world so full should be
happy as kings, and you know …
how happy kings are
One sweet morning in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and thirty-nine, a little old gentleman got up and threw wide the windows of his bedroom, letting in the living sun. A black-widow spider, who had been dozing on the balcony, slashed at him, and although she missed, she did not miss very far. The old gentleman went downstairs to the dining room and was just sitting down to a splendid breakfast when his grandson, a boy named Burt, pulled the chair from under him. The old man’s hip was strained, but it was fortunately not broken.
Out in the street, as he limped toward a little park with many trees, which was to him a green isle in the sea, the old man was tripped up by a gaily colored hoop sent rolling at him, with a kind of disinterested deliberation, by a grim little girl. Hobbling on a block farther, the old man was startled, but not exactly surprised, when a bold daylight robber stuck a gun in his ribs. “Put ‘em up, Mac,” said the robber, “and come across.” Mac put them up and came across with his watch and money and a gold ring his mother had given him when he was a boy.
When at last the old gentleman staggered into the little park, which had been to him a fountain and a shrine, he saw that half the trees had been killed by a blight and the other half by a bug. Their leaves were gone and they no longer afforded any protection from the skies, so the hundred planes which appeared suddenly overhead had an excellent view of the little old gentleman through their bombing sights.
Moral: The world is so full of a number of things, I am sure we should all be as happy as kings, and you know how happy kings are.
Further Fables VIII by James Thurber as was printed today, February 17, in the New Yorker Magazine back in 1940.
The first 2 stanzas of the moral are from the Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem Happy Thought (XXIV) from Mr. Stevenson’s Child’s Book of Verse.
The world is so full of a number of things,
I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.
The final part, and you know how happy kings are, was a favorite Thurber quote.
Oh how I wish for a Thurber or a Mencken to experience this era …
But then, I wouldn’t wish this era on anyone.
As Mr. Thurber said, The world is so full of a number of things, I am sure we should all be as happy as kings, and you know how happy kings are.
The fable must have been too dark as it wasn’t picked to be the either Fables for Our Time, published in 1939 or Further Fables for Our Time published in 1955, but had to wait for the Collected Fables which didn’t come around until 2019.
No Haiku For You 