(August 24 to September 23)
VIRGO IS the sign of the Virgin, and those born under it have a special gift of emerging from the most dishevelled situations looking as though butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths. You who are born under this sign will do well to take fullest advantage of your air of inexperience and untouchability which, with careful husbanding, should last all your life, deluding thousands of people, some of whom ought to know better. Staggering as the notion is, all astrologers agree that the greatest danger to you lies in over-work; therefore you should never lose an opportunity to rest, and should always put off until tomorrow what people born under Leo have demanded that you do today.
As you might have expected, those born under the sign of Virgo have a somewhat cool group of lucky colours—green, greeny-yellowy, blue and black. Your lucky flowers likewise are on the quiet side—bachelor’s button, mourning bride, lavender and azalea. Your lucky stones are marcasite (or white iron pyrites if you want to drag the thing down to its lowest level), agate (of the kind from which children’s marbles are made), jasper and the more attractive emerald and topaz. You will probably wonder why those born under the sign of the Virgin are not encouraged to wear white. I do not know, but I think you should be pleased that you have been spared such a trying colour; it is a nuisance to maintain and very few people look really well in it. Also, it is a ridiculous colour for men. The only man in recent history who habitually wore white clothes was Mark Twain, who was born under Sagittarius and should have worn black, both for astrological and laundry considerations.
Disagreeable as such a revelation must be to the Virgin-born, your weak spot is your intestines, and astrologers for five centuries have advised your kind to keep away from rich foods and sweetmeats. Your liver, spleen, pancreas and tripes are all of a delicate and readily incommoded disposition. Much of your pensive and romantic character in youth springs directly from this source, but as middle age overtakes you these qualities are likely to be transformed into simple dyspepsia. It is then that you must either behave like a philosopher and eat a restricted and moderate diet, or embark on a life of alternating excess and remorse—the Christmas Dinner followed by the Awful Session in the Night. Many of the Virgo-born attempt to sublimate their dyspepsia—to render it nobler by pretending that it is some mysterious and debilitating complaint which they bear with a martyr’s smile—but this rarely works. The eructation and the borborygmy, the yellow eyeball and the pallid cheek betray too plainly where the trouble really lies.
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INVENTOR OF THE HANDKERCHIEF / I should like to learn something every day, but whole months pass during which I learn nothing at all. Today, however, a crumb of information came my way which I had never nibbled before, and it was this: the handkerchief was invented by King Richard II. He was the first man known to history to carry a piece of linen or silk, clean every day, for blowing his nose. This seems to me to raise Richard to a higher place in the ranks of English royalty than he is usually granted. We make a hero of Henry V, who was a loudmouthed brawler, and we take an indulgent view of his father, Henry IV, who was a crook. Both of these fellows, though usurpers of Richard’s throne, blew their noses on their fingers and slept in their underwear. But Richard, who invented the handkerchief and seems to have been one of the very few English politicians who knew how to get along with the Irish, is usually brushed off as a foolish fellow who liked poetry and music, attended plays and wasted money on triflers like Chaucer. For his invention of the handkerchief I insist that he deserves a statue in pure gold.
CHURCH ECONOMICS / Attended an entertainment in a church hall this evening, and during the intervals some little girls sold fudge in aid of their Sunday School. They handed over a large sack of first-class fudge in return for ten cents, and this struck me as typical church economics, for there was at least twenty cents’ worth of delicious fattening sweetmeat in each bag. If these little girls had business instincts, they would reckon their overhead, time, cartage to the church, and materials, and would then sell the fudge at thirty-five cents a bag; but as no one could then afford to eat it, they would lobby for a government subsidy, which would pay them twenty cents on each bag of fudge, allowing them to sell for fifteen cents. As the fudge would still sell very well at that price, there would soon be a glutted market, and they would get the government to buy their surplus fudge at the full retail price, and sell it to Europe for ten cents a bag. However, I did not explain these things to them, but contented myself with buying two bags of bargain fudge, and stealing another, which somebody, in the seats in front of mine, left behind them at the end of the entertainment.
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To the Rev. Simon Goaste, B.D.
