Chapter VII
Reading edition
JOHN HENRY ON CHAFING DISHES
I pulled a wheeze on Bunch Jefferson a few weeks ago that made him sit up and scream for help.
Bunch is the Original Ace all right, all right, but it does put dust on his dignity to have anybody josh his literary attainments.
Bunch can really sling a nasty little pen, but he isn't anybody's John W. Milton.
Not at all.
He can take a bunch of the English language and flatten it out around the edges till it looks quite poetic, but that doesn't make him a George O. Khayaam.
Not at all.
The trouble with Bunch is that his home folks have swelled his chest to such an extent by petting his adjectives that he thinks he has Shakespeare on a hot skiddoo for the sand dunes, and when it comes to that poetry thing he thinks he can make Hank Longfellow beat it up a tree.
Bunch lives out in Westchester County in one of those hand-painted suburbs where everybody knows everybody else's business and forgets his own.
Bunch and Alice joined the local club, of course, and when Bunch read some of his poetical outbursts at a free-and-easy one evening, Society got up on its hind legs and with one voice declared my old pal Jefferson to be the logical successor to Robert H. Browning, Sir Walter K. Scott, Bert Tennyson, or any other poet that ever shook a quill.
Bunch began to fancy himself some—well, rather!
When Peaches and I went out Westchester way a few weeks ago to spend a week-end with Bunch and Alice, all we heard was home-made poetry.
When Bunch wasn't ladling out impromptu sonnets, Alice was reading one of his epics or throwing a fit over a "perfectly lovely" rondeau—whatever that may be.
Even at meal times Bunch couldn't break away.
With a voice full of emotion and vegetable soup he would exclaim:
And now the twilight shadows on The distant mountain flutter, And thou, my fair and good friend John, Wilt kindly pass the butter!
What are you going to do with a man who has a bug like that?
What would you do, if while sitting at breakfast with an old chum, he suddenly yelped in accents wild:
The palpitating Elsewhere shrinks Before that glamorous host, Eftsoon, aye, now, good friend, methinks That thou would'st have more toast!
It was clearly up to me to hand Bunch a good hard bump and wake him up before that poetry germ began to bite his arm off.
Bunch told me that in response to the urgent demands of his Westchester friends, he contemplated getting out a little book of his poems, and this was my cue.
I figured it out that the antithesis of a book of poetry would be a cook book, so I hustled.
In a few days I had the book framed up; a few days later it was printed, and before very long Bunch's Westchester society friends were grabbing for what they supposed was his feverish output of poesy.
This is what they got: