Shapes of Clay by Ambrose Bierce (best short novels of all time txt) 📕

/> Careless and free was his mien, and he
Held a fiddle-string in his teeth.

She marked his march, she wrought an arch
Of her back and blew up her tail;
And her eyes were green as ever were seen,
And she uttered a woful wail.

The spitcat's plaint was as follows: "It ain't
That I am to music a foe;
For fiddle-strings bide in my own inside,
And I twang them soft and low.

"But that dog has trifled with art and rifled
A kitten of mine, ah me!
That catgut slim was marauded from him:
'Tis the string that men call E."

Then she sounded high, in the key of Y,
A note that cracked the tombs;
And the missiles through the firmament flew
From adjacent sleeping-rooms.

As her gruesome yell from the gate-post fell
She followed it down to earth;
And that snapdog wears a placard that bears
The inscription: "Blind from birth."





THE GENESIS OF EMBARRASSMENT.

When Adam first saw Eve he said:
"O lovely creature, share my bed."
Before consenting, she her gaze
Fixed on the greensward to appraise,
As well as vision could avouch,
The value of the proffered couch.
And seeing that the grass was green
And neatly clipped with a machine--
Observing that the flow'rs were rare
Varieties, and some were fair,
The posts of precious woods, besprent
With fragrant balsams, diffluent,
And all things suited to her worth,
She raised her angel eyes from earth
To his and, blushing to confess,
Murmured: "I love you, Adam--yes."
Since then her daughters, it is said,
Look always down when asked to wed.





IN CONTUMACIAM.

Och! Father McGlynn,
Ye appear to be in
Fer a bit of a bout wid the Pope;
An' there's divil a doubt
But he's knockin' ye out
While ye're hangin' onto the rope.

An' soon ye'll lave home
To thravel to Rome,
For its bound to Canossa ye are.
Persistin' to shtay
When ye're ordered away--
Bedad! that is goin' too far!





RE-EDIFIED.

Lord of the tempest, pray refrain
From leveling this church again.
Now in its doom, as so you've willed it,
We acquiesce. But _you'll_ rebuild it.





A BULLETIN.

"Lothario is very low,"
So all the doctors tell.
Nay, nay, not _so_--he will be, though,
If ever he get well.





FROM THE MINUTES.

When, with the force of a ram that discharges its ponderous body
Straight at the rear elevation of the luckless culler of simples,
The foot of Herculean Kilgore--statesman of surname suggestive
Or carnage unspeakable!--lit like a missile prodigious
Upon the Congressional door with a monstrous and mighty momentum,
Causing that vain ineffective bar to political freedom
To fly from its hinges, effacing the nasal excrescence of Dingley,
That luckless one, decently veiling the ruin with ready bandanna,
Lamented the loss of his eminence, sadly with sobs as follows:
"Ah, why was I ever elected to the halls of legislation,
So soon to be shown the door with pitiless emphasis? Truly,
I've leaned on a broken Reed, and the same has gone back on me meanly.
Where now is my prominence, erstwhile in council conspicuous, patent?
Alas, I did never before understand what I now see clearly,
To wit, that Democracy tends to level all human distinctions!"
His fate so untoward and sad the Pine-tree statesman, bewailing,
Stood in the corridor there while Democrats freed from confinement
Came trooping forth from the chamber, dissembling all, as they passed him,
Hilarious sentiments painful indeed to observe, and remarking:
"O friend and colleague of the Speaker, what ails the unjoyous proboscis?"





WOMAN IN POLITICS.

What, madam, run for School Director? You?
And want my vote and influence? Well, well,
That beats me! Gad! where _are_ we drifting to?
In all my life I never have heard tell
Of such sublime presumption, and I smell
A nigger in the fence! Excuse me, madam;
We statesmen sometimes speak like the old Adam.

But now you mention it--well, well, who knows?
We might, that's certain, give the sex a show.
I have a cousin--teacher. I suppose
If I stand in and you 're elected--no?
You'll make no bargains? That's a pretty go!
But understand that school administration
Belongs to Politics, not Education.

