prose

A Teeny-Tiny Ghost Story

My parents used to read this story to my brothers and me when we were in grade school — after dark, in scary voices. I loved it! The book set that the story is in eventually ended up in their attic for many years, but today we came across it while cleaning and those cherished childhood memories have now come to live on my bookshelves. —tg

“TEENY-TINY”

Reprinted from James Orchard Halliwell, Esq., “Fireside Nursery Stories,” Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales: A Sequel to the Nursery Rhymes of England, 1849.

This simple tale seldom fails to rivet the attention of children, especially if well told. The last two words should be said loudly with a start. It was obtained from oral tradition, and has not, I believe, been printed. –JOH, Brixton Hill, Surrey, April 1849

Once upon a time there was a teeny-tiny woman lived in a teeny-tiny house in a teeny-tiny village. Now, one day this teeny-tiny woman put on her teeny-tiny bonnet, and went out of her teeny-tiny house to take a teeny-tiny walk. And when this teeny-tiny woman had gone a teeny-tiny way, she came to a teeny-tiny gate; so the teeny-tiny woman opened the teeny-tiny gate, and went into a teeny-tiny churchyard. And when this teeny-tiny woman had got into the teeny-tiny churchyard, she saw a teeny-tiny bone on a teeny-tiny grave, and the teeny-tiny woman said to her teeny-tiny self, “This teeny-tiny bone will make me some teeny-tiny soup for my teeny-tiny supper.” So the teeny-tiny woman put the teeny-tiny bone into her teeny-tiny pocket, and went home to her teeny-tiny house.

Now when the teeny-tiny woman got home to her teeny-tiny house, she was a teeny-tiny tired; so she went up her teeny-tiny stairs to her teeny-tiny bed, and put the teeny-tiny bone into a teeny-tiny cupboard. And when this teeny-tiny woman had been to sleep a teeny-tiny time, she was awakened by a teeny-tiny voice from the teeny-tiny cupboard, which said, “Give me my bone!” And this teeny-tiny woman was a teeny-tiny frightened, so she hid her teeny-tiny head under the teeny-tiny clothes, and went to sleep again. And when she had been to sleep again a teeny-tiny time, the teeny-tiny voice again cried out from the teeny-tiny cupboard a teeny-tiny louder, “Give me my bone!” This made the teeny-tiny woman a teeny-tiny more frightened, so she hid her teeny-tiny head a teeny-tiny further under the teeny-tiny clothes. And when the teeny-tiny woman had been to sleep again a teeny-tiny time, the teeny-tiny voice from the teeny-tiny cupboard said again a teeny-tiny louder, “Give me my bone!” And this teeny-tiny woman was a teeny-tiny bit more frightened, but she put her teeny-tiny head out of the teeny-tiny clothes, and said in her loudest teeny-tiny voice, “TAKE  IT!”

No Kings quotes

*  *  *

How happy we ought to be that we have no kings in America!

—J. Smytthe, Jr, 1853

*  *  *

      It was the birthday of the Neapolitan King. According to custom, the various vessels in the harbor of Naples were decked in their gayest colors, while the men-of-war fired salutes at sunrise, noon, and sunset. However, this year there was an exception — the vessel of Commodore Morgan, U.S.N., which had recently arrived to the harbor.
      The King sent for the Commodore. “Commodore Morgan, I wish to know if your nation desired that you show to me the disrespect which I observed?”
      “May I ask your Majesty,” said the Commodore, “how I have been wanting in respect towards your Majesty?”
      “It is my birthday, and, of all the vessels in port, yours alone did not deign to fire salutes.”
      “Ah, sir!” replied Morgan, “pardon my republican manners. We have no kings in America, and it is not the custom to fire salutes upon our President’s birthday.”

—The Anecdote of Commodore Morgan, 1853

*  *  *

America has no king, that is it has no officer to whom wealth and from whom corruption flow. It has no hereditary oligarchy, that is it acknowledges no order of men privileged to cheat and insult the rest of the members of the State.

—Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1820

*  *  *

America has no king, whose whim could be made into a law.

