The wind was blowing quite fresh, and it wasn’t long until the Italians came nigh enough to ascertain the real state of affairs, and rescue the unfortunate swimmer from his perilous situation. The fishermen rolled the old gentleman over a keg they had in the boat for half an hour, before his stomach could be emptied of its washy load and breathing rendered easy. When sufficiently relieved to admit of speech, the bather gave his rescuers to understand that in future the tide might ebb and flow, be warm as milk new drawn from the cow, and tranquil as a frozen pond, but a common bath-tub would be rivers, lakes—yea, oceans—to him during the remainder of his natural life.
While in one of the interior counties to-day I stood beside the graves of six members of one household. The father and his five sons all fell in one sanguinary family feud.
It seems an ill feeling had long existed between two families named respectively Frost and Coates. Though they frequently indulged in small skirmishes—from which black eyes, bloody noses, or slit ears were the principal trophies borne away—they had never met when their full forces were under arms. And for the happy hour that would bring about such a meeting, each party looked forward with interest, if not impatience.
A day arrived at last, full of promise. It was an election day. Each party expected the other out in strength, with furbished arms, and prepared themselves accordingly. They took the street, resolved, that—
“Ere the bat had flown His cloistered flight: ere to black Hecate’s summons The shard-borne beetle, with his drowsy hums, Had rung night’s yawning peal, there would be done A deed of dreadful note.”
Two planets keep not their motion in one sphere, nor could two quarrelsome families move long in a small village, or freely patronize the same groggeries without a collision. Towards evening they met, some mounted and more on foot, and from low jests amongst themselves respecting each other’s lack of prowess upon former occasions, the controversy soon reached the point of positive contradictions. As the “lie direct” is equivalent to a well-developed kick to your average fighting man, hostilities soon commenced.
The Coates family opened the engagement with a brisk fusilade, and at the first fire the gray-bearded patriarch of the Frost faction went down with all his imperfections on his head.