, three miles by land and eight by water--per
ferryboat. She is fairly and justly proud of it, for it is the exact
equivalent, in grandeur and impressiveness, in the case of a
child of our day, to two trips across the Atlantic and a thousand
miles by rail.
“In the love novels all the heroins are very desperate Isabella
will not allow me to speak about lovers and heroins, and tiss too
refined for my taste a loadstone is a curous thing indeed it is true
Heroic love doth never win disgrace this is my maxum and I will
follow it forever Miss Eguards [Edgeworth] tails are very good
particularly some that are very much adopted for youth as Lazy
Lawrence Tarelton False Key &c &c Persons of the parlement
house are as I think caled Advocakes Mr Cay & Mr Crakey has
that honour. This has been a very mild winter. Mr Banestors
Budget is to-night I hope it will be a good one. A great many
authors have expressed themselfs too sentimentaly.... The
Mercandile Afares are in a perilous situation sickness & a
delicante frame I have not & I do not know what it is, but Ah me
perhaps I shall have it.[18] Grandure reigns in Edinburgh....
Tomson is a beautifull author and Pope but nothing is like
Shakepear of which I have a little knolegde of. An unfortunate
death James the 5 had for he died of greif Macbeth is a pretty
composition but awful one Macbeth is so bad & wicked, but Lady
Macbeth is so hardened in guilt she does not mind her sins &
faults No.
“... A sailor called here to say farewell, it must be dreadful to
leave his native country where he might get a wife or perhaps
me, for I love him very much & with all my heart, but O I forgot
Isabella forbid me to speak about love.... I wish everybody would
follow her example & be as good as pious & virtious as she is &
they would get husbands soon enough, love is a parithatick
[pathetic] thing as well as troublesome & tiresome but O Isabella
forbid me to speak about it.”
But the little rascal can’t keep from speaking about it, because
it is her supreme interest in life; her heart is not capacious
enough to hold all the product that is engendered by the ever-
recurring inflaming spectacle of man-creatures going by, and the
surplus is obliged to spill over; Isa’s prohibitions are no sufficient
dam for such a discharge.
 “Love I think is the fasion for everybody is marring
[marrying].... Yesterday a marrade man named Mr John Balfour
Esg [Esq.] offered to kiss me, & offered to marry me though the
man was espused [espoused], & his wife was present & said he
must ask her permission but he did not, I think he was ashamed
or confounded before 3 gentleman Mr Jobson and two Mr
Kings.”
I must make room here for another of Marjorie’s second-hand
high-morality outbreaks. They give me a sinful delight which I
ought to grieve at, I suppose, but I can’t seem to manage it:
“James Macary is to be transported for murder in the flower of
his youth O passion is a terible thing for it leads people from sin
to sin at last it gets so far as to come to greater crimes than we
thought we could comit and it must be dreadful to leave his
native country and his friends and to be so disgraced and
affronted.”
That is Marjorie talking shop, dear little diplomat--to please
and comfort mamma and Isa, no doubt.
This wee little child has a marvelous range of interests. She
reads philosophies, novels, baby books, histories, the mighty
poets--reads them with burning interest, and frankly and freely
criticizes them all; she revels in storms, sunsets, cloud effects,
scenery of mountain, plain, ocean, and forest, and all the other
wonders of nature, and sets down her joy in them all; she loves
people, she detests people, according to mood and
circumstances, and delivers her opinion of them, sometimes
seasoned with attar of roses, sometimes with vitriol; in games,
and all kinds of childish play she is an enthusiast; she adores
animals, adores them all; none is too forlorn to fail of favor in her
friendly eyes, no creature so humble that she cannot find
something in it on which to lavish her caressing worship.
“I am going to-morrow to a delightfull place, Braehead by
name, belonging to Mrs. Crraford [Crauford], where there is
ducks cocks hens bobblyjocks 2 dogs 2 cats and swine which is
delightful. I think it is shocking to think that the dog and cat
should bear them and they are drowned after all.”
