Mike Marble His Crotchets and Oddities.

Excerpt

CHAP. I.

ABOUT CROTCHETS.

Don't be frightened, reader, at what you see on the title-page of this book, or at the head which I have given to my first chapter. Don't let the idea creep into your head, that I am going to give you a dull and sleepy essay on music. It is not the crotchets which you find in the singing-book, that I intend to talk about; I leave them to those who know more about them than I do. There is a man of my acquaintance, whom I could hunt up without much trouble, and who, if you should ever choose to give him a chance, would talk you deaf, and write you blind, about this sort of crotchets, together with all the members of that noisy family—breves, semibreves, minims, and what not! I'll refer you to him, for all the mysteries of the gamut. Whenever you want to learn them, I assure you he would like no better fun than to teach them to you. I'll not interfere with his trade.

My business is with another family of crotchets. Webster—Noah Webster, the man who made the spelling-book, out of which Uncle Frank learned to say, or rather to drawl his letters—gives, in his large dictionary, as one of the definitions of the word crotchet, this: "a peculiar turn of mind, a whim, a fancy." Here you have just that kind of crotchet that I am going to deal with. Mr. Webster could not have hit my crotchet more exactly, if he had taken aim at it on purpose. It is a peculiar turn of mind, or, if you prefer it, a whim, or a fancy, that I shall talk about, for an hour or so, perhaps longer. Indeed, I am not perfectly sure but I shall find a whole flock of whims and fancies, because, you know, "birds of a feather flock together," and, in that case, I shall give you a peep at a score or two of whims and fancies.

Now, who knows but these crotchets will be worth hearing about? People write large, thick volumes, on drier topics than whims and fancies—that is, to my way of thinking—and I suppose their books are read. Certainly they expect to have them read, or they would not make them. Then why may not my book on crotchets find readers?

If I were to write a book on warts and corns, don't you think the book would get read? I do. I have not the least doubt of it. Suppose, now, it were published in the newspapers, that Messrs. Phillips, Sampson & Company, one of the largest and most respectable publishing houses in the Union, are about to issue a volume, entitled Freaks of the Wart Family, from the pen of Uncle Frank, a man who, first and last, has printed a good deal of sense, together with some nonsense, and who, in this volume, has succeeded in stringing together some of the strangest things that ever saw the light. Suppose that some newspaper should give that item of news, don't you think folks would get the book, when it was published? and don't you think they would read it, or, at all events, skim it over, to see what kind of stuff Uncle Frank had been emptying out of his brain? I think so.

Well, warts and corns are to the body what whims and crotchets are to the mind....