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Heah now, I'se Massa Swanson," and Scip imitated Swanson's gait, "I'se playin' poker wid you gemmen. I'se out o' cash; Massa Cummins thar, he got a king full, and lay ovah my bob-tail flush, I say, 'Hole on thar, Massa Cummins, I'se got to unlock de combinashun of my safe. Den I walk ovah to de picture, an' I hit a crack with my fist, so Well, I be damned!"
The late Clarence King was in his day a leader in the Century talk, and his comment on the club was that it contained "the rag-tag and bob-tail of all that was best in the country." Many times has it been introduced under thin disguises in the fiction dealing with New York. In some of the novels of Robert W. Chambers it appears as the Pyramid.
Carefully handled in his youth, the bob-tail is unequalled as a stock dog, and he is equally at home and efficient in charge of sheep, of cattle, and of New Forest ponies. So deep-rooted is the natural herding instinct of the breed that it is a thousand pities that the modern shepherd so frequently puts up with an inferior animal in place of the genuine article.
The melodious sounds thence issuing, continually draw tears from the eyes of the Waisters; reminding them of their old paternal pig-pens and potato-patches. They are the tag-rag and bob-tail of the crew; and he who is good for nothing else is good enough for a Waister.
Gobble, thanks be to God, can defy the whole world to prove that he ever said an uncivil word, or did a rude thing to a gentleman, knowing him to be a person of fortune. Indeed, as to your poor gentry and riffraff, your tag-rag and bob-tail, or such vulgar scoundrelly people, he has always behaved like a magistrate, and treated them with the rigger of authority."
Reared in a slave-holding community of narrow-visioned, arrogantly provincial people of the lower middle class; seeing his own father so degrade himself as to cuff his negro house-boy; consorting with ragamuffins, the rag-tag and bob-tail of the town, in his passion for bohemianism and truantry young Clemens never learned to know the beauty and the dignity, the purity and the humanity, of that aristocratic patriarchal South which produced such beautiful figures as Lee and Lanier.
"I believe that," admitted Janice. "So I won't give them money. But I can buy things for them that they need. And the poor little baby is sick. That cunning Sophie told me so." "Goodness, Janice!" laughed Nelson, yet with some small vexation. "I see there's no use in opposing your charitable instincts. But I really wish you would not get acquainted with every rag-tag and bob-tail in town.
I scorn to be as abusive as Horace upon the occasion but if there is no catachresis in the wish, and no sin in it, I wish from my soul, that every imitator in Great Britain, France, and Ireland, had the farcy for his pains; and that there was a good farcical house, large enough to hold aye and sublimate them, shag rag and bob-tail, male and female, all together: and this leads me to the affair of Whiskers but, by what chain of ideas I leave as a legacy in mort-main to Prudes and Tartufs, to enjoy and make the most of.
"Right oh! your majesty," said another of the men, and they all three laughed. What was still worse, they all three wore the Federationist rosette, which was red to the bull in Thomas Chadwick. It was part of Tommy's political creed that Federationists were the "rag, tag, and bob-tail" of the town.
These things are of minor importance, but the docking of that badger's tail, and setting it up like a bob-tail horse, is an outrage upon every citizen of the State, and when the democrats get into power that tail shall be restored to its normal condition if it takes all the blood and treasure in the State, and this work of the republican incendiaries shall be undone.
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