A Liar Laid Out
We have an amiable tallow-chandler and soap-boiler in our street, who certainly should have been a novelist. I firmly believe he could give weight to Baron Munchausen, Jules Verne, M. de Chaillu, or the London Times in the matter of exaggeration, and romp in an easy winner. The whoppers that spreader of lies and light can tell would raise the hair on the head of an Egyptian mummy.
But he met his match last week.
I happened to be in our club-room with Dipps, when there entered an acquaintance of mine, a gentleman who aspires to legislative honors. Of course Congressional candidates must acquire the art of so embellishing and embroidering the naked truth as to make it attractive. Well, my friend has been studying this science, and he has advanced so far that he can dispense with facts altogether now. His enemies aver that the truth isn’t in him. I wouldn’t say that myself. I think it is in him—very much in him—it’s impossible to get it out of him.
I didn’t think of this, or I wouldn’t have introduced him to Dipps. I regretted it on the spot. Dipps was smoking a peculiar pipe. The future member noticed it. He made some slight remark about it. Dipps was all there. He replied on the instant that that was the identical pipe that Napoleon III. was smoking when he surrendered at Sedan. He had procured it from a wandering Teutonic troubadour, who had picked it up when the Emperor dropped it to hand his sword to his German conqueror.
The statesman expressed no surprise. He merely observed that by a strange coincidence he possessed the stump of the cigar which had fallen from Marshal MacMahon’s lips when his eleventh horse was shot under him at Worth. He had purchased the souvenir from a Zouave with two wooden legs and a glass eye, who had secured the half-finished weed and was smoking it out when a fragment of a shell drove it and a couple of teeth into the back of his head, from which they were extracted by the regimental surgeon. He had one of the teeth, too, fitted into his own gums. He showed it to Dipps.
I could see Dipps was rather staggered. He changed the subject. He exhibited his walking-stick. Remarkable stick, that. It was manufactured out of one of the railway carriages blown into the river on the night of the terrible Tay bridge disaster, in Scotland. At the risk of his life, a diver had brought up a panel out of that carriage for the express purpose of making that stick.
The embryo representative had another coincidence on hand. He had another walking-stick at home—made out of the thigh bone of the engine-driver of that ill-fated train. It was too ghastly a memento to carry about with him; but he could show it to Dipps at any time, and would point out the half-cooked appearance of a portion of it, arising from the fact that the driver was in the habit of sitting on the boiler in cold weather to warm himself.
Dipps was silent after this for a few minutes. But he wasn’t going to be put down without a desperate effort. He drew out his large scarf-pin. He called our attention to what appeared to be a drop of water in the centre of the colorless stone. No, the stone was not real. It was not a diamond. It was far more precious. That small dewy globule inside was worth a hundred diamonds of its size. It had been borne from the mystic shores of Lake Nyanza by a mighty traveller. It had passed into Dipps’s hands by a miracle. It was the tear Livingstone had shed when he first met Stanley. And Dipps smiled a lofty smile at the coming Daniel Webster, which said, as plainly as a candle-contriver’s grin could say anything, “Trot out your curiosities, now, old man, and match that if you’re able.”
Hang me if that expectant recruit to the ranks of the legislators didn’t squelch Dipps with a third coincidence. It was extraordinary—it was almost fabulous, he said, but he had another breastpin which contained a companion tear to Dipps’s. The knight of the soap-pan flatly denied the assertion. Livingstone had only shed one tear; that tear hadn’t been divided into suitable lots; it remained intact, complete, unmutilated, and he (Dipps) was its proud possessor.
“I didn’t say,” gently interposed the coming victim of some future Tom Reed, “I didn’t say that I had the tear Livingstone shed when the advent of the New York Herald Central African tourist pumped that saline particle up. No, sir; but I have a lachrymose relic equally enthralling in the interest which it must inspire.”
“Pooh!” snorted Dipps contemptuously, “what have you, what can you have, that approaches within a hemisphere of my historic, geographic treasure?”
“My friend,” replied the next man to be counted in his absence by the Speaker, “I do not grudge you the tear that Livingston shed when he embraced Stanley, for know that I have the identical tear that Stanley didn’t shed on that occasion, nor since, that I’m aware of.”