Black Beetles in Amber by Ambrose Bierce (ebook reader with highlight function txt) 📖

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"Great and lasting is my renown,
However the wits may flout--
As wide almost as this blessed town"
(But he winced as if with gout).
"I paid 'em like sin
For to put me in,
But it's O, and O, to be out!"



ONE OF THE REDEEMED

Saint Peter, standing at the Gate, beheld
A soul whose body Death had lately felled.

A pleasant soul as ever was, he seemed:
His step was joyous and his visage beamed.

"Good morning, Peter." There was just a touch
Of foreign accent, but not overmuch.

The Saint bent gravely, like a stately tree,
And said: "You have the advantage, sir, of me."

"Renan of Paris," said the immortal part--
"A master of the literary art.

"I'm somewhat famous, too, I grieve to tell,
As controversialist and infidel."

"That's of no consequence," the Saint replied,
"Why, I myself my Master once denied.

"No one up here cares anything for that.
But is there nothing you were always at?

"It seems to me you were accused one day
Of _something_--what it was I can't just say."

"Quite likely," said the other; "but I swear
My life was irreproachable and fair."

Just then a soul appeared upon the wall,
Singing a hymn as loud as he could bawl.

About his head a golden halo gleamed,
As well befitted one of the redeemed.

A harp he bore and vigorously thumbed,
Strumming he sang, and, singing, ever strummed.

His countenance, suffused with holy pride,
Glowed like a pumpkin with a light inside.

"Ah! that's the chap," said Peter, "who declares:
'Renan's a rake and drunkard--smokes and swears.'

"Yes, that's the fellow--he's a preacher--came
From San Francisco. Mansfield was his name."

"Do you believe him?" said Renan. "Great Scott!
Believe? Believe the blackguard? Of course _not!_

"Just walk right in and make yourself at home.
And if he pecks at you I'll cut his comb.

"He's only here because the Devil swore
He wouldn't have him, for the smile he wore."

Resting his eyes one moment on that proof
Of saving grace, the Frenchman turned aloof,

And stepping down from cloud to cloud, said he:
"Thank you, monsieur,--I'll see if he'll have _me_."



A CRITIC

[Apparently the Cleveland _Leader_ is not a good judge of poetry.--_The Morning Call_.]


That from _you_, neighbor! to whose vacant lot
Each rhyming literary knacker scourges
His cart-compelling Pegasus to trot,
As folly, fame or famine smartly urges?

Admonished by the stimulating goad,
How gaily, lo! the spavined crow-bait prances--
Its cart before it--eager to unload
The dead-dog sentiments and swill-tub fancies.

Gravely the sweating scavenger pulls out
The tail-board of his curst imagination,
Shoots all his rascal rubbish, and, no doubt,
Thanks Fortune for so good a dumping-station.

To improve your property, the vile cascade
Your thrift invites--to make a higher level.
In vain: with tons of garbage overlaid,
Your baseless bog sinks slowly to the devil.

"Rubbish may be shot here"--familiar sign!
I seem to see it in your every column.
You have your wishes, but if I had mine
'Twould to your editor mean something solemn.



A QUESTION OF ELIGIBILITY

It was a bruised and battered chap
The victim of some dire mishap,
Who sat upon a rock and spent
His breath in this ungay lament:

"Some wars--I've frequent heard of such--
Has beat the everlastin' Dutch!
But never fight was fit by man
To equal this which has began
In our (I'm in it, if you please)
Academy of Sciences.
For there is various gents belong
To it which go persistent wrong,
And loving the debates' delight
Calls one another names at sight.
Their disposition, too, accords
With fighting like they all was lords!
Sech impulses should be withstood:
'Tis scientific to be good.

"'Twas one of them, one night last week,
Rose up his figure for to speak:
'Please, Mr. Chair, I'm holding here
A resolution which, I fear,
Some ancient fossils that has bust
Their cases and shook off their dust
To sit as Members here will find
Unpleasant, not to say unkind.'
And then he read it every word,
And silence fell on all which heard.
That resolution, wild and strange,
Proposed a fundamental change,
Which was that idiots no more
Could join us as they had before!

"No sooner was he seated than
The members rose up, to a man.
Each chap was primed with a reply
And tried to snatch the Chairman's eye.
They stomped and shook their fists in air,
And, O, what words was uttered there!

"The Chair was silent, but at last
He hove up his proportions vast
And stilled them tumults with a look
By which the undauntedest was shook.
He smiled sarcastical and said:
'If Argus was the Chair, instead
Of me, he'd lack enough of eyes
Each orator to recognize!
And since, denied a hearing, you
Might maybe undertake to do
Each other harm before you cease,
I've took some steps to keep the peace:
I've ordered out--alas, alas,
That Science e'er to such a pass
Should come!--I've ordered out--the gas!'

