【英文读物】The Works of Thomas Hood.docx

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1、【英文读物】The Works of Thomas HoodHOODS OWN: OR, LAUGHTER FROM YEAR TO YEAR. THE ISLE OF MAN.THE BOY AT THE NORE.“Alone I did it!Boy!”CORIOLANUS.I SAY, little Boy at the Nore,Do you come from the small Isle of Man?Why, your history a mystery must be,Come tell us as much as you can,Little Boy at the Nore

2、!Pg 2You live it seems wholly on water,Which your Gambier calls living in clover;But how comes it, if that is the case,Youre eternally half seas over,Little Boy at the Nore?While you ridewhile you dancewhile you floatNever mind your imperfect orthography;But give us as well as you can,Your watery au

3、to-biography,Little Boy at the Nore!LITTLE BOY AT THE NORE LOQUITUR.Im the tight little Boy at the Nore,In a sort of sea negus I dwells;Half and half twixt saltwater and Port,Im reckond the first of the swellsIm the Boy at the Nore!I lives with my toes to the flounders,And watches through long days

4、and nights;Yet, cruelly eager, men lookTo catch the first glimpse of my lightsIm the Boy at the Nore.I never gets cold in the head,So my life on salt water is sweet,I think I owes much of my healthTo being well used to wet feetAs the Boy at the Nore.Theres one thing, Im never in debt:Nay!I liquidate

5、s more than I oughtor1;So the man to beat Cits as goes by,In keeping the head above water,Is the Boy at the Nore.Pg 3Ive seen a good deal of distress,Lots of Breakers in Oceans Gazette;They should do as I dorise oer all;Aye, a good floating capital get,Like the Boy at the Nore! THE BUOY AT THE NORE.

6、Im ater the sailors own heart,And cheers him, in deep water rolling;And the friend of all friends to Jack Junk,Ben Backstay, Tom Pipes, and Tom Bowling,Is the Boy at the Nore!Could I eer but grow up, Id be offFor a week to make love with my wheedles;If the tight little Boy at the NoreCould but catch

7、 a nice girl at the Needles,Wed have two at the Nore!Pg 4They thinks little of sizes on water,On big waves the tiny one skulks,While the river has Men of War on itYesthe Thames is oppressd with great Hulks,And the Boys at the Nore!But Ive donefor the water is heavingRound my body, as though it would

8、 sink it!And Ive been so long pitching and tossing,That sea-sickyoud hardly now think itIs the Boy at the Nore! AS SAFE AS THE BANK.1A word caught from some American Trader in passing.THE RUN-OVER.“DO you see that ere gentleman in the buggy, with the clipt un?” enquired Ned Stocker, as he pointed wi

9、th his whip at a chaise, some fifty yards in advance. “Well, for all hes driving there so easy like, and comfortable, he once had a gig-shaft, and thats a fact, driv right through his body!”“Rather him than me,” drawled a passenger on the box, without removing his cigar from his mouth.“Its true for

10、all that,” returned Ned, with a nod of his head equal to an affidavit.Pg 5 “The shaft run in under one armpit, right up to the tug, and out again at tother besides pinning him to the wall of the stableand thats a thing such as dont happen every day.”“Lucky it dont,” said the smoker, between two puff

11、s of his cigar.“It ant likely to come often,” resumed Ned, “let alone the getting over it afterwards, which is the wonderfullest part of it all. To see him bowling along there, he dont look like a man pinned to a stable-wall with the rod through him, right up to the tugdo he?”“Cant say he does,” sai

12、d the smoker.“For my part,” said Ned, “or indeed any mans part, most people in such a case would have said, its all up with me, and good reason why, as I said afore, with a shaft clean through your inside, right up to the tugand two inches besides into the stable wall, by way of a benefit. But someh

13、ow he always stuck to itnot the wall, you knowbut his own opinion, that he should get over ithe was as firm as flints about thatand sure enough the event came off exactly.”“The better for him,” said the smoker.“I dont know the rights on it,” said Ned, “for I warnt therebut they do say when he was de

14、xtricated from the rod, there was a regular tunnel through him, and in course the greatest danger was of his ketching cold in the lungs from the thorough draught.”“Nothing more likely,” said the fumigator.“Howsomever,” continued Ned,Pg 6 “he was cured by Dr. Maiden of Stratford, who give him lots of

15、 physic to provoke his stomach, and make him eat hearty; and by taking his feeds well,warm mashes at first, and then hard meat, in course of time he filled up. Nobody hardly believed it, though, when they see him about on his legs againmyself for onebut he always said he would overcome it, and he wa