 She is a dear child, a bewitching little scamp; and never
dearer, I think, than when the devil has had her in possession
and she is breaking her stormy little heart over the remembrance
of it:
“I confess I have been very more like a little young divil than a
creature for when Isabella went up stairs to teach me religion
and my multiplication and to be good and all my other lessons I
stamped with my foot and threw my new hat which she had
made on the ground and was sulky and was dreadfully
passionate, but she never whiped me but said Marjory go into
another room and think what a great crime you are committing
letting your temper git the better of you. But I went so sulkily that
the devil got the better of me but she never never never whips
me so that I think I would be the better of it & the next time that I
behave ill I think she should do it for she never does it.... Isabella
has given me praise for checking my temper for I was sulky even
when she was kneeling an whole hour teaching me to write.”
The wise Isabella, the sweet and patient Isabella! It is just a
hundred years now (May, 1909) since the grateful child made
that golden picture of you and laid your good heart bare for
distant generations to see and bless; a hundred years--but if the
picture endures a thousand it will still bring you the blessing, and
with it the reverent homage that is your due. You had the seeing
eye and the wise head. A fool would have punished Marjorie and
wrecked her, but you held your hand, as knowing that when her
volcanic fires went down she would repent, and grieve, and
punish herself, and be saved.
Sometimes when Marjorie was miraculously good, she got a
penny for it, and once when she got an entire sixpence, she
recognized that it was wealth. This wealth brought joy to her
heart. Why? Because she could spend it on somebody else! We
who know Marjorie would know that without being told it. I am
sorry--often sorry, often grieved--that I was not there and looking
over her shoulder when she was writing down her valued penny
rewards: I would have said, “Save that scrap of manuscript, dear;
make a will, and leave it to your posterity, to save them from
want when penury shall threaten them; a day will come when it
will be worth a thousand guineas, and a later day will come when
it will be worth five thousand; here you are, rejoicing in copper
farthings, and don’t know that your magic pen is showering gold
coin all over the paper.” But I was not there to say it; those who
were there did not think to say it; and so there is not a line of that
quaint precious cacography in existence to-day.
I have adored Marjorie for six-and-thirty years; I have adored
her in detail, I have adored the whole of her; but above all other
details--just a little above all other details--I have adored her
because she detested that odious and confusing and
unvanquishable and unlearnable and shameless invention, the
multiplication table:
“I am now going to tell you the horible and wretched plaege
[plague] that my multiplication gives me you can’t conceive it the
most Devilish thing is 8 times 8 & 7 times 7 it is what nature itself
cant endure.”
I stand reverently uncovered in the presence of that holy
verdict.
Here is that person again whom I so dislike--and for no reason
at all except that my Marjorie doesn’t like her:
“Miss Potune is very fat she pretends to be very learned she
says she saw a stone that dropt from the skies, but she is a good
christian.”
Of course, stones have fallen from the skies, but I don’t
believe this “horid fat Simpliton” had ever seen one that had
done it; but even if she had, it was none of her business, and she
could have been better employed than in going around
exaggerating it and carrying on about it and trying to make
trouble with a little child that had never done her any harm.
“... The Birds do chirp the Lambs do leap and Nature is clothed
with the garments of green yellow, and white, purple, and red.
“... There is a book that is called the Newgate Calender that
contains all the Murders: all the Murders did I say, nay all Thefts
& Forgeries that ever were committed & fills me with horror &
consternation.”
Marjorie is a diligent little student, and her education is always
storming along and making great time and lots of noise:
 “Isabella this morning taught me some French words one of
which is bon suar the interpretation is good morning.”
It slanders Isabella, but the slander is not intentional. The main
thing to notice is that big word, “interpretation.” Not many
children of Marjorie’s age can handle a five syllable team in that
easy and confident way. It is observable that she frequently
employs words of an imposingly formidable size, and is
manifestly quite familiar with them and not at all afraid of them.
