Who Spoke Next | Page 8

must tell you, however, how I at last came here. Judah Loring brought
me home safe; he was a very honest fellow, and seeing the initials
scratched on my butt-end, and 'Lexington' underneath, he went there on
purpose to find to whom I belonged.
My friend William claimed me, and I was again placed behind the old
clock in the little parlor. His mother looked very calm, and almost
happy, but not as she once did; she sighed heavily when William
brought me home. William's wound in his arm healed after a while, but
his arm was disabled. By great self-denial and exertion, his mother had
got him into college, and he was to be a schoolmaster.
The sight of me was painful to this good woman, and she gave me to
uncle John who kept me safely and, on the whole, honorably till his son
placed me here.
There is one disgrace I have met with which, in good faith, however
unwillingly, I ought to mention. Uncle John used me to kill skunks
occasionally. This there was no great harm in doing, only he should not
have talked about it. I disliked, it, however, exceedingly.
Once, I am told, when he was in the South, some southern gentleman,
for some trifling offense, challenged him.
Uncle John was told that he, as the party challenged, might choose his
weapons.
"Well," he said to his enemy, "if you will wait till I can send for my
skunk gun, I am ready for you."
I have since, I do hate to say it, been called the skunk gun repeatedly.

To be sure, no one that has any reverence in his nature speaks of me in
this way. Uncle John had not much, but his son, the father of that little
girl, treats me with due respect, and forbids them to call me the skunk
gun.
I was once the defender of liberty, and am ready to be so again. I was
not made to kill skunks, those disgusting little animals. I hate to think
of them.
Pardon me for keeping you listening to me so long; I have done. I wish
to hear now what that respectable-looking broadsword has to say. We
two ought to be friends."
"I was born a gentleman," said the broadsword. "I was always
considered the sign, the symbol of one. Not many years since, a sword
was so essential to the character of a gentleman that a man without one
by his side, was, in fact, not considered a gentleman.
My master, who was also yours, Mr. Curlingtongs, was one the officers
in the company of Cadets at its first formation. He had the honorable
title of Major, and all his best friends called him Major. Little did I
think once that I should be condemned to the disgrace of spending my
old age in a garret with crooked curling tongs, broken pitchers, old
baize gowns, noseless tea-kettles, old crutches, a foot stove, and, worse
than all, a spinning wheel.
My only peers here are the venerable musket and the respectable wig.
Even they have seen too much hard service to be able fully to
appreciate the feelings of a gentleman who has been brought up as I
have. The degradation the musket especially endured, in being used as
a spade by such a very common sort of person as Judah Loring--a
degradation of which, far from being ashamed, he seems actually proud;
all this, I say, my friends, makes a wide separation between us never to
be forgotten or got over."
"I'm agreed, the further off the better," growled the musket. The old
wig also gave a sort of contemptuous hitch, that seemed to say, he
agreed with the musket.

"I consider myself," resumed the broad-sword, "to be a perfect
gentleman. I have never denied myself by any sort of labor. I have been
considered something to show, something to be used only as a terror to
evil doers.
It strikes me that I really made the Major; he never could appear in his
company or perform his duties without me; his queue was not more
essential. He was not a Major without me. Every one feared me when
they saw my shining blade out of its scabbard, and it was really
amusing occasionally to see the effect I produced. There have been
swords that have done bloody work, but I have never been so defiled.
The Boston Cadets, you know, are the Governor's body guard, and such
is the anxiety of people sometimes to see a real live governor when he
has on his governor's dress and character, that the women and children
crowd around him so that he can hardly find room to move and breathe.
At one of these times of great pressure, my master