16、s as good as his word. If that ant game, I dont know what is.”“No more do I,” said the man with the Havannah.“I dont know the philosophy on it,” resumed Ned, “but its a remark of mine about recovering, if a man says he will, he will,and if he says he wont, he wontyou may book that for certain. Mayha

17、p a good pluck helps the wounds in healing kindly,but so it is, for Ive observed it. Youll see one man with hardly a scratch on his face, and says he, Im done forand he turns out quite correctwhile another as is cut to ribbons will saynever mind,Im good for another round, and so he proves, particula

18、rly if hes one of your small farmers. Ill give you a reason why.”“Now then,” said the smoker.“My reason is,” replied Ned, “that theyre all as hard as nailsregular pebbles for game. They take more thrashing than their own corn, and thats saying something. Theyre all fortitude, and nothing else. Talk

19、about punishment! nothing comes amiss to em, from butt-ends of whips and brickbats down to bludgeons loaded with lead. You cant hurt their feelings. Theyre jist like badgers, the more you welt em the more they grin, and when its over, maybe a turn-up at a cattle fair, or a stop by footpads, theyll g

20、o home to their missises all over blood and wounds as cool and comfortable as cowcumbers, with holes in their heads enough to scarify a whole hospital of army surgeons.”“The very thing Scott has characterised,” I ventured to observe, “in the person of honest Dandie.”“Begging your pardon, Sir,” said

21、Ned,Pg 7 “I know Farmer Scott very well, and hes anything but a dandy. I was just a going to bring forward, as one of the trumps, a regular out-and-outer. We become friends through an axident. It was a darkish night, you see, and him a little lushy or so, making a bit of a swerve in his going toward

22、s the middle of the road, before you could cry Snacks! I was over him with the old Regulator.”“Good God!” exclaimed my left-hand companion on the roof. “Was not the poor fellow hurt?”“Why, not much for HIM,” answered Ned, with a very decided emphasis on the pronoun. “Though it would have been a quie

23、tus for nine men out of ten, and, as the Jews say, Take your pick of the basket. But he looked queer at first, and shook himself, and made a wryish face, like a man that hadnt got the exact bit of the joint he preferred.”“Looked queer!” ejaculated the compassionate passenger, “he must have looked dr

24、eadful! I remember the Regulator, one of the oldest and heaviest vehicles on the road. But of course you picked him up, and got him inside, and”“Quite the reverse,” answered Ned, quietly, “and far from it; he picked himself up, quite independent, and wouldnt even accept a lift on the box. He only fe

25、lt about his head a bit, and then his back, and his arms, and his thighs, and his lines, and after that he guv a nod, and says he, all right, and away he toddled.”“I cant credit it,” exclaimed the man on the roof.“Thats jist what his wife said,” replied Ned, with considerable composure, in spite of

26、the slur on his veracity. “Let alone two black eyes, and his collar bone, and the broke rib, hed a hole in his head, with a flint sticking in it bigger than any one you can find since Macadaming. But he made so light on it all, and not being very clear besides in his notions, Im blest if he didnt te

27、ll her hed only been knockt down by a man with a truck!”“Not a bad story,” said the smoker on the box.I confess I made internally a parallel remark. Naturally robust as my faith is, I could not, as Hamlet says, let “Belief lay hold of me,” with the coachmans narrative in his hand, like a copy of a w

28、rit. I am no stranger, indeed, to the peculiarPg 8 hardihood of our native yeomanry; but Ned, in his zeal for their credit, had certainly overdrawn the truth. As to his doctrine of presentiments, it had never been one of the subjects of my speculations; but on a superficial view, it appeared to me i

29、mprobable that life or death, in cases of casualty, could be predetermined with such certainty as he had averred; and particularly as I happen to know a certain lady, who has been accepting the Bills of Mortality at two months date, for many years pastbut has never honoured them when due. It was fat

30、ed, however, that honest Ned was to be confirmed in his theories and corroborated in his facts.We had scarcely trotted half a mile in meditative silence, when we overtook a sturdy pedestrian, who was pacing the breadth as well as the length of the road, rather more like a land surveyor than a mere t

31、raveller. He evidently belonged to the agricultural class, which Ned had distinguished by the title of Small Farmers. Like Scotts Liddesdale yeoman, he wore a shaggy dreadnought, below which you saw two well-fatted calves, penned in a pair of huge top-bootsthe tops and the boots being of such differ

32、ent shades of brown as you may observe in two arable fields of various soil, a rich loam and a clay. In his hand he carried a formidable knotted club-stick, and a member of the Heralds College would have set him down at once a tenant of the Earl of Leicester, he looked so like a bear with a ragged s

