Black Beetles in Amber, Ambrose Bierce [read with me .txt] 📗

/> And it's, O, a weepin' sight
To see a great editor bold and free
Reducted to sech a plight!



"BLACK BART, Po8"

Welcome, good friend; as you have served your term,
And found the joy of crime to be a fiction,
I hope you'll hold your present faith, stand firm
And not again be open to conviction.

Your sins, though scarlet once, are now as wool:
You've made atonement for all past offenses,
And conjugated--'twas an awful pull!--
The verb "to pay" in all its moods and tenses.

You were a dreadful criminal--by Heaven,
I think there never was a man so sinful!
We've all a pinch or two of Satan's leaven,
But you appeared to have an even skinful.

Earth shuddered with aversion at your name;
Rivers fled backward, gravitation scorning;
The sea and sky, from thinking on your shame,
Grew lobster-red at eve and in the morning.

But still red-handed at your horrid trade
You wrought, to reason deaf, and to compassion.
But now with gods and men your peace is made
I beg you to be good and in the fashion.

What's that?--you "ne'er again will rob a stage"?
What! did you do so? Faith, I didn't know it.
Was _that_ what threw poor Themis in a rage?
I thought you were convicted as a poet!

I own it was a comfort to my soul,
And soothed it better than the deepest curses,
To think they'd got one poet in a hole
Where, though he wrote, he could not print, his verses.

I thought that Welcker, Plunkett, Brooks, and all
The ghastly crew who always are begriming
With villain couplets every page and wall,
Might be arrested and "run in" for rhyming.

And then Parnassus would be left to me,
And Pegasus should bear me up it gaily,
Nor down a steep place run into the sea,
As now he must be tempted to do daily.

Well, grab the lyre-strings, hearties, and begin:
Bawl your harsh souls all out upon the gravel.
I must endure you, for you'll never sin
By robbing coaches, until dead men travel.



A "SCION OF NOBILITY"

Come, sisters, weep!--our Baron dear,
Alas! has run away.
If always we had kept him here
He had not gone astray.

Painter and grainer it were vain
To say he was, before;
And if he were, yet ne'er again
He'll darken here a door.

We mourn each matrimonial plan--
Even tradesmen join the cry:
He was so promising a man
Whenever he did buy.

He was a fascinating lad,
Deny it all who may;
Even moneyed men confess he had
A very taking way.

So from our tables he is gone--
Our tears descend in showers;
We loved the very fat upon.
His kidneys, for 'twas ours.

To women he was all respect
To duns as cold as ice;
No lady could his suit reject,
No tailor get its price.

He raised our hope above the sky;
Alas! alack! and O!
That one who worked it up so high
Should play it down so low!



THE NIGHT OF ELECTION

"O venerable patriot, I pray
Stand not here coatless; at the break of day
We'll know the grand result--and even now
The eastern sky is faintly touched with gray.

"It ill befits thine age's hoary crown--
This rude environment of rogue and clown,
Who, as the lying bulletins appear,
With drunken cries incarnadine the town.

"But if with noble zeal you stay to note
The outcome of your patriotic vote
For Blaine, or Cleveland, and your native land,
Take--and God bless you!--take my overcoat."

"Done, pard--and mighty white of you. And now
guess the country'll keep the trail somehow.
I aint allowed to vote, the Warden said,
But whacked my coat up on old Stanislow."



THE CONVICTS' BALL

San Quentin was brilliant. Within the halls
Of the noble pile with the frowning walls
(God knows they've enough to make them frown,
With a Governor trying to break them down!)
Was a blaze of light. 'Twas the natal day
Of his nibs the popular John S. Gray,
And many observers considered his birth
The primary cause of his moral worth.
"The ball is free!" cried Black Bart, and they all
Said a ball with no chain was a novel ball;
"And I never have seed," said Jimmy Hope,
"Sech a lightsome dance withouten a rope."
Chinamen, Indians, Portuguese, Blacks,
Russians, Italians, Kanucks and Kanaks,
Chilenos, Peruvians, Mexicans--all
Greased with their presence that notable ball.
None were excluded excepting, perhaps,
The Rev. Morrison's churchly chaps,
Whom, to prevent a religious debate,
The Warden had banished outside of the gate.
The fiddler, fiddling his hardest the while,
"Called off" in the regular foot-hill style:
"Circle to the left!" and "Forward and back!"
And "Hellum to port for the stabbard tack!"
(This great _virtuoso_, it would appear,
Was Mate of the _Gatherer_ many a year.)
"_Ally man_ left!"--to a painful degree
His French was unlike to the French of Paree,
As heard from our countrymen lately abroad,
And his "_doe cee doe_" was the gem of the fraud.
But what can you hope from a gentleman barred
From circles of culture by dogs in the yard?
'Twas a glorious dance, though, all the same,
The Jardin Mabille in the days of its fame
Never saw legs perform such springs--
The cold-chisel's magic had given them wings.
They footed it featly, those lades and gents:
Dull care (said Long Moll) had a helly go-hence!

