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CATS AND CANDY
The following address was delivered at a social meeting of
literary men in New York in 1874:
When I was fourteen I was living with my parents, who were very poor--and
correspondently honest. We had a youth living with us by the name of Jim
Wolfe. He was an excellent fellow, seventeen years old, and very
diffident. He and I slept together--virtuously; and one bitter winter's
night a cousin Mary--she's married now and gone--gave what they call a
candy-pulling in those days in the West, and they took the saucers of hot
candy outside of the house into the snow, under a sort of old bower that
came from the eaves--it was a sort of an ell then, all covered with
vines--to cool this hot candy in the snow, and they were all sitting
there. In the mean time we were gone to bed. We were not invited to
attend this party; we were too young.
The young ladies and gentlemen were assembled there, and Jim and I were
in bed. There was about four inches of snow on the roof of this ell, and
our windows looked out on it; and it was frozen hard. A couple of tom-
cats--it is possible one might have been of the opposite sex--were
assembled on the chimney in the middle of this ell, and they were
growling at a fearful rate, and switching their tails about and going on,
and we couldn't sleep at all.
Finally Jim said, "For two cents I'd go out and snake them cats off that
chimney." So I said, "Of course you would." He said, "Well, I would;
I have a mighty good notion to do it." Says I, "Of course you have;
certainly you have, you have a great notion to do it." I hoped he might
try it, but I was afraid he wouldn't.
Finally I did get his ambition up, and he raised the window and climbed
out on the icy roof, with nothing on but his socks and a very short
shirt. He went climbing along on all fours on the roof toward the
chimney where the cats were. In the mean time these young ladies and
gentlemen were enjoying themselves down under the eaves, and when Jim got
almost to that chimney he made a pass at the cats, and his heels flew up
and he shot down and crashed through those vines, and lit in the midst of
the ladies and gentlemen, and sat down in those hot saucers of candy.
There was a stampede, of course, and he came up-stairs dropping pieces of
chinaware and candy all the way up, and when he got up there--now anybody
in the world would have gone into profanity or something calculated to
relieve the mind, but he didn't; he scraped the candy off his legs,
nursed his blisters a little, and said, "I could have ketched them cats
if I had had on a good ready."
[Does any reader know what a "ready" was in 1840? D.W.] |
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