A House-Boat on the Styx | Page 9

isn't a marker to a little day in October I wot of."
"Still sore on that point?" queried Confucius, trying the edge of his
knife on the shade of a salted almond.
"Oh no," said Columbus, calmly. "I don't feel jealous of Washington.
He is the Father of his Country and I am not. I only discovered the
orphan. I knew the country before it had a father or a mother. There
wasn't anybody who was willing to be even a sister to it when I knew it.
But G. W. here took it in hand, groomed it down, spanked it when it
needed it, and started it off on the career which has made it worth while
for me to let my name be known in connection with it. Why should I be
jealous of him?"
"I am sure I don't know why anybody anywhere should be jealous of
anybody else anyhow," said Diogenes. "I never was and I never expect
to be. Jealousy is a quality that is utterly foreign to the nature of an
honest man. Take my own case, for instance. When I was what they
call alive, how did I live?"
"I don't know," said Doctor Johnson, turning his head as he spoke so
that Boswell could not fail to hear. "I wasn't there."
Boswell nodded approvingly, chuckled slightly, and put the Doctor's
remark down for publication in The Gossip.
"You're doubtless right, there," retorted Diogenes. "What you don't
know would fill a circulating library. Well--I lived in a tub. Now, if I
believed in envy, I suppose you think I'd be envious of people who live
in brownstone fronts with back yards and mortgages, eh?"
"I'd rather live under a mortgage than in a tub," said Bonaparte,
contemptuously.

"I know you would," said Diogenes. "Mortgages never bothered you--
but I wouldn't. In the first place, my tub was warm. I never saw a house
with a brownstone front that was, except in summer, and then the
owner cursed it because it was so. My tub had no plumbing in it to get
out of order. It hadn't any flights of stairs in it that had to be climbed
after dinner, or late at night when I came home from the club. It had no
front door with a wandering key-hole calculated to elude the key
ninety-nine times out of every hundred efforts to bring the two together
and reconcile their differences, in order that their owner may get into
his own house late at night. It wasn't chained down to any particular
neighborhood, as are most brownstone fronts. If the neighborhood ran
down, I could move my tub off into a better neighborhood, and it never
lost value through the deterioration of its location. I never had to pay
taxes on it, and no burglar was ever so hard up that he thought of
breaking into my habitation to rob me. So why should I be jealous of
the brownstone- house dwellers? I am a philosopher, gentlemen. I tell
you, philosophy is the thief of jealousy, and I had the good-luck to find
it out early in life."
"There is much in what you say," said Confucius. "But there's another
side to the matter. If a man is an aristocrat by nature, as I was, his
neighborhood never could run down. Wherever he lived would be the
swell section, so that really your last argument isn't worth a stewed
icicle."
"Stewed icicles are pretty good, though," said Baron Munchausen, with
an ecstatic smack of his lips. "I've eaten them many a time in the polar
regions."
"I have no doubt of it," put in Doctor Johnson. "You've eaten fried
pyramids in Africa, too, haven't you?"
"Only once," said the Baron, calmly. "And I can't say I enjoyed them.
They are rather heavy for the digestion."
"That's so," said Ptolemy. "I've had experience with pyramids myself."
"You never ate one, did you, Ptolemy?" queried Bonaparte.

"Not raw," said Ptolemy, with a chuckle. "Though I've been tempted
many a time to call for a second joint of the Sphinx."
There was a laugh at this, in which all but Baron Munchausen joined.
"I think it is too bad," said the Baron, as the laughter subsided--"I think
it is very much too bad that you shades have brought mundane
prejudice with you into this sphere. Just because some people with
finite minds profess to disbelieve my stories, you think it well to be
sceptical yourselves. I don't care, however, whether you believe me or
not. The fact remains that I have eaten one fried pyramid and countless
stewed icicles, and the stewed icicles were finer than any diamond-back
rat Confucius ever had served at a state banquet."
"Where's Shakespeare to-night?" asked Confucius, seeing that the
Baron was beginning to