'Twas a very aristocratic affair:
The _creme de la creme_ and _elite_ were there--
Rank, beauty and wealth from the highest sets,
And Hubert Howe Bancroft sent his regrets.



A PRAYER

Sweet Spirit of Cesspool, hear a mother's prayer:
Her terrors pacify and offspring spare!
Upon Silurians alone let fall
(And God in Heaven have mercy on them all!)
The red revenges of your fragrant breath,
Hot with the flames invisible of death.
Sing in each nose a melody of smells,
And lead them snoutwise to their several hells!



TO ONE DETESTED

Sir, you're a veteran, revealed
In history and fable
As warrior since you took the field,
Defeating Abel.

As Commissary later (or
If not, in every cottage
The tale is) you contracted for
A mess of pottage.

In civil life you were, we read
(And our respect increases)
A man of peace--a man, indeed,
Of thirty pieces.

To paying taxes when you turned
Your mind, or what you call so,
A wide celebrity you earned--
Saphira also.

In every age, by various names,
You've won renown in story,
But on your present record flames
A greater glory.

Cain, Esau, and Iscariot, too,
And Ananias, likewise,
Each had peculiar powers, but who
Could lie as Mike lies?



THE BOSS'S CHOICE

Listen to his wild romances:
He advances foolish fancies,
Each expounded as his "view"--
Gu.

In his brain's opacous clot, ah
He has got a maggot! What a
Man with "views" to overwhelm us!--
Gulielmus.

Hear his demagogic clamor--
Hear him stammer in his grammar!
Teaching, he will learn to spell--
Gulielmus L.

Slave who paid the price demanded--
With two-handed iron branded
By the boss--pray cease to dose us,
Gulielmus L. Jocosus.



A MERCIFUL GOVERNOR

Standing within the triple wall of Hell,
And flattening his nose against a grate
Behind whose brazen bars he'd had to dwell
A thousand million ages to that date,
Stoneman bewailed his melancholy fate,
And his big tear-drops, boiling as they fell,
Had worn between his feet, the record mentions,
A deep depression in the "good intentions."

Imperfectly by memory taught how--
For prayer in Hell is a lost art--he prayed,
Uplifting his incinerated brow
And flaming hands in supplication's aid.
"O grant," he cried, "my torment may be stayed--
In mercy, some short breathing spell allow!
If one good deed I did before my ghosting,
Spare me and give Delmas a double roasting."

Breathing a holy harmony in Hell,
Down through the appalling clamors of the place,
Charming them all to willing concord, fell
A Voice ineffable and full of grace:
"Because of all the law-defying race
One single malefactor of the cell
Thou didst not free from his incarceration,
Take thou ten thousand years of condonation."

Back from their fastenings began to shoot
The rusted bolts; with dreadful roar, the gate
Laboriously turned; and, black with soot,
The extinguished spirit passed that awful strait,
And as he legged it into space, elate,
Muttered: "Yes, I remember that galoot--
I'd signed his pardon, ready to allot it,
But stuck it in my desk and quite forgot it."



AN INTERPRETATION

Now Lonergan appears upon the boards,
And Truth and Error sheathe their lingual swords.
No more in wordy warfare to engage,
The commentators bow before the stage,
And bookworms, militant for ages past,
Confess their equal foolishness at last,
Reread their Shakspeare in the newer light
And swear the meaning's obvious to sight.
For centuries the question has been hot:
Was Hamlet crazy, or was Hamlet not?
Now, Lonergan's illuminating art
Reveals the truth of the disputed "part,"
And shows to all the critics of the earth
That Hamlet was an idiot from birth!



A SOARING TOAD

So, Governor, you would not serve again
Although we'd all agree to pay you double.
You find it all is vanity and pain--
One clump of clover in a field of stubble--
One grain of pleasure in a peck of trouble.
'Tis sad, at your age, having to complain
Of disillusion; but the fault is whose
When pigmies stumble, wearing giants' shoes?

I humbly told you many moons ago
For high preferment you were all unfit.
A clumsy bear makes but a sorry show
Climbing a pole. Let him, judicious, sit
With dignity at bottom of his pit,
And none his awkwardness will ever know.
Some beasts look better, and feel better, too,
Seen from above; and so, I think, would you.

Why, you were mad! Did you suppose because
Our foolish system suffers foolish men
To climb to power, make, enforce the laws,
And, it is whispered, break them now and then,
We love the fellows and respect them when
We've stilled the volume of our loud hurrahs?
When folly blooms we trample it the more
For having fertilized it heretofore.

Behold yon laborer! His garb is mean,
His face is grimy, but