Over the Plum Pudding

"Indeed, yes," said Otto, "for entertainment is better than dyspepsia, and poor eating comes more of the one than the other."

"By careful economy," continued Eisenberg, "Gregory soon managed to amass a little fortune, and then he felt he might safely venture to write a little himself, and he did so. He wrote poems about the moon, odes to commonplace things, like scissors and dust-pans, but he was wise enough not to publish any of his verse. Then he married, and occasionally he would recite his verses to his wife, who said they were magnificent. She in turn repeated them to her friends, and they said, as she had, that they were unsurpassed. Still Gregory would not print them, though it soon got noised about that he was a great poet. And so it went. Finally, finding himself subjected to great temptation to print his writings, he put everything he had written into a casket, and, having a small closet constructed in the walls of his house, he placed the casket in that closet, locked the iron door upon it and threw away the key. Time went on, and people daily, their curiosity excited, talked more and more of Gregory's poetry; they even sent delegations to him, requesting him to have his rhymes printed, but he was faithful to his resolution, and when he died he was looked upon as a great writer, without having printed a line. Time passed and his reputation grew. Three generations passed by. His children and their children and their children's children came, lived, and died, and constantly his fame increased, and people said, 'Ah, yes; so and so is a great poet, but the poems of Gregory! You should have heard them. They were sublime.'

"But two years ago there came an unhappy day. Some one laughed at the mention of Gregory's name and cast doubt upon the tradition that he had written, and his great-grandson, foolishly, I thought, and recklessly, as has since been proved, offered to prove the truth of the tradition by opening the closet which for a century had remained closed, and publishing the writings of his ancestor. I was sent for as keysmith to open the door, and when it was opened there stood the casket, and in the casket were found the poems.

"'Let that suffice,' said I to his great-grandson. 'You have proved your point.'

"'I will prove it to the world,' said he. 'I will publish the poems.'"

Here Eisenberg sighed.

"He did so," he resumed mournfully, "and another idol was shattered. The poems were the worst you ever read, and from that time on the name of Gregory the poet began to sink into oblivion, where it now lies. Had his descendants been less weak, his name would still have remained a household word, such is the force of tradition. As it is, the printed volume is the best testimony that the great poet Gregory was nothing but a commonplace rhymester whose name was not worthy of remembrance.

"And that, sir," concluded Eisenberg, bowing politely to me, "is why I say that a poet who does not publish runs less risk of failing as a poet than he who does publish."

And I? Well, how could I deny that Eisenberg was right? He had proved his point only too well, and even that night, on my return home, I went to my little portfolio and utterly destroyed the dozen or more poems I had written that day. If you will take my word for it, you will think them greater than you might if you insisted upon reading them.

"What think you?" asked Hans, as we went home? "Are they not wise?"

"Wiser than the Three Men of Gotham who went to sea in a bowl," said I, "for I do not believe that Otto, Eisenberg, or Jurgurson would go to sea at all."

"True," was Hans's comment, "for as Otto well says in one of his maxims, 'For a sailor with his sea-legs on there is nothing like the sea, but for a shoemaker who lives by shoes alone, dry land is by much the solider foundation.'"

The Loss of the "Gretchen B."

A TALE OF A PIRATE GHOST, FOUND FLOATING IN A WATER-BOTTLE

I

THE DISCOVERY

It was a very pleasant evening in July. Hans Pumpernickel, who had just laid down the duties of Mayor of Schnitzelhammerstein-on-the-Zugvitz, after having filled that lofty office for eight years, was walking with me along the river-front at its busiest point.

"Let us go out on the wharf," said Hans, as we neared its entrance. "When I was a small boy I used to take pleasure in sitting upon the twine-piece of the wharf and letting my legs dingle over."

I scratched my head for a moment before I saw exactly what he meant by "twine-piece" and "dingle."

"You speak English very well, Pumpernickel," said I; "but what you should have said was 'string-piece' and 'dangle,' not 'twine-piece' and 'dingle.'"

"But," he protested, "is not a piece of twine a piece of string?"

"Yes," I replied; "but – "

"Then why may not a 'twine-piece' be a 'string-piece'? And as for 'dingle,' is it not the present tense of the verb 'to dingle'? Dingle, dangle, dungle – like sing, sang, sung? You would not say 'letting him sang' – it would be 'letting him sing'; wherefore, why not say 'letting my legs dingle over,' and avoid saying 'letting my legs dangle over'?"

"Oh, well, have it your own way," said I; and, having reached the end of the wharf, we sat down there, and shortly found our legs "dingling" over the water in the most approved style.

"It is a hard sort of a seat," said I, after a moment or two of silence, as we gazed upon the river flowing by.

"True," said Hans, philosophically, "though it is not made of hard wood. Let us take a boat and have a row."

I agreed, and we hired a small skiff and paddled idly down the stream. We had not gone far when the bow of our craft bumped up against something which scraped against the side of the boat as we passed.

"What was that?" said Pumpernickel.

"I don't know," said I, indifferently. "Nothing, I guess."

"What nonsense you talk sometimes!" he retorted. "It must have been something. We'll retreat and see."

Suiting the action to the words, Hans backed water with his oars, and in the dim light of the moon we soon descried the object of our search – a curious old earthen vessel floating in the river, bobbing up and down very much like a buoy. It looked like a water-bottle of two centuries ago, and, indeed, upon investigation turned out to be such.

"Aha!" cried Hans, triumphantly, as I lifted the bottle into the boat, "it was something, after all. I knew it could not be nothing. Is it empty of contents?"

I turned the vessel bottom side up, and nothing came out of it, but there was a distinct thud within which betrayed the presence of some solid substance.

"It is not empty of contents," said I, giving it another shake, "but it hasn't any table to show what those contents are."

"Oh, we don't need a table," said Hans, failing to appreciate the subtle humor of my remark. "Just shake it out."

With a sigh over my lost joke, I did as I was bidden, and soon, after a vigorous shaking and the removal of a cork which I had not previously noticed, the substance within issued forth through the bottle's neck.

"Dear me," said I. "It appears to be manuscript."

"Let me see," said Hans. "Ah," he observed, "it is writing. Why did you say it was manuscript?"

"That is writing," I explained.

"That may be," said he, "but why waste your tongue on three syllables when two will do?"

I ignored the question and put another.

"Can you read it?" I asked.

"With difficulty," he said, "by this light. Let us return to my rooms and see if we can decimate it."

"Decipher, decipher, Hans," said I.

"As you will," he retorted, with a sweep of the oars which brought us under the shadow of the wharf.

Tying our boat, we hastened back to Pumpernickel's rooms, and within a half-hour of our find we were busily engaged in translating the extraordinary narrative of Captain Hammerpestle, commander of the Gretchen B., a ship that, as we learned from the captain's story, was once of ill-repute, later of pleasant memory, and finally the central figure of an ocean mystery never as yet solved, though at least two hundred and fifty years had passed since she was given up for lost.

The story was in substance as follows:

II

THE TALE OF CAPTAIN HAMMERPESTLE

The end is approaching, and I, Rudolf Hammerpestle, of Bingen, third owner and captain of the ill-starred Gretchen B., formerly known as the Dutch Avenger, will shortly find a watery grave in sixty-eight fathoms of the Atlantic, ninety miles west of the rock of Gibraltar.