difficulty of springing ten or fifteen feet into the air and coming
down, crotched out, on a given spot, or else he must contribute a
feat in contortion the like of which has never been duplicated
since.

To be brutally frank about it, the thing just naturally is not
possible. I don't care if Young Lochinvar was as limber as a yard
of fresh tripe--and he certainly did shake a lithesome calf in
the measures of the dance if Sir Walter, in an earlier stanza, is
to be credited with veracity. Even so, I deny that he could have
done that croupe trick. There isn't a croupier at Monte Carlo who
could have done it. Buffalo Bill couldn't have done it. Ned
Buntline wouldn't have had Buffalo Bill trying to do it. Doug
Fairbanks couldn't do it. I couldn't do it myself.

Skipping over Robert Southey's tiresome redundancy in spending
so much of his time and mine, when I was in the Fifth Reader stage,
in telling how the waters came down at Ladore when it was a
petrified cinch that they, being waters, would have to come down,
anyhow, I would next direct your attention to two of the foremost
idiots in all the realm of poesy; one a young idiot and one an
older idiot, probably with whiskers, but both embalmed in verse,
and both, mind you, stuck into every orthodox reader to be glorified
before the eyes of childhood. I refer to that juvenile champion
among idiots, the boy who stood on the burning deck, and to the
ship's captain in the poem called The Tempest. Let us briefly
consider the given facts as regards the latter: It was winter and
it was midnight and a storm was on the deep, and the passengers
were huddled in the cabin and not a soul would dare to sleep, and
they were shuddering there in silence--one gathers the silence