Read it up-----, and don't come asking a man if he's certain about a bit of ABC stuff that the very southern niggers know all about."Here the Admiral's fires began to wax hot, the atmosphere thickened, the coming earthquake rumbled, he began to thunder and lighten.Within three minutes his volcano was in full irruption and he was discharging flames and ashes of indignation, belching black volumes of foul history aloft, and vomiting red-hot torrents of profanity from his crater.Meantime Williams sat silent, and apparently deeply and earnestly interested in what the old man was saying.By and by, when the lull came, he said in the most deferential way, and with the gratified air of a man who has had a mystery cleared up which had been puzzling him uncomfortably:
"Now I understand it.I always thought I knew that piece of history well enough, but was still afraid to trust it, because there was not that convincing particularity about it that one likes to have in history; but when you mentioned every name, the other day, and every date, and every little circumstance, in their just order and sequence, I said to myself, this sounds something like--this is history--this is putting it in a shape that gives a man confidence; and I said to myself afterward, I will just ask the Admiral if he is perfectly certain about the details, and if he is I will come out and thank him for clearing this matter up for me.
And that is what I want to do now--for until you set that matter right it was nothing but just a confusion in my mind, without head or tail to it."Nobody ever saw the Admiral look so mollified before, and so pleased.
Nobody had ever received his bogus history as gospel before; its genuineness had always been called in question either by words or looks;but here was a man that not only swallowed it all down, but was grateful for the dose.He was taken a back; he hardly knew what to say; even his profanity failed him.Now, Williams continued, modestly and earnestly:
"But Admiral, in saying that this was the first stone thrown, and that this precipitated the war, you have overlooked a circumstance which you are perfectly familiar with, but which has escaped your memory.Now Igrant you that what you have stated is correct in every detail--to wit:
that on the 16th of October, 1860, two Massachusetts clergymen, named Waite and Granger, went in disguise to the house of John Moody, in Rockport, at dead of night, and dragged forth two southern women and their two little children, and after tarring and feathering them conveyed them to Boston and burned them alive in the State House square; and Ialso grant your proposition that this deed is what led to the secession of South Carolina on the 20th of December following.Very well." [Here the company were pleasantly surprised to hear Williams proceed to come back at the Admiral with his own invincible weapon--clean, pure, manufactured history, without a word of truth in it.] "Very well, I say.
But Admiral, why overlook the Willis and Morgan case in South Carolina?
You are too well informed a man not to know all about that circumstance.