The Autobiography of Methuselah | Page 2

I know not why it should
so transpire, but it is the fact that since I passed my nine hundred and
fiftieth birthday I have had little liking for the pleasures which modern
society most affects. To be sure, old and feeble as I am, and despite the
uncertain quality of my knees, I still enjoy the excitement of the
Virginia Reel, and can still hold my own with men several centuries
younger than myself in the clog, but I leave such diversions as bridge,

draw-poker and pinochle to more frivolous minds--though I will say
that when my great-grandchildren, Shem, Ham and Japhet, the sons of
my grandson Noah, come to my house on the few holidays, their
somewhat over-sober parent allows them from their labors in the
ship-yard, I take great delight in sitting upon the ground with them and
renewing my acquaintance with those games of my youth, marbles, and
mumbledy-peg, the which I learned from my
great-uncle-seven-times-removed, Cain, in the days when with my
grandfather, Jared, I used to go to see our first ancestor, Adam, at the
old farm just outside of Edensburg where, with his beautiful wife Eve,
that Grand Old Man was living in honored retirement.
Nor have I in these days, as I used to have, any especial taste for the
joys of the chase. There was a time when my slungshot was unerring,
and I could bring down a Dodo, or snipe my Harpy on the wing with as
much ease as my wife can hit our barn-door with a rolling-pin at six
feet, and for three hundred and thirty years I never let escape me any
opportunity for tracking the Dinosaur, the Pterodactyl, or that fierce
and sanguinary creature the Osteostogothemy to his lair and there
fighting him unto the death during the open season for wild game of
that particular sort. I well remember how, in my boyhood days, to be
precise, shortly after my two hundred and twenty-second birthday, I
went with my great-grandfather, Mehalaleel, over into the woods back
of Little Ararat after a great horned Ornythyrhyncus and--but that is
another story. Suffice it to say that I have at last reached a period in my
life where I am content to leave the pleasures of Nimrod to my more
nimble neighbors, and that now no winged thing, save an occasional
mosquito, or locust, need fear my approach, and that my indulgence in
the shedding of the blood of animals is confined to an infrequent
personal superintendence of the slaughter of a spring-lamb in green-pea
time, when the scent is in the julep and the bloom is on the mint; or
possibly, now and then, the removal from the pasture to the pantry of a
bit of lowing roast-beef, when I feel an inner craving for the crackle
and the steak.
Racing I have an abhorrence for, and always have had since in my early
days I attended the county-fair at North Ararat, and was there induced

by one of my neighbors to participate as a rider in a twenty-mile
steeplechase between a Discosaurus which I rode, and a Diplodocus in
his possession. I found after the race had started that the animal which
had been assigned to me as a gentleman jockey, had not been broken to
the saddle, and my experience during the next six days in staying on his
back--for he immediately took the bit between his teeth and bolted for
the woods, and was not again got under control for that time--as he
jumped over the various obstacles to his progress, from
thank-you-marms in the highways which were plentiful, to such
mountains as the country for a thousand miles about provided for his
delectation, was one of the most terrific in my life, prolonged as it has
been. I had been assured that the race was to be a "Go-As-You-Please"
affair, but I had not been seated on that horrible creature's back for two
minutes before I discovered that it was a "Go-As-He-Pleased" affair
and that "Going-As-I-Pleased," like the flowers that bloom in the
Spring, had nothing to do with the case. Had I begun in the pursuit of
the pleasures of the track in later years after the invention of wheels,
whereby that easy running vehicle, the sulky, was brought into being,
and when, by the taming of the horse, the latter became a domesticated
animal with sporting proclivities, instead of a mere prowler of the
plains, I might have found the joys of racing more to my taste, although
in these later years of my life when a truly noble pursuit has
degenerated into a mere gambling enterprise, wherein those who can ill
afford it squander their substance in riotous bookmaking, I am inclined
to be grateful that my first experience in this direction