Dear Rector:
Do you believe in reincarnation? I don’t suppose you do, and neither do I, but it is attractive nonsense, none the less. I ask because it occurred to me last night that I might possibly be a reincarnation of Good Queen Bess. I read that she “passionately admired handsome persons and he was already far advanced in her favour who approached her with beauty and grace. She had so unconquerable an aversion for men who had been treated unfortunately by nature, that she could not endure their presence.” I feel just the same. I like handsome people, particularly women. I also like people who are fascinatingly ugly. It’s the in-betweens who give me eye-strain and I generally treat them with bad-tempered indifference.
So perhaps I am Queen Elizabeth returned to earth. Have you noticed that people who believe in reincarnation never imagine that they were a person of no importance in another life? Have you ever heard one claim that he was a slave who worked quite contentedly on the Pyramids, and died of rupture at 23? Or that he was a peasant who neglected to go to see Joan of Arc burned because he was mending his roof? Or that he was a Scottish crofter who saw young James Watt watching the tea-kettle and said “Yon laddie’ll never amount to owt”? But the world is full of unrecognized Napoleons, Cleopatras and similar great ones.
Yours sincerely,
Samuel Marchbanks
(or possibly Queen Elizabeth).
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To Miss Nancy Frisgig.
Charming Nancy:
I have your note in which you say that you wish you had lived in the Middle Ages, because it must have been such fun. I’m not so sure. Do you know that during the greater part of what we call the Middle Ages nobody had a bed? They slept on heaps of straw, quite naked, and it was considered pernickety to change the straw more than two or three times a year. Those who had beds slept in curious contrivances which caused them to lie at an angle of forty-five degrees; it must have been rather like sleeping standing up. Do you know that there were no chimneys in those times? Fires were built in the middle of the main room of the house, and the smoke escaped through a hole in the roof, but only after it had whirled all around the room and choked everybody. When, late in the Middle Ages, chimneys were introduced, they caused outraged complaint among architectural critics and moralists who thought discomfort must be healthy.
But the real trial was the music. Last week I had a chance to hear quite a lot of mediaeval music, played on a lute, by a modern expert. I suppose you think of a lute as a charming instrument which young men would have played under your window to show that they loved you? Ha, ha. The lute sounds pretty much like a guitar with a cold in its head. A catarrh, in fact. Ho, ho.
So when you are tempted to idealize the Middle Ages, imagine yourself lying naked in dirty, tickly straw, breathing smoke and listening to the lute. There is really a great deal to be said for modern comfort.
Yours as always,
Sam.
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To Haubergeon Hydra, ESQ.
My dear Mr. Hydra:
I am not an unreasonable man, I hope, but the Government’s action in bringing in Daylight Saving, or Summer Time, has caused me a degree of inconvenience which rouses me to protest. And naturally it is to you, as Deputy Commissioner of Officially Approved Nuisances, that I turn.
The principal timepiece in my home, sir, is a striking clock. At the half hour it goes Dong, and at the hour it goes Dong as many times as it is o’clock. Or rather, I should say that it goes Whang, for the thing in its intestines which makes the noise is not a bell, but a coiled spring, which simulates the sound of a bell less than perfectly.
Now some years ago this clock fell ill of a horological malady which caused its Whanging apparatus to lose an hour, so that it always Whangs one too few. And now that you have further complicated matters with your Daylight Saving, it Whangs two too few, which is more than flesh and blood can bear, particularly when it Whangs midnight at two a.m.
As you know, it is fatal to tamper with a good clock. One must take it as it is, or not at all. But my clock is unnerving me, and I hold you and the Government responsible.
Yours at sixes and sevens,
Samuel Marchbanks.
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To Raymond Cataplasm, M.D., F.R.C.P.
Dear Dr. Cataplasm:
Cannot the medical profession do anything about the vast quantity of medical misinformation which is foisted upon the public under the guise of beauty hints? I am just as anxious to be beautiful as anyone, and I read in a magazine yesterday that it was a very good thing to lie down for half an hour with your feet higher than your head. The writer stated flatly that this would relieve bags under the eyes, blotchy complexion, sinus trouble, slumped abdomen, taedium vitae and all the other ills from which I suffer. So I tried it.