“Isa is teaching me to make Simecolings nots of interrigations
periods & commas &c. As this is Sunday I will meditate uppon
senciable & Religious subjects first I should be very thankful I am
not a beggar as many are.”
That was the “first.” She didn’t get to her second subject, but
got side-tracked by a saner interest, and used her time to better
purpose.
“It is melancholy to think, that I have so many talents, & many
there are that have not had the attention paid to them that I have,
& yet they contrive to be better then me.
“... Isabella is far too indulgent to me & even the Miss Crafords
say that they wonder at her patience with me & it is indeed true
for my temper is a bad one.”
The daring child wrote a (synopsized) history of Mary Queen
of Scots and of five of the royal Jameses in rhyme--but never
mind, we have no room to discuss it here. Nothing was entirely
beyond her literary jurisdiction; if it had occurred to her that the
laws of Rome needed codifying she would have taken a chance
at it.
Here is a sad note:
“My religion is greatly falling off because I dont pray with so
much attention when I am saying my prayers and my character
is lost a-mong the Breahead people I hope I will be religious
again but as for regaining my character I despare of it.”
When religion and character go, they leave a large vacuum.
But there are ways to fill it:
“I’ve forgot to say, but I’ve four lovers, the other one is Harry
Watson, a very delightful boy.... James Keith hardly ever Spoke
to me, he said Girl! make less noise.... Craky hall ... I walked to
that delightfull place with a delightful young man beloved by all
his friends and espacialy by me his loveress but I must not talk
any longer about him for Isa said it is not proper for to speak of
gentalman but I will never forget him....
“The Scythians tribe live very coarsely for a Gluton Introduced
to Arsaces the Captain of the Army, 1 man who Dressed hair &
another man who was a good cook but Arsaces said that he
would keep 1 for brushing his horses tail and the other to fead
his pigs....
“On Saturday I expected no less than three well-made bucks,
the names of whom is here advertised. Mr. Geo. Crakey [Cragie],
and Wm. Keith and Jn Keith--the first is the funniest of every one
of them. Mr. Crakey and I walked to Craky-hall [Craigiehall] hand
and hand in Innocence and matitation sweet thinking on the kind
love which flows in our tender hearted mind which is overflowing
with majestic pleasure no one was ever so polite to me in the
hole state of my existence. Mr. Craky you must know is a great
Buck and pretty good-looking.”
For a purpose, I wish the reader to take careful note of these
statistics:
“I am going to tell you of a melancholy story. A young turkie of
2 or 3 months old, would you believe it, the father broke its leg, &
he killed another! I think he ought to be transported or hanged.”
Marjorie wrote some verses about this tragedy--I think. I
cannot be quite certain it is this one, for in the verses there are
three deaths, whereas these statistics do not furnish so many.
Also in the statistics the father of the deceased is indifferent
about the loss he has sustained, whereas in the verses he is not.
Also in the third verse, the mother, too, exhibits feeling, whereas
in the two closing verses of the poem she--at least it seems to be
she--is indifferent. At least it looks like indifference to me, and I
believe it is indifference:
 “Three turkeys fair their last have breathed,
And now this world forever leaved;
Their father, and their mother too,
They sighed and weep as well as you;
Indeed, the rats their bones have cranched.
Into eternity theire launched.
A direful death indeed they had,
As wad put any parent mad;
But she was more than usual calm,
She did not give a single dam.”

The naughty little scamp! I mean, for not leaving out the l in
the word “Calm,” so as to perfect the rhyme. It seems a pity to
damage with a lame rhyme a couplet that is otherwise without a
blemish.
Marjorie wrote four journals. She began the first one in
January, 1809, when she was just six years old, and finished it
five months later, in June.
She began the second in the following month, and finished it
six months afterward (January, 1810), when she was just seven.
She began the third one in April, 1810, and finished it in the
autumn.