—Jay William Hudson, 1922

*  *  *

The extraordinary notion that the President has exclusive control over the use of the army has been in part produced by a vague impression of resemblance between his constitutional prerogative and that of sovereigns under constitutional governments. This impression is begotten partly of pride, partly of fear, and greatly of ignorance. There are some people who take such pride in everything American that they must needs consider their own chief magistrate as mightier than a king. It is not an uncommon thing to hear one of these foolish persons boast that their President has more power than the Queen of England, nay, that he is the greatest magistrate in the world. A false analogy here ministers to pride. Because the President is chief magistrate it is inferred that he is like other chief magistrates, and as these are in general kings, it does not require a great stretch of the imagination to fancy that he also is a sort of king. But an American President is not a king, nor anything like a king, any more than he is like the Emperor of Russia, the Sultan of Turkey, or the Mikado of Japan. The chief magistracy is not of necessity a kingly office. The Governors of our States are chief magistrates also, but they are not little kings.

—David Dudley Field, 1877

*  *  *

I have a short answer to all this. America has no king!

—Dublin University Magazine, 1834

*  *  *

The King who comes to his office by virtue of birth, and not of personal qualifications, reigns but does not govern. The republican magistrate does not reign; but it is implied in his position that, within the limits of authority which the law gives him, he should govern. This is implied in the very notion of an elected magistrate. If he is not chosen on account of his capacity for government, why should he be chosen at all?

—The Saturday Review, 1877

*  *  *

It Should be considered, that there are in America, no Kings, Princes, or Nobles: no Popes, Cardinals, Patriarchs, Archbishops, Bishops, or other ecclesiastical Dignitaries. All publick offices and Employments are bestowed, by the free Choice of the People.

—John Adams, 1780

*  *  *

The U.S. Constitution was designed to prevent and control berserk actions by a President and by the Executive Branch of government. Presidents are not kings; they have no Divine Right; and when they commit actions that are immoral, or in violation of the Constitution, they must be stopped, or this country will cease to function as a free Constitutional democracy.

—Pete Hamill, 1972

*  *  *

Every great movement on behalf of humanity leads to organized action. The modern world is learning the enormous value of intelligent and free cooperation; for it is a triumph of the democratic spirit. The people today resolve to do things for themselves. In order to do them, they must combine their energies and their wits, utilize the peculiar power of each individual, and march side by side to the accomplishment of results. Party is simply cooperation. It is not servitude, if the rank and file have brains; for so-called leaders are only servants, if they do but execute the will, and carry out the thought of the people. Presidents are not kings, though entrusted with far more power than most kings possess. There is even no honor in their election, except on the admission that it is an honor to be permitted to serve. The moment a leader sets up to be master instead of servant, let him be promptly dismissed.

—Francis Ellingwood Abbot, 1870

*  *  *

Here is an attempt to throw something of the mystery of kingship round one who is not a King and who cannot really act as a King. A President chosen for four years cannot really play a King’s part. There is nothing sacred about him. He must submit to praise and blame.

—The Saturday Review, 1877

*  *  *

The American system is strictly republican. The relations between President and Congress, whatever may be their advantages and disadvantages, follow naturally from the decision of the founders of the Constitution that the executive power should be vested in a single man and not in a council, and that that single man should be, not a king, but a magistrate: elective, terminable, and responsible.

—Edward A. Freeman, 1879

*  *  *

      We told him we lived in America beneath the flag for which our fathers fought; that we lived in the United States, and we had a right and had a ground to fight on; and we asked the governor to abolish the Baldwin guards. That was the chief thing I was after because I knew when we cleaned them out other things would come with it.
      I called the committee, and I said, “Here, take this document into the governor’s office and present it to him. Now, don’t get on your knees; you don’t need to get on your knees; we have no kings in America; stand on both feet, with your heads erect.”

—Mother Jones, 1912

*  *  *

In America, our president will not only be without the influencing advantages of the British king, but they will be in the possession of the people at large, to strengthen their hands in the event of a contest with him. In short, danger from ecclesiastical tyranny, that long standing and still remaining curse of the people — that sacrilegious engine of royal power in some countries — can be feared by no man in the United States.

—Tench Coxe, 1788

*  *  *

The position of the President of the United States one peculiarly well fitted for learning the truth in regard to a political question! Why, sir, palaces are not proverbial for the amount of truth that is uttered in the ears of the king. Indeed, it is probably one of the most repulsive features that surround a man having the kingly office, that from the day of his birth to the day of his death he never hears the honest, simple truth spoken. The President of the United States, it is true, is not a king; but some of the incidents attaching to kings attach to him, and one of those incidents is that he is less likely than almost any other man in the nation to hear the truth spoken. Who are the men that surround him, and what are their purposes and objects? To speak the truth? Oh no, sir. They are men having other purposes and other objects than to tell the truth. They have an eye to fat contracts, to gifts, and emoluments. They do not go there to offend the ear of majesty by speaking the truth, unless it should be pleasant to the ear of majesty to hear it. About the courts of kings, and, I fear, about presidential mansions, there are many who may, without impropriety, be styled toads, who live upon the vapor of the palace. They may have the precious jewel of truth in their heads, but they are specially cautious not to have it on their tongues.

