"Lord!" exclaims Johnny Beedle, courting Sally Jones, on the occasion of his first embrace, "did ye ever see a hawk pounce upon a young robin? or a bumble bee on a clover top? I say nothing."
Consarn it, how a buss will crack of a still frosty night! Mrs. Jones was about half way between asleep and awake.
"There goes my yeast bottle," says she to herself, "burst into twenty hundred pieces, and my bread is all dough agin."
Billy Warwick relates also of his courtship with Miss Barb'ry Bass:
"She trimbl'd, and look'd so pretty, and sed nothin', I couldn't help kissin' her; and seein' she didn't say 'quit,' I kissed her nigh on seven or eight times; and as old Miss Bass had gone to bed, and Kurnel (Colonel) Hard was a snorin' away, I warn't perticllar, and I s'pose I kiss'd her too loud; for jist as I kissed her the last time, out hollered old Miss Bass: 'My Lord, Barb'ry! old Troup is in the milkpan; I heard him smackin’ his lips a-lickin' of the milk. Git out, you old warmint—git out!'"
As a specimen of the extravagant in the same line, Colonel Crockett's admiration of a young lady, whose new gown was made of a whole bear's hide, the tail serving for a train, might be quoted. The said young lady could weave a rope of live rattlesnakes; and when giving her arm to Davy, put a fifty-pound stone into her pocket, to balance her on the other side. Davy, however, was outcourted here by a fellow with a pocket full of eyes, that had been gouged from people of his acquaintance!
Sketches like that of the "Decline and Fall of the City of Dogtown," are also very nationally characteristic, and have been introduced with success into our own literature. The "Way in which Billy Harris Drove the Drum-Fish to Market," is a bit of very original humour. So, also, of the father and son, both done at "thimble-rig;" and of twenty other stories, that might, many of them, be made the basis of good telling farces.
"Scenes and Adventures in Central America"[1] are said to be "based" upon the German works of Charles Sealsfield; but whencesoever derived, they are certainly admirably-depicted sketches of life and scenery. Mr. Hardman is a very clever writer—one of the best, in fact, of old Maga's contributors. The opening scene of a prairie on fire is as startling as anything of the kind in Cooper, and the horrors of the Cypress Swamp are accumulated till the reader feels his flesh creeping, and his very hair standing on end. The "Bloody Blockhouse" is a record of a gallant struggle on the part of a handful of American backwoodsmen against a host of Spaniards and French, or Acadians as they were called, when the latter held Louisiana. The main point in the "Scamper in the Prairie," and which lies in the lost man following his own track for hours together, ever travelling in a circle, is now an oft-repeated transatlantic joke; we have it in another shape, in the instance of the 'coon-hunt, or a fency country, in Sam Slick's "Traits of American Humour." "Bob Rock" is a capital sketch of what a backwoodsman once was, and the "Patriarch Oak" is admirably described. "Twenty to One" is a little bit of Americanism, as patent as the capture and cutting-up of the sea-serpent, to any one versed in that rollicking, go-a-head kind of literature, of the true Davy Crockett style—which runs its career as interestingly disregardful of all propriety or possibility, as it is of all facts or truth.
- ↑ Scenes and Adventures in Central America. Edited by Frederick Hardman, Esq. William Blackwood and Sons.
