Page:Under the Sun.djvu/353

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Of Tailors.
329

that, he has put his enemies to flight. Root a-too-it! Root-a-too-it! It is a great villain; yet the audience roar their fat applause. So with the elephant. Yet Mrs. Gurton has handed him down to future childhood as a marvel of sagacity, to be compared only with that pig who tells the time of day on playing-cards; the cat in Wellingtons who made his master Marquis of Carabas, and rose himself to high honors; and that ingenious but somewhat severe old lady who labored under the double disadvantage of small lodgings and a large family. Of all these Mrs. Gurton, in her able work, preserves the worthy memories; but that episode of the high-handed elephant and the seemly tailor should have been forgotten — irrecoverably lost like the hundred and odd volumes of Livy, or Tabitha Bramble’s reticule in the River Avon. But the blame of perpetuation rests not with Mrs. Gurton, but with her posterity. They admired the work and reprinted it, not like Anthon’s classics, expurgated, but in its noisome entirety. The volume before me is now a score years old — one year younger than was Ulysses’s dog, and two years older than Chatterton; so perhaps it may not be reproduced in our generation, and the mischievous fable may die out before the growth of better reading, as the scent of a musk-rat killed over-night fades away before the fumes of breakfast. Then let us hope, the tailor — the only story which reflects contempt on him being abolished — will assume his proper position between the angels and the anthropomorphous apes.