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[371]
There is one story which it is said Washington has related, of a man who went into an inn, and asked for a glass of drink from the landlord, who pushed forward a wine-glass about half the usual size; the tea-cups also in that day were not more than half the present size.
The landlord said, “That glass out of which you are drinking is forty years old.”
“Well,” said the thirsty traveller, contemplating its diminutive proportions, “I think it is the smallest thing of its age I ever saw.”
That story as told is given as a story of Athens three hundred and seventy-five years before Christ was born.
Why! all these Irish bulls are Greek,--every one of them.
Take the Irishman who carried around a brick as a specimen of the house he had to sell; take the Irishman who shut his eyes and looked into the glass to see how he would look when he was dead; take the Irishman that bought a crow, alleging that crows were reported to live two hundred years, and he meant to set out and try it; take the Irishman who met a friend who said to him, “Why, sir, I heard you were dead.”
“Well,” says the man, “I suppose you see I'm not.”
“Oh, no!”
says he, “I would believe the man who told me a good deal quicker than I would you.”
Well, those are all Greek.
A score or more of them, of a parallel character, come from Athens.
Our old Boston patriots felt that tarring and feathering a Tory was a genuine patent Yankee fire-brand,--Yankeeism.
They little imagined that when Richard Coeur de Lion set out on one of his crusades, among the orders he issued to his camp of soldiers was that any one who robbed a hen-roost should be tarred and feathered.
Many a man who lived in Connecticut has repeated the story of taking children to the limits of the town, and giving them a sound thrashing to enforce their.
memory of the spot.
But the Burgundians in
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