<p><SPAN name="ch23" id="ch23"></SPAN></p>
<h2> CHAPTER XXIII </h2>
<h3> [Nicodemus Dodge and the Skeleton] </h3>
<p><br/></p>
<p>We were satisfied that we could walk to Oppenau in one day, now that we
were in practice; so we set out the next morning after breakfast
determined to do it. It was all the way downhill, and we had the loveliest
summer weather for it. So we set the pedometer and then stretched away on
an easy, regular stride, down through the cloven forest, drawing in the
fragrant breath of the morning in deep refreshing draughts, and wishing we
might never have anything to do forever but walk to Oppenau and keep on
doing it and then doing it over again.</p>
<p>Now, the true charm of pedestrianism does not lie in the walking, or in
the scenery, but in the talking. The walking is good to time the movement
of the tongue by, and to keep the blood and the brain stirred up and
active; the scenery and the woodsy smells are good to bear in upon a man
an unconscious and unobtrusive charm and solace to eye and soul and sense;
but the supreme pleasure comes from the talk. It is no matter whether one
talks wisdom or nonsense, the case is the same, the bulk of the enjoyment
lies in the wagging of the gladsome jaw and the flapping of the
sympathetic ear.</p>
<p>And what motley variety of subjects a couple of people will casually rake
over in the course of a day's tramp! There being no constraint, a change
of subject is always in order, and so a body is not likely to keep pegging
at a single topic until it grows tiresome. We discussed everything we
knew, during the first fifteen or twenty minutes, that morning, and then
branched out into the glad, free, boundless realm of the things we were
not certain about.</p>
<p>Harris said that if the best writer in the world once got the slovenly
habit of doubling up his "haves" he could never get rid of it while he
lived. That is to say, if a man gets the habit of saying "I should have
liked to have known more about it" instead of saying simply and sensibly,
"I should have liked to know more about it," that man's disease is
incurable. Harris said that his sort of lapse is to be found in every copy
of every newspaper that has ever been printed in English, and in almost
all of our books. He said he had observed it in Kirkham's grammar and in
Macaulay. Harris believed that milk-teeth are commoner in men's mouths
than those "doubled-up haves."</p>
<blockquote>
<blockquote>
<blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>I do not know that there have not been moments in the course of
the present session when I should have been very glad to have
accepted the proposal of my noble friend, and to have exchanged
parts in some of our evenings of work.—[From a Speech of the
English Chancellor of the Exchequer, August, 1879.]</p>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<p>That changed the subject to dentistry. I said I believed the average man
dreaded tooth-pulling more than amputation, and that he would yell quicker
under the former operation than he would under the latter. The philosopher
Harris said that the average man would not yell in either case if he had
an audience. Then he continued:</p>
<p>"When our brigade first went into camp on the Potomac, we used to be
brought up standing, occasionally, by an ear-splitting howl of anguish.
That meant that a soldier was getting a tooth pulled in a tent. But the
surgeons soon changed that; they instituted open-air dentistry. There
never was a howl afterward—that is, from the man who was having the
tooth pulled. At the daily dental hour there would always be about five
hundred soldiers gathered together in the neighborhood of that dental
chair waiting to see the performance—and help; and the moment the
surgeon took a grip on the candidate's tooth and began to lift, every one
of those five hundred rascals would clap his hand to his jaw and begin to
hop around on one leg and howl with all the lungs he had! It was enough to
raise your hair to hear that variegated and enormous unanimous caterwaul
burst out!<br/> <br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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<p><br/> <br/> <br/> <br/></p>
<p>With so big and so derisive an audience as that, a sufferer wouldn't emit
a sound though you pulled his head off. The surgeons said that pretty
often a patient was compelled to laugh, in the midst of his pangs, but
that they had never caught one crying out, after the open-air exhibition
was instituted."</p>
<p>Dental surgeons suggested doctors, doctors suggested death, death
suggested skeletons—and so, by a logical process the conversation
melted out of one of these subjects and into the next, until the topic of
