Another field through which I sometimes wandered was sown with those sound-relations between words which constitute the pun. For hours I walked aching with laughter in this land of Paronomasia, where the whole Dictionary had arrayed itself in strophe and antistrophe, and was dancing a ludicrous chorus of quirk and quibble. If Hood had been there, the notes which he would have taken had supplied him with materials for the Comic Annuals of a cycle. Rarely did the music of a deeper wit intermingle with the rattling fantasies of the pun-country; never was anything but the broad laugh heard there, and the very atmosphere was crazy with oxygen. Were it possible to transport to a country such as this those grave professors of the moralities who have been convicted of contempt of the court of Mirth, and high treason to the King of Misrule, how delightful would it be to behold their iron diaphragms vibrating perforce, and the stereotyped downward curves at the corners of their mouths reversed until they encroached upon the boundaries of their juiceless cheeks! But, in hashish states, temperament and previous habit so much decide tendencies, that the transport-ship which bore these convicts would float inevitably to the mouth of Acheron, or strand midway upon some reef upraised by a million of zoophytic Duns Scotuses.
Out of the number of double-entendres which appeared to me (and they probably amounted to thousands), I recollect but very few. To recall them all would be nearly, if not quite as difficult as to remember the characteristics of each separate wheat-head in a large harvest-field after having but once passed through it. I give two of them.
A youth, not at all of that description which “maketh a glad father,” was seen standing at the counter of a gaudy restaurant. Glass after glass of various exhilarating compounds was handed to him by the man in waiting, and as quickly drained. I did not observe that the genius of decanters received any compensation for the liquors consumed from the young man who demanded them, and modestly asked him how he had been induced to purvey to the drinker’s thirst on so liberal a scale. With arms akimbo, and casting upon me a most impressive look, the official replied, “Like the man in Thanatopsis, I am
“ ‘Sustained by an unfaltering trust.’ ”
Upon the steps of the post-office stood another young man, who had been disappointed in a remittance from the parental treasury. “What are you doing there?” I asked. “I am waiting patiently until my change come.”
Occasionally there intervened between the vagaries of pun and double-entendre some display of comic points in human nature, which were as amusing as the puns themselves. For instance, I remember the representation to me of a man of remarkable self-esteem, who happened, as he sat in my presence, to appease the irritation of his scalp with his digit. Just then a peal of thunder shook the sky above us. “Heavens!” cried our friend, “to think that it should thunder because a man scratched his head!”
I feel that these things lose very much of their original effervescence in the relation, for at the time they none of them seemed so much told to me as acted before me; nor was it the action of a stage, but of a vivified picture, where fun, in all its myriad mutations, was embodied to sight, and the joke was as much apprehended by the eye as by the feeling. Every gesture of the figures that passed before me told more of raillery than tongue could utter, and it was this fact that sometimes made pantomime upon the stage a perfect feast of mirth to me as I sat seeing it in the appreciative state induced by hashish. At such seasons, not the faintest stroke of humor in look or manner escaped me, and I no doubt often committed that most gross error in any man, laughing when my neighbors saw fit not to be moved.
At one time, in my ramble through the realm of incongruities, I came to the strand of the Mediterranean, and beheld an acquaintance of mine standing close beside the water. With a tourist’s knapsack upon his back, and a stout umbrella in his hand, to serve the double purpose of a walking-stick, he drew near and accosted me. “Will you go with me,” said he, “to make a call upon a certain old and valued friend?”
“Most willingly, if you will let me know his name.”
“It is the Prophet Jonah, who still occupies submarine lodgings in a situation, to be sure, rather cold and damp, yet commanding a fine water privilege.” “There is nothing,” I replied, “which would please me more; but how is it to be accomplished?” “Be patient, and you shall see.” Just then a slight ripple ridged the surface of the sea, bubbles appeared, and then there followed them the black muzzle of Leviathan, who, with mighty strokes, pushed toward the shore. Arriving there, his under jaw slid halfway up the beach, and his upper jaw slowly rose