It was not positively unpleasant, though it produced an effect rather like slow strangulation. The article led me to believe that this was wonderful fresh blood swirling around in my blood-starved brain. But when the half hour was up, and I rose to my feet, everything about me which had been slumped before slumped again with such sudden force that for a moment I thought the shock would bear me to the ground. I was just able to stagger to a sofa, and lie down in a perfectly horizontal position until the fit had passed.
My beauty has not been noticeably enhanced by this experience. Why are such impostures permitted?
Yours in a condition of utter slump,
Samuel Marchbanks.
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To Amyas Pilgarlic, ESQ.
Dear Pil:
It is a bit thick, your rebuke to me for believing in ghosts, calling them “superstitions unbecoming a scientific age.” If there is one lesson science impresses on us all, it is surely that nothing is incredible.
Haven’t you heard about “neutrinos”? Apparently there are such things—little doodads of which sixty billion penetrate each square inch of our bodies every second and go on their way having done no harm whatever. But nobody has so far suggested that the neutrinos are, in their way, unaware of us. I put it to you that to a neutrino you and I probably seem like ghosts. And I put it to you also that we may, in our turn, be as neutrinos to other beings, whizzing in and about them without much awareness, but with an occasional intuition that things are not quite as simple as even our five wits lead us to suppose.
Multiply my bulk in square inches by sixty billion, and reflect that it is from amid that assemblage of unknown but active creatures that I now adjure you to bethink yourself, and stop talking nonsense. We are all much more ghostly than we know.
Your eerie comrade,
Samuel Marchbanks.
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TECHNICOLOUR FLAUBERT / Picked up Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbo, a book which I read as a schoolboy and looked upon with wry smiles even then, as it appears to me to be written in Technicolour; however, as I read it in translation I would be wise to keep quiet, for any Frenchman can shout me down. But the tone of the book is exhausting; nobody ever says “Giddap” to a horse; they always “urge it forward with a hoarse cry.” Nobody looks at a woman; he devours her with his eyes. I prefer a quieter life.… Salammbo suggests that medical practice in ancient Carthage was on an equally irrational footing with war and the pursuit of love. One remedy which is described is “the blood of a black dog slaughtered by barren women on a winter’s night among the ruins of a tomb”; a druggist who had filled a few prescriptions like that in the course of a day might well think of going into some other business.… However, Salammbo is enthralling, in its strange way, and I read it for half an hour after lunch before I realized that I had work to do, and urged myself toward my desk with a hoarse cry, devouring several women with my eyes as I trudged through the snow. One of them was eying a black dog reflectively, and I concluded that she was at least on the Pill.
A MEAGRE DIET / For several weeks I have been following a diet prescribed by my physician, which includes a great deal of seafood. Yet I find that when I order lobster or jumbo shrimps at a meal, and explain that I must mind my diet, the people with whom I am eating snigger in an underbred fashion and hint that I am a luxurious rascal, and that my diet is a thing of the imagination. This is bitterly unjust, but I do not know what I am to do about it. I like seafood, and eat it with obvious relish; is it necessary that everything on a diet should be nasty? I don’t like spinach and broccoli, but I eat them, and get no pity for it. Why am I grudged a simple little thing like a lobster or a dozen oysters?
CHILDREN AND CERAMICS / Attended a little party where there was a type of pickle hitherto unknown to me, though I consider myself rather an expert on pickles. It was made of infant ears of corn, an inch or two long, preserved in some savoury embalming fluid; they were delicious. But as I looked at these tiny ears, plucked before they had grown to fullness and maturity, and arrested in their growth for our delight, I was strongly reminded of those children who, during the Middle Ages, were turned into dwarfs for the pleasure of people whose income permitted them to run to the luxury of a household dwarf. Gypsies kidnapped these children and encased them in pottery forms, so that they could not grow, and developed into wry shapes, regarded as funny by our strong-stomached ancestors. When they had reached adult years, the pottery form was broken, and there was a child, of a kind, with an adult mind, of a kind. I do not suppose this curious trade will ever be revived. I have watched some of the pottery classes sponsored by our recreational associations, but I have never seen anybody at work on a pot which suggested that it was for the jugging of a child.