We'll pass the teacher deal; but it were wise
To understand each other at the start.
You know my business--books and school supplies;
You'd hardly, if elected, have the heart
Some small advantage to deny me--part
Of all my profits to be yours. What? Stealing?
Please don't express yourself with so much feeling.

You pain me, truly. Now one question more.
Suppose a fair young man should ask a place
As teacher--would you (pardon) shut the door
Of the Department in his handsome face
Until--I know not how to put the case--
Would you extort a kiss to pay your favor?
Good Lord! you laugh? I thought the matter graver.

Well, well, we can't do business, I suspect:
A woman has no head for useful tricks.
My profitable offers you reject
And will not promise anything to fix
The opposition. That's not politics.
Good morning. Stay--I'm chaffing you, conceitedly.
Madam, I mean to vote for you--repeatedly.





TO AN ASPIRANT.

What! you a Senator--you, Mike de Young?
Still reeking of the gutter whence you sprung?
Sir, if all Senators were such as you,
Their hands so crimson and so slender, too,--
(Shaped to the pocket for commercial work,
For literary, fitted to the dirk)--
So black their hearts, so lily-white their livers,
The toga's touch would give a man the shivers.





A BALLAD OF PIKEVILLE.

Down in Southern Arizona where the Gila monster thrives,
And the "Mescalero," gifted with a hundred thousand lives,
Every hour renounces one of them by drinking liquid flame--
The assassinating wassail that has given him his name;
Where the enterprising dealer in Caucasian hair is seen
To hold his harvest festival upon his village-green,
While the late lamented tenderfoot upon the plain is spread
With a sanguinary circle on the summit of his head;
Where the cactuses (or cacti) lift their lances in the sun,
And incautious jackass-rabbits come to sorrow as they run,
Lived a colony of settlers--old Missouri was the State
Where they formerly resided at a prehistoric date.

Now, the spot that had been chosen for this colonizing scheme
Was as waterless, believe me, as an Arizona stream.

The soil was naught but ashes, by the breezes driven free,
And an acre and a quarter were required to sprout a pea.
So agriculture languished, for the land would not produce,
And for lack of water, whisky was the beverage in use--
Costly whisky, hauled in wagons many a weary, weary day,
Mostly needed by the drivers to sustain them on their way.
Wicked whisky! King of Evils! Why, O, why did God create
Such a curse and thrust it on us in our inoffensive state?

Once a parson came among them, and a holy man was he;
With his ailing stomach whisky wouldn't anywise agree;
So he knelt upon the _mesa_ and he prayed with all his chin
That the Lord would send them water or incline their hearts to gin.

Scarcely was the prayer concluded ere an earthquake shook the land,
And with copious effusion springs burst out on every hand!
Merrily the waters gurgled, and the shock which gave them birth
Fitly was by some declared a temperance movement of the earth.
Astounded by the miracle, the people met that night
To celebrate it properly by some religious rite;
And 'tis truthfully recorded that before the moon had sunk
Every man and every woman was devotionally drunk.
A half a standard gallon (says history) per head
Of the best Kentucky prime was at that ceremony shed.
O, the glory of that country! O, the happy, happy folk.
By the might of prayer delivered from Nature's broken yoke!
Lo! the plains to the horizon all are yellowing with rye,
And the corn upon the hill-top lifts its banners to the sky!
Gone the wagons, gone the drivers, and the road is grown to grass,
Over which the incalescent Bourbon did aforetime pass.
Pikeville (that's the name they've given, in their wild, romantic way,
To that irrigation district) now distills, statistics say,
Something like a hundred gallons, out of each recurrent crop,
To the head of population--and consumes it, every drop!





A BUILDER.

I saw the devil--he was working free:
A customs-house he builded by the sea.
"Why do you this?" The devil raised his head;
"Churches and courts I've built enough," he said.





AN AUGURY.

Upon my desk a single spray,
With starry blossoms fraught.
I write in many an idle way,
Thinking one serious thought.

"O flowers, a fine Greek name ye bear,
And with a