Francis Hopkinson Smith

“ I want you to promise me you’ll take me home to America with you when you go. I’m tired dodging these people. I want to get somewhere where I can shoot and hunt and fish, and nobody can stop me. I snared that rabbit; been snaring them all summer; going to keep on snaring them after you’re gone. I love to hunt them—love the fun of it—born that way. And I’ve got something else to tell you’—here a triumphant smile flashed over his face—‘I smashed that cobbler!’
“‘You, Fiddles!’ I laughed. ”

“ To rescue a friend would be commonplace, to rescue a stranger smacked of adventure.
“I uncovered my head and bowed to the ground. ‘His Honor shoots almost every day, your Excellency,’ I said to the gendarme. ‘I have seen him frequently with his friends—this young man is no doubt one of them—Let—me—think—was it this morning, or yesterday, I met the Mayor? It is at best a very small rabbit’—here I fingered the head and ears—‘and would probably have died of hunger anyway. ”

“ Then the landlady broke out in a fresh place: ‘No public-house for you! This is my treat! All of you come inside. Gretchen, get the mugs full—all the mugs—Sit down! Sit down! The Herr Painter at the top of the table, the Herr Feudels-Shimmer on the right; all the other Herrs anywhere in between. Hock the Mahler! Hock the Hunter! Hock everybody but the cobbler!’ Here a groan went round. ‘Hock! Hip and Blather skitzen for the good and honorable Mayor, who always loves the people!’
“‘And Hock! too, for the honorable and good gendarme!’ laughed Fiddles, dropping into his chair. ”

“ I tried, but I couldn’t paint it—nobody could—so I did his profile; one of those curving, seductive mouths you sometimes see on a man, that quivers when he smiles, the teeth gleaming between the moist lips. ”

“ What a picturesque liar you are, Fiddles”—here the point of the tack was pressed into the plaster with Marny’s fat thumb—“and what a good-for-nothing, breezy, lovable vagabond”— (Bang! Bang! Hammer at play now) —“you could be when you tried. There!”
Marny stepped back and took in the stuffed head and wide-branched antlers of the magnificent elk (five feet six from skull to tips) and the small, partly faded miniature of a young man in a student cap and high-collared coat.
I waited and let him run on. It is never wise to interrupt Marny. ”

“ Some weeks later Fiddles came into my room, locked the door, pulled down the shades, looked under the bed, in the closet and behind the curtains, and sat down in front of me. (I had to return to Munich the next day, and this would be our last night together.)
“You have been very good to me, Master,’ he said with a choke in his voice. ‘I love people who are good to me; I hate those who are not. ”

“ Outside, in the road, stood four young men—all pals of Fiddles, all bareheaded, and all carrying lanterns. They had come to crown the American with a gold chaplet cut from gilt paper, after which I was to be conducted to the public house where bumpers of beer were to be drunk until the last pfennig was spent.
“On hearing this, Gretchen, the landlady, the apothecary, the hostler, and the stable-boy—not the cobbler, you may be sure—burst forth with cries of: ‘Hip! Hip!—Hock! Donder und Blitzen!’ or whatever they do yell when they are mad with joy. ”

“ Then his Honor turned to me and said: ‘My memory is not always very good, but this time the cobbler’s—who is a meddlesome person—is even more defective. Yes, I think it quite possible I was hunting on last Wednesday. I can sympathize with the young man as to the size of the rabbit. They are running very small this year. My decision, therefore, is that you can let the young man go.’
“Oh, but that was a great night at the inn. Gretchen was so happy that she spilled the beer down the apothecary’s back and the landlady could talk of nothing but Fiddles’s release. ”

“ Who Fiddles was and why his Honor the Mayor should sit up and think; why, too, the miniature of the young man—and he was young and remarkably good-looking, as I well knew, having seen the picture many times before on his mantel—should now be suspended below the elk’s head, would come out in time if I loosened my ear-flaps and buttoned up my tongue, but not if I reversed the operation.
“Ah, you young fraud,” he went on—the position of both head and miniature pleased him now—“do you remember the time I hauled you out from under the table when the hucksters were making a door-mat of your back ”