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To Raymond Cataplasm, M.D., F.R.C.P.
Dear Dr. Cataplasm:
I see that an eminent member of your profession has declared that in his opinion sleep was the original and natural state of all living things. The lower organisms still exist, says he, in a somnolent condition: great numbers of higher creatures pass months every year in hibernation—which is a kind of sleep: the most sleepless of all is the king of them all—Man, proud Man. He suggests that we might be better off if we slept more. But it seems to me that it might be argued to the contrary that we should be even more civilized if we slept less.
I write to you from a transcontinental train, upon which I am hastening toward our great Canadian West. As I bump and clatter across the broad and lumpy bosom of our motherland I find it impossible to sleep at all. Other people sleep, but not Marchbanks, the super-civilized. My eyelids feel as though someone had been striking matches on them, and when I push them down over the peeled grapes swimming in stewed rhubarb which are my eyes, hot balls of pain bounce around in my head.
But am I more civilized than in the days when I slept for the usual eight hours? I am certainly more fearful, jumpy and cross-grained, and these are the badges of civilization today. When I return, I want you to give me some medicine to uncivilize me. A barbiturate to make me barbarous, shall we say?
Your unbearably civilized patient,
Samuel Marchbanks.
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To Amyas Pilgarlic, ESQ.
Dear Pil:
Yesterday I was in Banff and its mountainous environs. Have you ever thought how romantically some mountains are named? The Three Sisters, for instance. If I had been asked to name it I should have called it The Three Jagged Snags, or, in a more poetic vein, The Hag’s Lower Denture. But no: The Three Sisters it is. There are cases, of course, where the names are well chosen. Several mountains are named after millionaires and bankers, and they have just the right unapproachable, frosty look. One is named after a missionary: it has a look of suspicious disapproval like the banker-mountains, but on a more spiritual plane, if I make myself clear. I like mountains, but I refuse to be patronized by them.
What really astonishes me here in the West is the superstitious awe which is extended toward the East. Whenever Westerners are behaving in a natural and jolly manner, somebody is likely to say, “Of course, we know you don’t carry on like this in the East.” It is rather a new thing for me to be in a place where Ontario is regarded as a gentle, old-world, tradition-encrusted civilization, but I suppose I shall get used to it. Indeed I am doing so right here in Banff. I am older than the rocks among which I sit, and my eyelids are a little weary. I am beginning to take pride in certain gracious old Ontario traditions, such as wearing a neck-tie in the morning and depending on braces instead of a belt. I have not, as some Easterners do, bought myself a white cowboy hat. Something—a life-long mistrust of cows, perhaps, and a conviction that their milk is the most over-rated drink known to man—prevents me. Tomorrow I press on dauntlessly to Vancouver.
Yours,
Sam.
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To Waghorn Wittol, ESQ.
Dear Wittol:
When I was at Banff yesterday my guide showed me, with utmost pride, a big heap of sticks, mud and dirt which was, he said, a beaver lodge.
In fact, it was undistinguishable from the big heap of sticks, mud and dirt behind the garage at Marchbanks Towers. I have been trying to get a man to come and haul this away, but I shall not do so now. If anyone asks me what it is I shall say airily, “Oh, a beaver lodge.” The word rubbish will not be uttered in its presence.—How travel broadens one’s outlook.
My regards to Mrs. Wittol, if you can find her.
Samuel Marchbanks.
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To Haubergeon Hydra, ESQ.
Dear Mr. Hydra:
As a citizen and taxpayer of this country I write to you, as Deputy Guarantor of Tourist Attractions, to complain about our prairies: they are not as flat as I was led to believe. People have assured me for years that the prairie is as flat as a billiard table. This, sir, is a lie put out to attract tourists. It is not nearly so flat as that.
There is much talk of conservation these days, but very little action. Let us not lose our prairies. Tear down the farmhouses at once: nobody wants them: the farmers are all in California spending their wheat subsidy. And then put a fleet of steam rollers on the prairies and get those unsightly humps out of them. Keep at it until they are, as advertised, flat as a billiard table.
Your indignant taxpayer,
S. Marchbanks.
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To Amyas Pilgarlic, ESQ.
