The Autobiography of Methuselah | Page 8

condition
of enduring spinsterhood in which she was passing her days. Even her,
however, I could have viewed with amused toleration if so be she could
have been induced to practice her theories as to the Fifty-seven Best
Ways To Bring Up The Young upon others than myself. She was an
amusing young thing, and the charming way in which even in middle
age--she was as I have already said 623 years old at the time of which I
write--she held on to the manners of youth was delightful to
contemplate. She always kept herself looking very fit, and was the first
woman in our section of the world to wear her hair pompadour in front,
running to the extreme psychic knot behind--she called it psychic,
though I have since learned that the proper adjective is Psyche,
indicating rather a levity of mind than anything else. It should be said
of her in all justice that she was a leader in her set, and as President of
the Woman's Club of Enochsville was a person of more than ordinary
influence, and it was through her that the movement to grant the
franchise to all single women over three hundred and forty, resulted in
the extension of the suffrage to that extent.
[Illustration: "It's a boy, sir!"]

Incidentally I cannot forget the wise words of my father in this
connection. He had always been an anti-suffragist, but when Aunt
Jerusha's plan was laid before him he swung instantly around and
became one of its heartiest advocates.
"It is a wise measure," said he. "Safe, sane and practical, for no single
woman will confess to the age of qualification, so that in passing this
act we grant the prayers of our petitioners without subjecting ourselves
to the dangers of women's suffrage. Remember my son, that it always
pays to be generous with that which costs you nothing, and that
woman's suffrage is as harmless as the cooing dove if you only take the
precaution to raise the age limit high enough to freeze out the old
maids."
I should add too that Aunt Jerusha had a way with her that was not
without its fascination. To look at her you would never have supposed
that she was more than four hundred years old, and the variety of eyes
that she could make when there were men about, was wonderful to see.
I noticed it the very day I was born, and when I first caught sight of that
piquante little glance that now and then she cast in my direction out of
the tail of her eye, I began rummaging about in the back of my
subconscious mind for the precise words with which to characterize
her.
"You giddy old flirt!" was the apostrophe I had in mind at the moment,
but, of course, having had no practice in speech I was compelled to
forego the pleasure of giving audible expression to the thought.
Unfortunately for me Aunt Jerusha equipped with that intuitive
knowledge of what to do under any given circumstances that invariably
goes with the status of maiden-aunthood in its acute stages, now
assumed complete control of my destinies; and for a time it looked as
though I were in a fair way to become what the great Egyptian ruler,
King Ptush the Third was referring to in many of his State papers as a
"Meticulous Mollycoddle." To begin with, Aunt Jerusha was a strong
believer in the New Thought School of Infantile Development, and
when I was barely six weeks old she began strapping me on a board
like an Eskimo baby, and suspending me thus restrained to a peg in the

wall, where, helpless, I was required to hang and stare while she
implanted the germs of strength in my soul by reading aloud whole
chapters from the inspired chisellings of the popular seer Ber Nard
Pshaw, who was to the literature of that period what King Ptush was to
statecraft. He was the acknowledged leader of the Neo-Bunkum School
of Right Thinking, and had first attracted the attention of his age by his
famous reply to one who had called him an Egotist.
"I am more than that," he answered. "I am a Megotist. The world is full
of I's, but there is only one Me."
Upon this sort of thing was I fed, not only spiritually but physically, by
my Aunt Jerusha. When, for instance, I found myself suffering from a
pain in my Commissary Department for the sole and sufficient reason
that my nurse had inadvertently handed me the hard cider jug instead of
my noon-day bottle of discosaurus' milk, she would rattle off some
such statement as this: Thought is everything. Pain is something. Hence
where there is no thought there can be no pain. Wherefore