Mr. Eternity by Aaron Thier Read Free Book Online Page A

have her own picture of the West Indian sugar plantation – the waving green cane, the dark faces of the slaves, the heat of the boilers. Babylon was just such a place, and yet not so, for it was Mr. Galsworthy’s fate to have located his plantation upon Little Salt, where the soil was in all truth perfectly salty, as presaged and advertis’d, and from which the slaves could no more coax a bountiful crop than could a curate teach the devil to dance a minuet. Yetthere was another problem that was paramount and supreme, which was that such cane as did grow was often as not food for black ratts, which at that time infested the island. The poor health of the cane, and the vigor of the ratts, gave the place an impoverished aspect, and a visitor from distant lands might have supposed that Mr. Galsworthy was not growing cane at all, but growing food for rats, & husbanding these small creatures, & doing an efficient job of it.
    Dr. Dan and I were feasting one day with our employer, who had that morning deliver’d a speech upon rats to slaves and overseers alike, exhorting all to pull together so that we might be delivered from this evil, and explaining that in cooperation we should found a new brotherhood of harmony. It was then that Dr. Dan unburden’d himself of yet another fantastical narrative. He spoke of a great queen he had known, the Queen of America, who lived in the city of Memphis, said he, unless it was called Anakitos, or Manoa. He avow’d he could never remember the names of cities. This one lay in the jungles of Terra Firme, close to the very girdle of the world, where the Great Orb rose to that point which lies closest to the sun, and is therefore hottest of all lands save the trackless Zahara and, of course, Arabia deserta. In such places, said he, grow all the world’s great jewels and stones, for they require the hot sun for their growth. Now this queen, Maria Yako was her name, did one day cause a great cloak to be made in her honor, and it was made from no other than ratt leather (this being the detail which had recalled the narrative to his mind), for ratt did constitute the chief food of these Piranha Indians.
    Mr. Galsworthy had listened carefully to all of this, & tipping back his claret, & watching all, with eyes like raisins, from above the lip of his glass, he pronounced himself inseminated with a grand Idea , and made shift to rise and go to his library, though his legs misgave him & he went down head foremost upon the hard floor. To this I gave a great laugh, and Dr. Dan made an expression of dismay, and Mr. Galsworthy had no reaction at all, having drubbed himself insensible. Yet he shortly revived, and whether he then recalled his grand idea, or whether the force of the blow had expelled that idea from the globous jelly of hisbrain and caused a new idea to crystallize there, we shall never know, though we shall forever speculate. In either case, he now smiled and spread his arms, & said with no small amount of pride, Here is my idea, it is this: When God gives you ratts, make ratt leather.
    Thus was the whole mission and purpose of our enterprise changed in an instant, and thus began the massacre of ratts, or rather it continued, with the difference that now the slaves were occupied in the curing and tanning of the skins. I owned it was a clever scheme, for if we could not vanquish these bewhiskered bandittoes, which had greatly the advantage over us by their superior faculty of multiplication, we could take the benefit of their numbers, and turn this multiplicative faculty to our own profit. Also, this labor of making leather – which did produce, as everyone knows, such a smell that there was no place upon Little Salt island where a man could not get a smack of it – was not one quarter so injurious to the slaves as making sugar, which fact especially endeared it to Mr. Galsworthy, who pronounced that he had whipt his last slave, and would from thence act midwife to a kind of Golden Age upon