Dear Pil:
Since last I wrote to you I have gone through what is widely believed to be one of the most moving spiritual experiences a Canadian can sustain—a jaunt through the Rocky Mountains. I enjoyed it, but spiritually I am exactly where I was before. I have seen them in full sunlight, which robs them of all mystery, and I have seen them in a rainy haze, which is much better. I have gaped at chunks of rock which are said to resemble the faces of Indians, though the likeness escaped me. I have looked shudderingly down into gorges over which the train was passing. I have been pleased, diverted and surprised, but I am not one of those who finds a sight of the Rockies an equivalent for getting religion at a revival meeting.
To make a shameful confession, the Rockies put me in mind of nothing so much as the first act of Rose Marie, a musical comedy of my younger days and the favourite theatre entertainment of his late Majesty, King George V. At any moment I expected a lovely French-Canadian girl to leap on the observation car, saying, “You make ze marriage wiz me, no?” Or an Indian girl, more lithe and beautiful than any Indian girl has ever been, to begin a totem dance on the track. The scenery was right: only the actors were missing.
Upon arrival in Vancouver, the first thing to meet my eye was a notice, signed by the Chief of Police, warning me against confidence tricksters. It told me in detail how I might expect them to work. I would be approached, first of all, by someone who would try to make friends: this would be “The Steerer” who would eventually steer me to “The Spieler,” who would sell me Stanley Park or the harbour at a bargain price. Not long after I had read this I was approached by a crafty-looking woman carrying a handful of pasteboards. “Juwanna buy four chances on the Legion car?” she cried, blocking my way. “Madam, you are wasting your time,” said I; “I know you for what you are—a Steerer.” She shrank away, muttering unpleasantly. Never let it be said that Marchbanks failed to heed a warning.
Vancouver has much to recommend it as a city; indeed, if it were not on the other side of those pestilent mountains I should go there often. Among other attractions it has a large and interesting Chinese quarter, where I ate the best Chinese food I have ever tasted. There are times when I think that I shall give up Occidental cuisine altogether, and eat Chinese food for the rest of my life. After lunch I wandered among the Chinese shops, and found one which sold a scent called “Girl Brand Florida Water.” There is a simplicity about that name which enchants me. In the same shop I saw the only piece of Chinese nude art that has ever come my way; the Chinese are believed not to care for representations of the nude: but this was plainly the result of Western influence; it was a Chinese girl, lightly draped, holding aloft a bunch of paper flowers. Her legs were short, her body long, and she seemed more amply endowed for sitting than Western standards of beauty permit. It was, I suppose, the kind of thing one finds in Chinese bachelor apartments, just as Occidental bachelors enrich their rooms with ash-trays held aloft by naked beauties in chrome, and drink beer from glasses into which libidinous pictures have been etched. East is East, and West is West, but bachelors are wistful rascals the world over.
Normally I do not mind cigars. I smoke them myself. But on a train—! Opposite me as I write sits a little bald man with a baby face and a head like a peeled onion who has, for the past 45 minutes, burned and sucked the most villainous stogie I have ever choked over. He has doused it with his drool, and re-lit it, five several times. He is just about to do so again and I must leave him to it, or strike him with the emergency axe, or be sick myself. If he made that stench by any other means, the sanitary inspector would condemn him.
Yours gaggingly,
Sam.
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WHERE AM I? / Was driving through the countryside today with some people who insisted upon frequent recourse to a road-map in order to discover, as they put it, “Just where they were.” Reflected that for my part I generally have a pretty shrewd idea of just where I am; I am enclosed in the somewhat vulnerable fortress which is my body, and from that uneasy stronghold I make such sorties as I deem advisable into the realm about me. These people seemed to think that whizzing through space in a car really altered the universe for them, but they were wrong; each one remained right in the centre of his private universe, which is the only field of knowledge of which he has any direct experience.
