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At this instant, the feet of the steam man began rising and falling with lightning like rapidity, the wagon being jerked forward with such sudden swiftness, that both Ethan and Mickey turned back summersets, rolling heels over head off the vehicle to the ground, while the monster went puffing over the prairie, and at a terrific rate.
"Why does he call those flowers summersets?" their mother said; and the girl, with a darkly brilliant look of humour and penetration, answered, "because they are so big." There seemed to be no further question possible after an explanation that was presented thus charged with meaning.
A very young boy, excited by his first sight of sunflowers, was eager to describe them, and called them, without allowing himself to be checked for the trifle of a name, "summersets." This was simple and unexpected; so was the comment of a sister a very little older.
Well, as the tide was sending me along nicely, I didn't get out the oars again, but sat in the boat meditating like, when all of a sudden I felt myself very queer in the inside, and pains came on just for all the world as if I had swallowed a score or two of big mackerel, and they were all kicking and wriggling about in my bread-basket. `They are the smoke-worms the doctor told me about, thinks I. `They don't like the taste of his stuff, that's the truth of it. Well, I felt queerer and queerer, and Southsea Castle began to spin round and round, and the kickers went dancing up and down, and the ships in the harbour were all turning summersets, and every sort of circumvolution and devilment you could think of took place.
They went for a principle, and the devil himself could not make them swerve from the pursuit of so sacred an object. I then candidly admitted that nature had not fitted me, as admirably as it had fitted my friend the judge, for the throwing of summersets; and I feared that when the order was given "to go to the right about," I might be found no better than a bungler.
He then gave two or three first-rate summersets, again laughed loudly, and clapped his hands. "You would scarcely think," he continued, "that I drove that little pony yesterday heavily laden all the way from Coruna. We arrived at Padron at two o'clock this morning; but we are nevertheless both willing and able to undertake a fresh journey.
She does it splendidly, though usu'ly she thinks she's too big to play with us any longer. I am pretty sure Hec would turn summersets for us. He has been quite respectable since that last licking the Judge gave him. Jimmy Jones would likely play the bones for us, too, if Hec asked him to. They don't make a pretty noise, but it's a sight to see his hands fly.
"Tessie and Effie and Cherry and Allee " "And Peace is to whistle," put in the small cherub with sisterly loyalty. "Aw, a girls' crowd! There ain't any boys in it." "You'll make one if you will turn summersets. And we thought you might get Jimmie to play the bones for us, and p'r'aps Lute Dunbar might bring over his accordian.
"Can it be possible! what was he doin'?" "Turnin' summersets at the rate of twinty to the second and about a dozen faat above the ground; I had only the one glimpse of him, but whin I obsarved him it looked to me as if his head and one leg wint off in different directions; I s'pose he's lookin' for the same."
Certainly Grimaldi never did this sort of thing; and though Brown, King, and Gibson have gone to the Surrey in vacation time, and Mr. C. J. Smith has ruralised at Sadler's Wells, we find no theatrical precedent for a general tumbling through the country, except in the gentleman, name unknown, who threw summersets on behalf of the late Mr.