33、taff.I observed that Ned seemed anxious. One of his leaders was a bolter, and his wheelers were far from steady; and the man ahead walked not quite so straightly as if he had been ploughing a furrow. We were almost upon himNed gave a sharp halloothe man looked back, and wavered. A minute decided the

34、 matter. He escaped Scylla, but Charybdis yawned for himin plain prose, he cleared the Rocket, but contrived to get under the broad wheel of a Warwickshire waggon, which was passingPg 9 in the opposite direction. There was still a chance,even a fly-waggon may be stopped without much noticebut the wa

35、ggoner was inside, sweethearting with three maids that were going to Coventry. Every voice cried out Woh! but the right one. The horses plodded onthe wheels rumbledthe bells jingledwe all thought a knell.Ned instantly pulled up, with his team upon their hauncheswe all alighted, and in a moment the s

36、ixteen the Rocket was licensed to carry were at the fatal spot. In the midst of the circle lay, what we considered a bundle of last linen just come home from the mangle.“Thats a dead un,” said the smoker, throwing away as he spoke the butt-end of a cigar.“Poor wretch,” exclaimed the humane man from

37、the roof, “what a shocking spectacle!”“Its over his chest,” said I.“Its all over,” said the passenger on my right.“And a happy release,” said a lady on my left; “he must have been a cripple for life.”“He cant have a whole rib in his body,” said a man from the dicky.“Hall to hattums,” said a gentlema

38、n from the inside.“The worst I ever see, and Ive had the good luck to see many,” said the guard.“No, he cant get over that,” said Ned himself.To our astonishment, however, the human mass still breathed. After a long sigh it opened one eyethe rightthen the otherthe mouth gaspedthe tongue movedand at

39、last even spoke, though in disjointed syllables.“Were nighhandant wethe ninemilestun?”“Yesyesclose to it,” answered a dozen voices, and one in its bewilderment asked, “Do you live there?” but was set right by the sufferer himself.Pg 10“Noa mile fudder.”“Where is there a surgeon?” asked the humane ma

40、n, “I will ride off for him on one of the leaders.”“Better not,” said the phlegmatic smoker, who had lighted a fresh cigar with some German tinder and a lucifer“not used to saddlemay want a surgeon yourself.”“Is there never a doctor among the company?” inquired the guard.“I am a medical man,” replie

41、d a squat vulgar-looking personage. “I sell Morisons pillsbut I havent any about me.”“Glad of it,” said the smoker, casting a long puff in the others face. “THIS IS THE TIME WHEN CHURCH-YARDS YAWN.”“Poor wretch!” sighed the compassionate man. “He is beyond human aid. Heaven help the widow and the fa

42、therlesshe looks like a family man!”“I were not to blaame,” said the waggoner.Pg 11 “The woife and childerin cant coom upon I.”“Does anyone know who he is?” inquired the coachman, but there was no answer.“Maybe the gemman has a card or summut,” said the gentleman from the inside.“Is there no house n

43、ear?” inquired the lady.“For to get a shutter off on,” added the gentleman.“Ought we not to procure a postchaise,” inquired a gentlemans footman.“Or a shell, in case,” suggested the man from the dicky.“Shell be hanged!” said the sufferer, in a tone that made us all jump a yard backward. “Stick me up

44、 agin the milestunthere, easy does itthats comfortableand now tell me, and no nonsense,be I flat?”“A little pancakey,” said the man with the cigar.“I say,” repeated the sufferer, with some earnestness, “be I flatquite flatas flat like as a sheet of paper? Yes or no?”“No, no, no,” burst from sixteen

45、voices at once, and the assurance seemed to take as great a load off his mind as had lately passed over his body. By an effort he contrived to get up and sit upon the milestone, from which he waved us a good-bye, accompanied by the following words:“Gentlefolk, my best thanks and my sarvice to you, a

46、nd a pleasant journey. Dont consarn yourselves about me, for theres nothing dangerous. I shall do well, I know I shall; and Ill tell you what Ill go uponif I beant flat I shall get round.”JOHNSONIANA.“None despise puns but those who cannot make them.”SWIFT.To the Editor of the Comic Annual.SIR,As I

47、am but an occasional reader in the temporary indulgence of intellectual relaxation, I have but recently becomePg 12 cognizant of the metropolitan publication of Mr. Murrays Mr. Crokers Mr. Boswells Dr. Johnson: a circumstance the more to be deprecated, for if I had been simultaneously aware of that

48、amalgamation of miscellaneous memoranda I could have contributed a personal quota of characteristic colloquial anecdotes to the biographical reminiscences of the multitudinous lexicographer, which although founded on the basis of indubitable veracity, has never transpired among the multifarious effusions of that stupendous complication of mechanical ingenuity, which, accordin