DE GUSTIBUS LOTS OF DISPUTANDUM / Had a pleasant chat with Dr. Boyd Neel, the conductor of the celebrated chamber orchestra. I asked him if he meant to play any contemporary music while he was touring Canada. “Oh yes,” said he, “I expect we may play a few new tunes.” This reply delighted me, for I am sick of the cloud of mystery and fear which surrounds modern music. It is not all harsh to the ear—to any ear, that is, which does not regard the barrel-organ as the last word in harmony—and much of it is very jolly and enlivening. There are even tunes in some recent pieces, though not tunes that you can whistle. I strongly suspect that it is hard work to write a tune if you set your face against the aids of folk-song and the forthright spirit of the Salvation Army Band. But I admired Dr. Neel because he spoke of modern music without passion. I grow weary of those people who become super-charged at the mention of modern music, or modern poetry, or modern painting; these are topics of great interest, but why must one be expected to take sides, violently for or against? “There is no disputing about tastes,” says the old saw. In my experience there is little else.
NON-STOP CULTURE / A man was exulting to me today about the wonders of a gramophone which he had given to himself and his family at Christmas. The beauty of it, in his eyes, is that it will play for eight hours without a stop, and he can heap four or five symphonies on it and let them rip. Ah, well; each to his pleasure. I find one symphony about all I can cope with in a day; my emotional blood-pressure rises sharply if too much passionate symphonic music is forced upon me in a single dose. Anyway, I don’t like to have a huge orchestra roaring in my living-room when I am trying to rest. For the chamber, chamber music is the proper fare.
AN ILLUSION SHATTERED / Was in the country today, and coming over the crest of a hill was surprised to see a fox a few yards away; it did not see me, and the wind was in the wrong direction for it to scent me, so I watched it for what seemed a long time, but was probably two minutes. Then it turned, saw me, gazed for a few seconds, and trotted away grinning. This is not what I would have expected, and when I returned to town I called a naturalist friend and told him that the fox had not appeared to be afraid of me. “Oh no,” he said, “unless you shot at it, or shouted, it probably wouldn’t fear you; foxes are stupid creatures—any dog is smarter than any fox—and if it couldn’t scent you it probably didn’t realize even that you were a man.” This was a blow to the notion I acquired as a child, from countless stories, that foxes are brilliantly intelligent, and the masterminds of the forest world. And after all, what evidence have we that a fox is clever? When chased it runs away, and makes better time in country it knows than a dog does. Is that clever? But a fox looks clever, and with animals as with humans, that is more than half the battle.
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There are many ways of telling fortunes, and no Almanack is complete without some allusion to at least one of them: Palmistry is the favourite, but it has been done to death; anyhow, it is hard to learn and there are too many people whose hand-lines do not conform to any known pattern. Therefore Wizard Marchbanks will confine himself to Fortune Telling by Moles, which is easy and rather dashing. Of course, there are people who are sensitive about their moles, and you had better avoid them. Here are the five easily memorized rules which will enable you to practise this fascinating branch of White Magic.
Moles on the Face: if extremely numerous and whimsically placed, the subject is likely to be unlucky in love.
Moles on the Arms: do not really count.
Moles on the Legs: should not be alluded to if the fortune-teller is desirous of the continued acquaintance of his subject.
Moles on the Back: are usually visible only when evening dress is worn and should not be mentioned.
Moles Elsewhere: are rarely disclosed until the immediate future of both subject and fortune-teller is easily predictable anyhow.
*
To Big Chief Marchbanks.
How, Marchbanks:
Good news, Marchbanks, I in jail now. Last week I try awful hard to get in jail. I throw brick at cop. He just wag finger and laugh. I call insult at mayor. He just lift hat. Getting near election time, Marchbanks. I write dirty word on City Hall. City Clerk come out and write “Ditto,” under it. No hope, Marchbanks. Then one day cop look at me very queer. You pay your poll tax, he ask. No, I say, I never own no pole. Aha, he say, you got to pay poll tax. I never have no totem pole, I say. Sell urn to tourist twenty year ago. Come along, he say, and we go to court. They find I owe $3,000 back poll tax. Put me in jail. Ha ha. That great tax, Marchbanks. Friendly tax to poor Indian. All set for winter now. You got money? I not need money.
How, again,
Osceola Thunderbelly,
Chief of the Crokinoles.
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Prophecy consists of carefully bathing the inevitable in the eerie light of the impossible, and then being the first to announce it.