She wrote the fourth in the winter of 1810-11, and the last
entry in it bears date July 19, 1811, and she died exactly five
months later, December 19th, aged eight years and eleven
months. It contains her rhymed Scottish histories.
Let me quote from Dr. John Brown:
“The day before her death, Sunday, she sat up in bed, worn
and thin, her eye gleaming as with the light of a coming world,
and with a tremulous, old voice repeated a long poem by Burns--
heavy with the shadow of death, and lit with the fantasy of the
judgment seat--the publican’s prayer in paraphrase, beginning:

“‘Why am I loth to leave this earthly scene?

Have I so found it full of pleasing charms?
Some drops of joy, with draughts of ill between,
Some gleams of sunshine ’mid renewing storms.’
 “It is more affecting than we care to say to read her mother’s
and Isabella Keith’s letters written immediately after her death.
Old and withered, tattered and pale, they are now; but when you
read them, how quick, how throbbing with life and love! how rich
in that language of affection which only women, and
Shakespeare, and Luther can use--that power of detaining the
soul over the beloved object and its loss.”
Fifty years after Marjorie’s death her sister, writing to Dr.
Brown, said:
“My mother was struck by the patient quietness manifested by
Marjorie during this illness, unlike her ardent, impulsive nature;
but love and poetic feeling were unquenched. When Dr.
Johnstone rewarded her submissiveness with a sixpence, the
request speedily followed that she might get out ere New Year’s
Day came. When asked why she was so desirous of getting out,
she immediately rejoined: ‘Oh, I am so anxious to buy something
with my sixpence for my dear Isa Keith.’ Again, when lying very
still, her mother asked her if there was anything she wished: ‘Oh
yes, if you would just leave the room door open a wee bit, and
play the Land o’ the Leal, and I will lie and think and enjoy
myself’ (this is just as stated to me by her mother and mine).
Well, the happy day came, alike to parents and child, when
Marjorie was allowed to come forth from the nursery to the
parlor. It was Sabbath evening, and after tea. My father, who
idolized this child, and never afterward in my hearing mentioned
her name, took her in his arms; and while walking her up and
down the room she said: ‘Father, I will repeat something to you;
what would you like?’ He said, ‘Just choose for yourself, Maidie.’
She hesitated for a moment between the paraphrase, ‘Few are
thy days and full of woe,’ and the lines of Burns already quoted,
but decided on the latter; a remarkable choice for a child. The
repeating of these lines seemed to stir up the depths of feeling in
her soul. She asked to be allowed to write a poem. There was a
doubt whether it would be right to allow her, in case of hurting
her eyes. She pleaded earnestly, ‘Just this once’; the point was
yielded, her slate was given her, and with great rapidity she
wrote an address of fourteen lines ‘To my loved cousin on the
author’s recovery.’”
The cousin was Isa Keith.
“She went to bed apparently well, awoke in the middle of the
night with the old cry of woe to a mother’s heart, ‘My head, my
head!’ Three days of the dire malady, ‘water in the head,’
followed, and the end came.”

17. Marjorie Fleming. By L. MacBean. G. P. Putnam’s Sons,

publishers, London and New York.
Permission to use the extracts quoted from Marjorie’s Journal
in this article has been granted me by the publishers.
18. It is a whole century since the dimly conscious little
prophet said it, but the pathos of it is still there.
 ADAM’S SOLILOQUY

(The spirit of Adam is supposed to be visiting New York City

inspecting the dinosaur at the Museum of Natural History)

(1905)
I

I t is strange ... very strange. I do not remember this creature.