"O if a tongue or pen of fire
Was mine I could not tell entire
What the ensuin' actions was.
When swollered up in darkness' jaws
We fit and fit and fit and fit,
And everything we felt we hit!
We gouged, we scratched and we pulled hair,
And O, what words was uttered there!
And when at last the day dawn came
Three hundred Scientists was lame;
Two hundred others couldn't stand,
They'd been so careless handled, and
One thousand at the very least
Was spread upon the floor deceased!
'Twere easy to exaggerate,
But lies is things I mortal hate.

"Such, friends, is the disaster sad
Which has befel the Cal. Acad.
And now the question is of more
Importance than it was before:
Shall vacancies among us be
To idiots threw open free?"



FLEET STROTHER

What! you were born, you animated doll,
Within the shadow of the Capitol?
'Twas always thought (and Bancroft so assures
His trusting readers) it was reared in yours.



CALIFORNIAN SUMMER PICTURES

THE FOOT-HILL RESORT

Assembled in the parlor
Of the place of last resort,
The smiler and the snarler
And the guests of every sort--
The elocution chap
With rhetoric on tap;
The mimic and the funny dog;
The social sponge; the money-hog;
Vulgarian and dude;
And the prude;
The adiposing dame
With pimply face aflame;
The kitten-playful virgin--
Vergin' on to fifty years;
The solemn-looking sturgeon
Of a firm of auctioneers;
The widower flirtatious;
The widow all too gracious;
The man with a proboscis and a sepulcher beneath.
One assassin picks the banjo, and another picks his teeth.



AT ANCHOR

The soft asphaltum in the sun;
Betrays a tendency to run;
Whereas the dog that takes his way
Across its course concludes to stay.



THE IN-COMING CLIMATE

Now o' nights the ocean breeze
Makes the patient flinch,
For that zephyr bears a sneeze
In every cubic inch.
Lo! the lively population
Chorusing in sternutation
A catarrhal acclamation!



A LONG-FELT WANT

Dimly apparent, through the gloom
Of Market-street's opaque simoom,
A queue of people, parti-sexed,
Awaiting the command of "Next!"
A sidewalk booth, a dingy sign:
"Teeth dusted nice--five cents a shine."



TO THE HAPPY HUNTING GROUNDS

Wide windy reaches of high stubble field;
A long gray road, bordered with dusty pines;
A wagon moving in a "cloud by day."
Two city sportsmen with a dove between,
Breast-high upon a fence and fast asleep--
A solitary dove, the only dove
In twenty counties, and it sick, or else
It were not there. Two guns that fire as one,
With thunder simultaneous and loud;
Two shattered human wrecks of blood and bone!
And later, in the gloaming, comes a man--
The worthy local coroner is he,
Renowned all thereabout, and popular
With many a remain. All tenderly
Compiling in a game-bag the debris,
He glides into the gloom and fades from sight.
The dove, cured of its ailment by the shock,
Has flown, meantime, on pinions strong and fleet,
To die of age in some far foreign land.



SLANDER

FITCH:

"All vices you've exhausted, friend;
So all the papers say."

PICKERING:

"Ah, what vile calumnies are penned!--
'Tis just the other way."



JAMES L. FLOOD

As oft it happens in the youth of day
That mists obscure the sun's imperfect ray,
Who, as he's mounting to the dome's extreme,
Smites and dispels them with a steeper beam,
So you the vapors that begirt your birth
Consumed, and manifested all your worth.
But still one early vice obstructs the light
And sullies all the visible and bright
Display of mind and character. You write.



FOUR CANDIDATES FOR SENATOR

To flatter your way to the goad of your hope,
O plausible Mr. Perkins,
You'll need ten tons of the softest soap
And butter a thousand firkins.
The soap you could put to a better use
In washing your hands of ambition
Ere the butter's used for cooking your goose
To a beautiful brown condition.

* * * * *

"The Railroad can't run Stanford." That is so--
The tail can't curl the pig; but then, you know,
Inside the vegetable-garden's pale
The pig will eat more cabbage than the tail.

* * * * *

When Sargent struts by all the lawmakers say:
"Right--left!" It is fair to infer
The right will get left, nor polar the day
When he makes that thing to occur.

Not so, not so, 'tis a joke, that cry--
Foolish and dull and small:
He so bores them for votes that they mean to imply
He's a drill-Sargent, that is all.

* * * * *

Gods! what a sight! Astride McClure's broad back
Estee jogs round the Senatorial track,
The crowd all undecided, as they pass,
Whether to cheer the man or cheer the ass.
They stop: the man to lower his feet is seen
And the tired beast, withdrawing from between,
Mounts, as they start again, the biped's neck,
And scarce the crowd can say which one's on deck.



A GROWLER

Judge Shafter, you're an aged man, I know,
And learned too, I doubt not, in the law;
And a head white with many