—Lafayette S. Foster, 1858

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NOTE:  Some of these quotations have been edited for clarity and brevity. For the full excerpts and attributions, plus several more “no kings” quotes, please see www.quotegarden.com/no-kings.html

I Prepare to Face Fifty

“I am middle-aged. Fifty is upon me. And I am faced by a grim reaper. But it is not youth I want. It is time. And there’s too little left. What shall I do about it? Shall I waste these remaining years on people who bore me, squander them on employments that satisfy no desires, sacrifice them to the ideas of others? No. I have wasted hours upon hours on nothing but waiting, days upon days on routine that led nowhere, and a tally of weeks on nonsense and so-called diversion.

“I had an idea that in middle age somehow I should reach a hill and beyond it would lie a promised land. Enough merely to be climbing up. Suddenly now I realize the crown of that hill is age fifty. And I know that if there is a promised land it has got to be in front of me. If I don’t find it now I never shall. So I had better face this fifty, acknowledge it is gone — whether squandered or treasured — forever, and plan what to do with this promised land, how to spend these last precious years left to me.

“From the brow of that fifty hill, suddenly I am beginning to compute time. Do I wish to spend so much of it in my remaining years on the pursuit of youthful looks, on this cult of youth? Perhaps I am a miser with my years, but I must confess that I can no longer see value received from pursuing youth. It will bring me no higher price for my work. It will make my husband no fonder; for affection after fifty rests on something other than complexion. It will not add to my emotional satisfaction nor to the pleasures of my mind. No, I shall not waste any of my remaining years on the pursuit of smooth pink cheeks. Nor will I waste my time or worry with weight, counting calories, or other such psychological-gastronomic engagements!

“Frankly, I do not feel the same as I did twenty years ago. Moreover, I do not want to feel the same. These new feelings — may they not be an asset instead of a liability? I will not be satisfied if my remaining years are a mere repetition of those that have gone before. I want something different. I will not spend this time in an effort to produce an illusion to myself. I will be content to look my age, to dress my age, to live my age. I will appreciate all that life has brought me. I will face fifty cheerfully.

“Do not take this to mean that I am negating its challenges. Fifty does not mean freedom from family demands nor from the things that we are tied to by duty. Fifty brings no alchemy that enables one to plan one’s life as one might try an uncharted sea. We will always have personal and financial limitations, and we can only alter our course according to the wheel in our hands, the craft under us, the shoals and currents around us. But what we may do is decide which direction to steer and how to get the maximum of enjoyment in the steering.

“I must be economical of time. Each day must count. I must plan for the satisfaction that is possible here, now. In youth, always before us was that will-o’-the-wisp, perfection, because there was always the hope of time to reach it. That it was always to be to-morrow did not affect our attitude of mind — that of preparing, improving, developing. But gradually it has been made plain to me that this to-morrow will never come, that as I am to-day so shall I be twenty years from now. Yes, I may improve or grow in that time, but it will be along the line already laid out — I shall not change my style, my type, my talk. In the difference between acceptance of this fact and the belief that ‘all things are possible’ lies the difference between thirty and fifty, between youth and middle-age. To those of my contemporaries who still look for the Prince to ride up and disclose a crown beneath his fedora, who still expect pumpkins to turn to coaches, this seems a tragic difference.

“May the acceptance of the truth of fifty bring its own joys. No longer do I need to pretend. I may say things frankly. I can accept myself as middle-aged, and therefore enjoy myself. I can squeeze the utmost out of what I am and what I have. I can relax from the struggle. I shall no longer punish myself. Instead of competing, I can create. I may choose what I like, including the colors that please me — that do something to my brain, if not indeed to my soul — rather than attempting to express the best in taste and fashion. No longer do I need to try to take everything as it comes, but select what I want. And please understand:  I am not retiring — I am attaining.”

