The True Account Read Online Free PDF

across the ice and collapsing in gales of laughter. Then he and the skate man shared half a pipeful of hemp, a large supply of which my uncle had brought in his Dutch clock, along with a sack of the tiny hemp seeds to trade with the Indians of Louisiana. I sketched them puffing away together, as companionable as two old schoolfellows, and sold the drawing to the skate man for three shillings. This was my first sale. Upon which my mellow uncle congratulated me on “turning professional,” and repeatedly shook my hand, and laughed long and loud as if we had no cares in the world. Which, for his part at least, seemed to be the case.

7
    â€œF AIR LADIES and fine gentlemen of Boston,” my uncle announced from the stage of the Beacon Street Lyceum with the greatest assurance in the world. “It is my pleasure to make you acquainted with myself, the renowned explorer and playwright, Private True Teague Kinneson. I now present, for your entertainment and edification, a dramatized lecture on my recent journey overland to the United States from the River Columbia and the Ocean Pacific. Act I. The Shipwreck.”
    With his chain mail gleaming, he rushed offstage and, to a smattering of bewildered applause, returned in the skate man’s cart, representing our ship the
Samuel de Champlain
, which he made go across the boards with his great galoshed feet like a child’s scoot-toy. “Beware the perils of a lee shore,” he shouted. “The breakers! The breakers! We are all lost.”
    With this alarming declaration, he deliberately tipped over the peddler’s cart in simulation of a terrible shipwreck and, flailing his arms like a drowning man, sprawled his full six-and-a-half-foot length on the stage, where he continued to thrash and writhe.
    â€œThe explorer is washed ashore at the mouth of the noble Columbia,” he at length explained. Getting to his feet, he rolled up his galoshes and made as if he were wading through crashing surf, swinging his elbows in time with his strides. Shading his brow with his hand, peering first in one direction, then another, rocking up on his toes, and dropping into a low crouch, he roared out through his tin ear trumpet, “Cast away on the far side of Continent North America, the undaunted explorer bethinks himself to journey overland, by canoe and on foot, to the United States.”
    The audience seemed puzzled. But as my uncle continued to charge about, now paddling the skate man’s cart up the Columbia, now climbing a ladder propped against some flats at the rear of the stage to represent the Rockies, now harrying offstage several street urchins from the Battle of Bunker Hill, whom he had engaged to represent the “all-puissant Blackfeet”—the playgoers began to laugh.
    A wag sitting beside me in the front row, wearing an academical cap and gown and no doubt from Harvard College, stood up. “I see Don Quixote,” he called out. “But where’s Sancho Panza?”
    Another Harvardite inquired if we had met the Lost Tribe of Israel in our travels. A third augmented the attack of the Blackfeet with an egg rather past its prime, which splattered on the good ship
Samuel de Champlain.
    The climax of the reenactment came when my uncle declared, “Hark, do I hear the thunder of ten thousand bison approaching?” At this cue, the skate man led his blind cart-pony out onto the stage, caparisoned in a moth-eaten buffalo robe. Which sight produced, I am afraid, unrestrained peals of laughter.
    Unabashed, the private stepped forward and made several flourishing bows, insisting that the urchins, the skate peddler, and the pony do the same. He then asked for subscriptions for his trip back to the Pacific. But so far from offering handsome investments in our project, the citizens of Boston, led by the Harvards, presented him with a barrage of spoiled oranges, eggs, cabbages, and dead rats, accompanied by jeers and