skeletons raised up Nicodemus Dodge out of the deep grave in my memory
where he had lain buried and forgotten for twenty-five years. When I was a
boy in a printing-office in Missouri, a loose-jointed, long-legged,
tow-headed, jeans-clad countrified cub of about sixteen lounged in one
day, and without removing his hands from the depths of his trousers
pockets or taking off his faded ruin of a slouch hat, whose broken rim
hung limp and ragged about his eyes and ears like a bug-eaten cabbage
leaf, stared indifferently around, then leaned his hip against the
editor's table, crossed his mighty brogans, aimed at a distant fly from a
crevice in his upper teeth, laid him low, and said with composure:</p>
<p>"Whar's the boss?"</p>
<p>"I am the boss," said the editor, following this curious bit of
architecture wonderingly along up to its clock-face with his eye.</p>
<p>"Don't want anybody fur to learn the business, 'tain't likely?"</p>
<p>"Well, I don't know. Would you like to learn it?"<br/> <br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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<p><br/> <br/> <br/> <br/></p>
<p>"Pap's so po' he cain't run me no mo', so I want to git a show somers if I
kin, 'taint no diffunce what—I'm strong and hearty, and I don't turn
my back on no kind of work, hard nur soft."</p>
<p>"Do you think you would like to learn the printing business?"</p>
<p>"Well, I don't re'ly k'yer a durn what I <i>do</i> learn, so's I git a chance fur
to make my way. I'd jist as soon learn print'n's anything."</p>
<p>"Can you read?"</p>
<p>"Yes—middlin'."</p>
<p>"Write?"</p>
<p>"Well, I've seed people could lay over me thar."</p>
<p>"Cipher?"</p>
<p>"Not good enough to keep store, I don't reckon, but up as fur as
twelve-times-twelve I ain't no slouch. 'Tother side of that is what gits
me."</p>
<p>"Where is your home?"</p>
<p>"I'm f'm old Shelby."</p>
<p>"What's your father's religious denomination?"</p>
<p>"Him? Oh, he's a blacksmith."</p>
<p>"No, no—I don't mean his trade. What's his <i>religious denomination</i>?"</p>
<p>"<i>Oh</i>—I didn't understand you befo'. He's a Freemason."</p>
<p>"No, no, you don't get my meaning yet. What I mean is, does he belong to
any <i>church</i>?"</p>
<p>"<i>Now</i> you're talkin'! Couldn't make out what you was a-tryin' to git
through yo' head no way. B'long to a <i>church</i>! Why, boss, he's ben the
pizenest kind of Free-will Babtis' for forty year. They ain't no pizener
ones 'n what <i>he</i> is. Mighty good man, pap is. Everybody says that. If they
said any diffrunt they wouldn't say it whar <i>I</i> wuz—not <i>much</i>
they wouldn't."</p>
<p>"What is your own religion?"</p>
<p>"Well, boss, you've kind o' got me, there—and yit you hain't got me
so mighty much, nuther. I think 't if a feller he'ps another feller when
he's in trouble, and don't cuss, and don't do no mean things, nur noth'n'
he ain' no business to do, and don't spell the Saviour's name with a
little g, he ain't runnin' no resks—he's about as saift as he
b'longed to a church."</p>
<p>"But suppose he did spell it with a little g—what then?"</p>
<p>"Well, if he done it a-purpose, I reckon he wouldn't stand no chance—he
<i>oughtn't</i> to have no chance, anyway, I'm most rotten certain 'bout that."</p>
<p>"What is your name?"</p>
<p>"Nicodemus Dodge."</p>
<p>"I think maybe you'll do, Nicodemus. We'll give you a trial, anyway."</p>
<p>"All right."</p>
<p>"When would you like to begin?"</p>
<p>"Now."</p>
<p>So, within ten minutes after we had first glimpsed this nondescript he was
one of us, and with his coat off and hard at it.</p>
<p>Beyond that end of our establishment which was furthest from the street,
was a deserted garden, pathless, and thickly grown with the bloomy and
villainous "jimpson" weed and its common friend the stately sunflower. In
the midst of this mournful spot was a decayed and aged little "frame"
house with but one room, one window, and no ceiling—it had been a
smoke-house a generation before. Nicodemus was given this lonely and
ghostly den as a bedchamber.</p>
<p>The village smarties recognized a treasure in Nicodemus, right away—a
butt to play jokes on. It was easy to see that he was inconceivably green
and confiding. George Jones had the glory of perpetrating the first joke
on him; he gave him a cigar with a firecracker in it and winked to the
crowd to come; the thing exploded presently and swept away the bulk of
Nicodemus's eyebrows and eyelashes. He simply said:</p>
<p>"I consider them kind of seeg'yars dangersome,"—and seemed to
suspect nothing. The next evening Nicodemus waylaid George and poured a
bucket of ice-water over him.</p>
<p>One day, while Nicodemus was in swimming, Tom McElroy "tied" his clothes.
