THE KING OF HAYTI.
FROM THE GERMAN.
CHAPTER I.
Six weeks after his death stood the bust of the late stamp-distributor Goodchild exposed to public view in the china-manufacture of L. For what purpose? Simply for this—that he might call Heaven and earth to witness, that, allowing for some little difference in the colours, he looked just as he did heretofore in life: a proposition which his brother and heir Mr. Goodchild the merchant flatly denied. For this denial Mr. Goodchild had his private reasons. “It is true,” said he, “my late brother the stamp-distributor, God rest him! did certainly bespeak three dozen copies of his own bust at the china-works:—but surely he bespoke them for his use in this life, and not in the next. His intention doubtless was to send a copy to each of those loose companions of his who helped him to run through his fine estate: natural enough for him to propose as a spendthrift, but highly absurd for me to ratify as executor to so beggarly an inheritance; and therefore assuredly I shall not throw so much money out of the windows.”
This was plausible talking to all persons who did not happen to know that the inheritance amounted to 25 thousand dollars; and that the merchant Goodchild, as was unanimously affirmed by all the Jews both Christian and Jewish, in L, weighed moreover in his own person, independently of that inheritance, one entire ton of gold.
CHAPTER II.
The ostensible Reason.
The china-works would certainly never have been put off with this allegation; and therefore, by the advice of his attorney, he had in reserve a more special argument why he ought not to pay for the six-and-thirty busts. “My brother,” said he, “may have ordered so many copies of his bust. It is possible. I neither affirm nor deny. Busts may be ordered: and my brother may have ordered them. But what then? I suppose all men will grant that he meant the busts to have some resemblance to himself, and by no means to have no resemblance. But now, be it known, they have no resemblance to him. Ergo I refuse to take them. One word’s as good as a thousand.”
CHAPTER III.
“In the second Place”—Dinner is on the Table.
But this one word, no nor a thousand such, would satisfy Mr. Whelp the proprietor of the china-works. So he summoned Mr. Goodchild before the magistracy. Unfortunately Mr. Whelp’s lawyer, in order to show his ingenuity, had filled sixteen folio pages with an introductory argument in which he laboured to prove that the art of catching a likeness was an especial gift of God, bestowed on very few portrait-painters and sculptors—and which therefore it was almost impious and prophane to demand of a mere uninspired baker of porcellain. From this argument he went on to infer à fortiori in the second place that, where the china-baker did hit the likeness, and had done so much more than could lawfully be asked of him, it was an injustice that would cry aloud to heaven for redress if, after all, his works were returned upon his hands; especially where, as in the present instance, so much beauty of art was united with the peculiar merit of a portrait. It was fatal, however, to the effect of this argument, that just as the magistrate arrived at—“In the second place,”—his servant came in and said, “If you please, Sir, dinner is on the table.” Naturally therefore conceiving that the gite of the lawyer’s reasoning was to defend the want of resemblance as an admitted fact, which it would be useless to deny, the worthy magistrate closed the pleadings and gave sentence against Mr. Whelp the plaintiff.