—Emily Newell Blair (1877–1951), “I Prepare to Face Fifty,” 1926, abridged

Confessions of a Worrier

“If any man or woman knows more about worrying than I do, that man or woman is sincerely to be pitied. To begin with, I come of honorable generations of worriers, all of whom seemed to be deeply sensible of their responsibility for the carrying on of a world which they did not create. My grandfather used to worry about the weather and crops. My mother worried with an elaboration and finish which really lent distinction to her performance. She could worry harder and longer on less provocation than anybody else I ever knew. When it became my turn to take up the burden of the universe I was quite as successful as she.

“As a child, I worried about the end of the world, and the Unpardonable Sin, which I knew I had committed, if I could only find out what it was. I worried my way through school and into college, where my course in worry was so complete that I came out with nervous prostration and two deep furrows between my eyebrows which I shall wear, like the scars of battle they really are, to my dying day. And then I worried about the furrows!

“I began to see the light through reading Menticulture by Horace Fletcher which put a vague old Buddhist doctrine into a modern, concrete formula — ‘Anger and worry are bad habits of the mind. They are not necessary ingredients.’ Worry not necessary! I had always supposed it was as much my business to worry as it was to breathe, and I looked upon people who did not worry as the shirks and cowards of creation, who were easy in their minds simply because they were criminally indifferent to their duties.”

—Mary Boardman Page, “The Confessions of a Worrier,” 1899, a little altered

Realm of sorrow

“Another call from the spiritual universe is to the realm of sorrow. We are not good for much until our hearts are broken. I know of no more pathetic object in time than a man or woman who has come to middle life, still heart-whole. It seems as if they had been overlooked or forgotten in the great curriculum of life.

“Sorrow cleanses our vision of misty humors, restores our spiritual myopia, so that we get a clear, long-range outlook upon the verities, the imperishable substances of the inner life.

“He has lived poorly who has come to mature years and has not been touched by world-pain; who has not heard the sighing and the groaning of the millions; who has not at least stepped back a little way into the awful shadow of the world’s spiritual sorrow; known something of its shame and agony for sin; its terrors of an avenging conscience; its fear of angry gods; its shivering dread in presence of an unknown eternity.

“Unless called now and then into the stillness and shadow of this common experience of sorrow, how would we ever be healed of our folly for the getting and having of things? What ministry of consolation and strength could we have among the sinful, the suffering, and the broken-hearted!”

—Rev. James H. Ecob, D.D. (1844–1921), “The Call of the Universe,” sermon, 1904

That dreadful moment

“Growing old… that dreadful moment when we first realize that we are ourselves no longer young. It is an extraordinary moment: pain, denial, rebellion, hopelessness. It arrives in many different ways. It used to come with spectacles — but nowadays the babe wears spectacles; sometimes it creeps upon us with a little stiffening of the joints; one does not run upstairs quite as lightly as one did. It may even reveal itself in the impatience that is felt because people do not speak quite as distinctly as they should — an impatience to which the younger generation rudely refers as deafness. These are gradual intimations that we are not as young as we were.

“There are abrupt ones — especially there is the glance into the mirror some morning, after a sleepless night. Probably every woman over forty-five has known the start of astonishment and dismay that comes with that glance… The woman who has had this slight shock before breakfast glances at her looking-glass many times that day, and always with a growing comfort, for as the day passes things change; her face is more alert, her eyes brighten, her double chin is, somehow, firmer. No; it was only fatigue from a bad night; not age, oh no!”

—Margaret Deland, “The Wickedness of Growing Old,” 1905

An Artist’s Sorrows

As the nightingale went home in the morning and hung his golden harp on the peg, he said in a bitter tone — ’Let them be sure of this, I will not sing again.’

And his wife came up to him with chirpings and hoppings to soothe him:  but nothing availed; it was clear to all that he was bitterly affronted.

Every night he went out and sang his loves to the rose; the night air throbbed and quivered to the sound.

His wife sat at home, and was contented if he was happy; moreover, she thought that, however his love raged, no harm could possibly come of it.

And now at her entreaty he told her of his sorrows, and how deeply he was wounded by what had passed.

‘I sang sweetly! I sang sweetly! the rose opened her leaves; it seemed to me that the moon rose earlier than her wont.

‘All things listened — all things near and far off listened, save only the youth and maiden who were close to me.

‘I sang sweetly! I sang sweetly! but they only turned and whispered to each other…’

—V. A. R., “An Artist’s Sorrows,” from the Kamschatskan, Poems, 1867