Page:The humbugs of the world - An account of humbugs, delusions, impositions, quackeries, deceits and deceivers generally, in all ages (IA humbugsworld00barnrich).djvu/276

 First came the “herds of brown quadrupeds” very like a—no! not a whale, but a bison, and “with a tail resembling that of the bos grunniens”—the reader probably understands what kind of a “bos” that is, if he’s apprenticed to a theatre in midsummer with musicians on a strike; then a creature, which the hoax-man naively declared “would be classed on earth as a monster”—I rather think it would!—“of a bluish lead color, about the size of a goat, with a head and a beard like him, and a single horn, slightly inclined forward from the perpendicular”—it is clear that if this goat was cut down to a single horn, other people were not! I could not but fully appreciate the exquisite distinction accorded by the writer to the female of this lunar animal—for she, while deprived of horn and beard, he explicitly tells us, “had a much larger tail!” When the astronomers put their fingers on the beard of this “beautiful” little creature (on the reflector, mind you!) it would skip away in high dudgeon, which, considering that 240,000 miles intervened, was something to show its delicacy of feeling.

Next in the procession of discovery, among other animals of less note, was presented “a quadruped with an amazingly long neck, head like a sheep, bearing two long spiral horns, white as polished ivory, and standing in perpendiculars parallel to each other. Its body was like that of a deer, but its forelegs were most disproportionately long, and its tail, which was very bushy and of a snowy whiteness, curled high over its rump and hung two or three feet by its side. Its colors were bright bay and white, brindled in patches, but of no regular