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"No, I'll write it in plain, every-day United States, and none of you will be sure how to read it." "What's the riddle?" demanded Dave, who saw that the story-teller had something up his sleeve. "Give me a sheet of paper and a pencil and I'll show you," returned Shadow.
There was a lake at Vincennes then, I am sure, with an island upon it and tall saplings, through which the morning sun was shining. The eyes of the lovers admired the scene, and they admired too the pretty reflections, and the swans moving about the island. The accomplished story-teller cries, "But if there is to be no scene in the restaurant, how is the story to finish?"
He knows nothing of the crisp, modulated, balanced, and reserved mastery of phrase and sentence which marks Thackeray. Nor is it the easy simplicity of Robinson Crusoe and the Vicar of Wakefield. The tale spins along, and the incidents rattle on with the volubility of a good story-teller who warms up as he goes, but who never stops to think of his sentences and phrases.
"I have no mind to eat anything," replied the story-teller; "long as I have been in the service of the king of Leinster, I never sat down to breakfast without having a new story ready for the evening, but this morning my mind is quite shut up, and I don't know what to do. I might as well lie down and die at once. I'll be disgraced for ever this evening, when the king calls for his story-teller."
"We have long been fellow-servants under this roof," said Hadji Baba, as they were about to begin. "That is true," replied one of the chaouses sternly. "I shall be forgiven, and depend on it thou shalt not be forgotten," said Baba quietly. The executioner, who knew that the story-teller had been a man of influence and power in the previous reign, hesitated.
But I must heave-to a bit and overhaul my reckoning, for I almost forget. Did ever any of you see a port-go-chaire?” “We never heard of such a port,” said some of his auditors; “you’re humbugging us.” “I have been to America, the West and East Ingees, but I never heard of such a port,” said another. “Why, you lubbers,” said the story-teller, “if you go to France, you’ll see thousands of them.
Garth looked at Natalie dubiously. "Yes," she said boldly. "Well, it was three years ago," began Tom Lillywhite, with the zest of the true story-teller. "The Gov'ment sent four surveyin' parties in; and I had more'n I could do freightin' from the Settlement to the different camps.
"I don't want to interrupt," said Tom, "but it seems to me that man must have been awful rich." "No, he wasn't," returned Lefty. "He was going to eat the dinner, you know, and then die without paying for it. He wasn't a very good man." "No," remarked the story-teller. "But he was a very hungry man, in which respect he was just like the Giant I am trying to tell you about.
That is the difficulty with the unprofessional story-teller: he yaws back and forth and can't keep in the wind; he drops his characters overboard when he hasn't any further use for them and drowns them; he forgets the coffee-pot and the frying-pan and all the other small essentials, and, if he carries a love affair, he mutters a fervent "Allah be praised" when he lands them, drenched with adventures, at the matrimonial dock at the end of the final chapter.
Dudley says that you are a story-teller, too." "Oh, yes! Some days the children keep me telling them all day long." "Suppose you tell me one," invited the little lady. "Well," returned Polly, a bit doubtfully, and then stopped to think over her list. "The Cherry-Pudding Story," which usually insisted on being uppermost, would scarcely do this time, she thought.
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