(After gazing long and admiringly.) Well, it is wonderful! The
mere skeleton fifty-seven feet long and sixteen feet high! Thus
far, it seems, they’ve found only this sample--without doubt a
merely medium-sized one; a person could not step out here into
the Park and happen by luck upon the largest horse in America;
no, he would happen upon one that would look small alongside
of the biggest Normandy. It is quite likely that the biggest
dinosaur was ninety feet long and twenty feet high. It would be
five times as long as an elephant; an elephant would be to it
what a calf is to an elephant. The bulk of the creature! The
weight of him! As long as the longest whale, and twice the
substance in him! And all good wholesome pork, most likely;
meat enough to last a village a year.... Think of a hundred of
them in line, draped in shining cloth of gold!--a majestic thing for
a coronation procession. But expensive, for he would eat much;
only kings and millionaires could afford him.
I have no recollection of him; neither Eve nor I had heard of
him until yesterday. We spoke to Noah about him; he colored
and changed the subject. Being brought back to it--and pressed
a little--he confessed that in the matter of stocking the Ark the
stipulations had not been carried out with absolute strictness--
that is, in minor details, unessentials. There were some
irregularities. He said the boys were to blame for this--the boys
mainly, his own fatherly indulgence partly. They were in the giddy
heyday of their youth at the time, the happy springtime of life;
their hundred years sat upon them lightly, and--well, he had once
been a boy himself, and he had not the heart to be too exacting
with them. And so--well, they did things they shouldn’t have
done, and he--to be candid, he winked. But on the whole they did
pretty faithful work, considering their age. They collected and
stowed a good share of the really useful animals; and also, when
Noah was not watching, a multitude of useless ones, such as
flies, mosquitoes, snakes, and so on, but they did certainly leave
ashore a good many creatures which might possibly have had
value some time or other, in the course of time. Mainly these
were vast saurians a hundred feet long, and monstrous
mammals, such as the megatherium and that sort, and there was
really some excuse for leaving them behind, for two reasons: (1)
it was manifest that some time or other they would be needed as
fossils for museums and (2) there had been a miscalculation, the
Ark was smaller than it should have been, and so there wasn’t
room for those creatures. There was actually fossil material
enough all by itself to freight twenty-five Arks like that one. As for
the dinosaur----But Noah’s conscience was easy; it was not
named in his cargo list and he and the boys were not aware that
there was such a creature. He said he could not blame himself
for not knowing about the dinosaur, because it was an American
animal, and America had not then been discovered.
Noah went on to say, “I did reproach the boys for not making
the most of the room we had, by discarding trashy animals and
substituting beasts like the mastodon, which could be useful to
man in doing heavy work such as the elephant performs, but
they said those great creatures would have increased our labors
beyond our strength, in the matter of feeding and watering them,
we being short-handed. There was something in that. We had no
pump; there was but one window; we had to let down a bucket
from that, and haul it up a good fifty feet, which was very
tiresome; then we had to carry the water downstairs--fifty feet
again, in cases where it was for the elephants and their kind, for
we kept them in the hold to serve for ballast. As it was, we lost
many animals--choice animals that would have been valuable in
menageries--different breeds of lions, tigers, hyenas, wolves,
and so on; for they wouldn’t drink the water after the salt sea
water got mixed with the fresh. But we never lost a locust, nor a
grasshopper, nor a weevil, nor a rat, nor a cholera germ, nor any
of that sort of beings. On the whole, I think we did very well,
everything considered. We were shepherds and farmers; we had
never been to sea before; we were ignorant of naval matters,
and I know this for certain, that there is more difference between
agriculture and navigation than a person would think. It is my
opinion that the two trades do not belong together. Shem thinks
the same; so does Japheth. As for what Ham thinks, it is not
important. Ham is biased. You find me a Presbyterian that isn’t, if
you think you can.”
He said it aggressively; it had in it the spirit of a challenge. I
avoided argument by changing the subject. With Noah, arguing
is a passion, a disease, and it is growing upon him; has been
growing upon him for thirty thousand years, and more. It makes
him unpopular, unpleasant; many of his oldest friends dread to
meet him. Even strangers soon get to avoiding him, although at
first they are glad to meet him and gaze at him, on account of his
celebrated adventure. For a time they are proud of his notice,
because he is so distinguished; but he argues them to rags, and
before long they begin to wish, like the rest, that something had
happened to the Ark.
