Page:Under the Sun.djvu/352

328 world exult over the tailor, whom the elephant, as we learn from Mrs. Gurton’s “Book of Anecdotes,” squirted with ditch-water? We know the elephant to have been the aggressor; but just as we rejoice with Punch over the murder of his wife, and the affront he offers to the devil, so we applaud the ill-mannered pachyderm. “The elephant,” we read in childhood, “put his trunk into a tailor’s shop,” thrust his nose, some four feet of it, into a tailor’s house, his castle, writing himself down a gross fellow and an impertinent. For the tailor to have said, “Take your nose out of my shop” would have been tame; and on a mammal ill-conditioned enough to go where he was not bidden, such temperance would have been thrown away. When the Goth pulled the beard of the Senator, the Roman struck him down. Did Jupiter argue with Ixion, or Mark bandy words with the lover of Isolt? The tailor did not waste his breath, but we read “pricked the elephant’s nose with a needle.” Here the story should end. Jove’s eagles have met at Delos. But no. “The elephant,” we are told, “retired to a puddle and filled his trunk with water, and returning to the shop, squirted it over the tailor.” It was sagacious, doubtless, to squirt water at the tailor, and to squirt it straight; but such sagacity is no virtue, or the Artful Dodger must be held to be virtuous. The triumph of the elephant was one of Punch’s triumphs; Punch, who beats his wife past recovery, hangs an intimate friend after stealing his dog, and trifles with the devil, — Punch the incorrigible homunculus who, fresh from murder (his infant being thrown out of window), and with the smell of the brimstone of Diavolus still clinging to his frilled coat, complacently drums his heels upon the stage and assures his friends in front