Nicodemus made a bonfire of Tom's by way of retaliation.</p>
<p>A third joke was played upon Nicodemus a day or two later—he walked
up the middle aisle of the village church, Sunday night, with a staring
handbill pinned between his shoulders. The joker spent the remainder of
the night, after church, in the cellar of a deserted house, and Nicodemus
sat on the cellar door till toward breakfast-time to make sure that the
prisoner remembered that if any noise was made, some rough treatment would
be the consequence. The cellar had two feet of stagnant water in it, and
was bottomed with six inches of soft mud.<br/> <br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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<p><br/> <br/> <br/> <br/></p>
<p>But I wander from the point. It was the subject of skeletons that brought
this boy back to my recollection. Before a very long time had elapsed, the
village smarties began to feel an uncomfortable consciousness of not
having made a very shining success out of their attempts on the simpleton
from "old Shelby." Experimenters grew scarce and chary. Now the young
doctor came to the rescue. There was delight and applause when he proposed
to scare Nicodemus to death, and explained how he was going to do it. He
had a noble new skeleton—the skeleton of the late and only local
celebrity, Jimmy Finn, the village drunkard—a grisly piece of
property which he had bought of Jimmy Finn himself, at auction, for fifty
dollars, under great competition, when Jimmy lay very sick in the tan-yard
a fortnight before his death. The fifty dollars had gone promptly for
whiskey and had considerably hurried up the change of ownership in the
skeleton. The doctor would put Jimmy Finn's skeleton in Nicodemus's bed!</p>
<p>This was done—about half past ten in the evening. About Nicodemus's
usual bedtime—midnight—the village jokers came creeping
stealthily through the jimpson weeds and sunflowers toward the lonely
frame den. They reached the window and peeped in. There sat the
long-legged pauper, on his bed, in a very short shirt, and nothing more;
he was dangling his legs contentedly back and forth, and wheezing the
music of "Camptown Races" out of a paper-overlaid comb which he was
pressing against his mouth; by him lay a new jewsharp, a new top, and
solid india-rubber ball, a handful of painted marbles, five pounds of
"store" candy, and a well-gnawed slab of gingerbread as big and as thick
as a volume of sheet-music. He had sold the skeleton to a traveling quack
for three dollars and was enjoying the result!<br/> <br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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<p><br/> <br/> <br/> <br/></p>
<p>Just as we had finished talking about skeletons and were drifting into the
subject of fossils, Harris and I heard a shout, and glanced up the steep
hillside. We saw men and women standing away up there looking frightened,
and there was a bulky object tumbling and floundering down the steep slope
toward us. We got out of the way, and when the object landed in the road
it proved to be a boy. He had tripped and fallen, and there was nothing
for him to do but trust to luck and take what might come.</p>
<p>When one starts to roll down a place like that, there is no stopping till
the bottom is reached. Think of people <i>farming</i> on a slant which is so
steep that the best you can say of it—if you want to be fastidiously
accurate—is, that it is a little steeper than a ladder and not quite
so steep as a mansard roof. But that is what they do. Some of the little
farms on the hillside opposite Heidelberg were stood up "edgeways." The
boy was wonderfully jolted up, and his head was bleeding, from cuts which
it had got from small stones on the way.<br/> <br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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<p><br/> <br/> <br/> <br/></p>
<p>Harris and I gathered him up and set him on a stone, and by that time the
men and women had scampered down and brought his cap.</p>
<p>Men, women, and children flocked out from neighboring cottages and joined
the crowd; the pale boy was petted, and stared at, and commiserated, and
water was brought for him to drink and bathe his bruises in. And such
another clatter of tongues! All who had seen the catastrophe were
describing it at once, and each trying to talk louder than his neighbor;
and one youth of a superior genius ran a little way up the hill, called
attention, tripped, fell, rolled down among us, and thus triumphantly
showed exactly how the thing had been done.</p>
<p>Harris and I were included in all the descriptions; how we were coming
along; how Hans Gross shouted; how we looked up startled; how we saw Peter
coming like a cannon-shot; how judiciously we got out of the way, and let
him come; and with what presence of mind we picked him up and brushed him
off and set him on a rock when the performance was over. We were as much
heroes as anybody else, except Peter, and were so recognized; we were
taken with Peter and the populace to Peter's mother's cottage, and there
we ate bread and cheese, and drank milk and beer with everybody, and had a
most sociable good time; and when we left we had a handshake all around,
and were receiving and shouting back <i>leb' wohl</i>'s until a turn in the road
separated us from our cordial and kindly new friends forever.</p>
<p>We accomplished our undertaking. At half past eight in the evening we
stepped into Oppenau, just eleven hours and a half out of Allerheiligen—one
hundred and forty-six miles. This is the distance by pedometer; the
guide-book and the Imperial Ordinance maps make it only ten and a quarter—a
surprising blunder, for these two authorities are usually singularly
accurate in the matter of distances.<br/> <br/> <br/> <br/> <br/> <br/>
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