II
(On the bench in the Park, midafternoon, dreamily noting the
drift, of the human species back and forth.) To think--this
multitude is but a wee little fraction of the earth’s population! And
all blood kin to me, every one! Eve ought to have come with me;
this would excite her affectionate heart. She was never able to
keep her composure when she came upon a relative; she would
try to kiss every one of these people, black and white and all. (A
baby wagon passes.) How little change one can notice--none at
all, in fact. I remember the first child well----Let me see ... it is
three hundred thousand years ago come Tuesday. This one is
just like it. So between the first one and the last one there is
really nothing to choose. The same insufficiency of hair, the
same absence of teeth, the same feebleness of body and
apparent vacancy of mind, the same general unattractiveness all
around. Yet Eve worshiped that early one, and it was pretty to
see her with it. This latest one’s mother worships it; it shows in
her eyes--it is the very look that used to shine in Eve’s. To think
that so subtle and intangible a thing as a look could flit and flash
from face to face down a procession three hundred thousand
years long and remain the same, without shade of change! Yet
here it is, lighting this young creature’s face just as it lighted
Eve’s in the long ago--the newest thing I have seen in the earth,
and the oldest. Of course, the dinosaur----But that is in another
class.
She drew the baby wagon to the bench and sat down and
began to shove it softly back and forth with one hand while she
held up a newspaper with the other and absorbed herself in its
contents. Presently, “My!” she exclaimed; which startled me, and
I ventured to ask her, modestly and respectfully, what was the
matter. She courteously passed the paper to me and said--
pointing with her finger:
“There--it reads like fact, but I don’t know.”
It was very embarrassing. I tried to look at my ease, and
nonchalantly turned the paper this and that and the other way,
but her eye was upon me and I felt that I was not succeeding.
Pretty soon she asked, hesitatingly:
“Can’t--can’t--you--read?”
I had to confess that I couldn’t. It filled her with wonder. But it
had one pleasant effect--it interested her in me, and I was
thankful, for I was getting lonesome for some one to talk to and
listen to. The young fellow who was showing me around--on his
own motion, I did not invite him--had missed his appointment at
the Museum, and I was feeling disappointed, for he was good
company. When I told the young woman I could not read, she
asked me another embarrassing question:
“Where are you from?”
 I skirmished--to gain time and position. I said:
“Make a guess. See how near you can come.”
She brightened, and exclaimed:
“I shall dearly like it, sir, if you don’t mind. If I guess right will
you tell me?”
“Yes.”
“Honor bright?”
“Honor bright? What is that?”
She laughed delightedly and said:
“That’s a good start! I was sure that that phrase would catch
you. I know one thing, now, all right. I know----”
“What do you know?”
“That you are not an American. And you aren’t, are you?”
“No. You are right. I’m not--honor bright, as you say.”
She looked immensely pleased with herself, and said:
“I reckon I’m not always smart, but that was smart, anyway.
But not so very, after all, because I already knew--believed I
knew--that you were a foreigner, by another sign.”
“What was that?”
“Your accent.”
She was an accurate observer; I do speak English with a
heavenly accent, and she had detected the foreign twang in it.
She ran charmingly on, most naïvely and engagingly pleased
with her triumph:
“The minute you said, ‘See ’ow near you can come to it,’ I said
to myself, ‘Two to one he is a foreigner, and ten to one he’s
English.’ Now that is your nationality, isn’t it?”
I was sorry to spoil her victory, but I had to do it: “Ah--you’ll
have to guess again.”
“What--you are not an Englishman?”
“No--honor bright.”
She looked me searchingly over, evidently communing with
herself--adding up my points, then she said:
“Well, you don’t look like an Englishman, and that is true.” After
a little she added, “The fact is, you don’t look like any foreigner--
not quite like ... like anybody I’ve seen before. I will guess some
more.”