Alexandria Gazette & Daily Advertiser

STORY OF KIT CRACKER -- Concluded

"Relieve me" (continued Simon) "thou mayst be a very good companion without swerving from the truth; nay, thou canst no otherwise be a good one, than by adhering to it: for if thou art in the practice of uttering falsehoods, we shall be in the practice of disbelieving thee even when thou speakest the truth; and so there will be an end of all confidence in society, and thy word will pass for nothing. I have observed it is thy vanity that betrays thee into falsehood; I should have hoped thou wouldst not have forgotten how thy falsehood betrayed thee into shame, and how we received and welcomed thee into our society, when thy friends in the metropolis had hooted thee out of theirs. Think not thou canst establish a credit with us by the fictions of imagination: plain truths suit men of plain understandings. Had thy shark been as big again as thou wouldst have us believe it was, what wouldst thou have gained by it? Nothing but the merit of having seen a monster: and what is that compared to the risque of being thought a monster-maker? If thou wast snatched from the jaws of the animal, by the hand of God, give God the praise: if thine own courage and address contributed to save thee, give him still the praise, who inspired thee with those means of furthering his providence in thy rescue. Where is the ground for boasting in all this? Sometimes thou wouldst persuade us thou art a man of consequence, in the favor of princes and in the secrets of ministers. If we are to believe all this, thou dost but libel those ministers for letting such a babbler into their councils; and if thou thinkest to gain a consequence with us thereby, thou art grievously deceived, friend Cracker, for we do not want to know what thou oughtest not to tell, and we despise the servant who betrayeth his master's trust. As for wonders, what signifieth telling us of them? The time is full of wonders: the revolution of empires, the fall of despotism and the emancipation of mankind, are objects whose superior magnitude makes thy shark shrink into an atom. Had the monster gorg'd thee at a mouthful, how many thousands, nay, tens of thousands have the voracious jaws of death devoured in a succession of campaigns, which have made creation melt? Didst thou escape the monster? what then: how can we have leisure to reflect upon thy single deliverance, when we call to mind the numbers of despairing captives who have been liberated from the damp dungeons of tyranny? In a word, friend Cracker, if it is through a love for the marvellous thou makest so free with the sacred name of truth, thou dost but abuse our patience in hunting after sharks and monsters of the deep; and if thou hast any other motive for fiction than the above, it must be a motive less innocent than I have supposed, and in that case, we hold thee dangerous to society, and a disgrace to human nature."

Here he concluded, and though the length and deliberate solemnity of his harangue had given me time enough, yet I had not so availed myself of it as to collect my thoughts, and prepare myself for any kind of defence. How to deal with this formal old fellow I knew not: to cudgel him was a service of more danger than I was fit to engage in, for he was of athletic limbs and stature: to challenge him to a gentleman's satisfaction, being a quaker, would have subjected me to universal ridicule. I rose from my chair, took my hat from the peg and quitted the room. Next morning I sent to cut my name out of the club, but behold! they had saved me that ceremony over night, and I had once more a new set of acquaintance to go in search of.

In this solitary interim, I strove to lighten the burden of time by a correspondence with one of our public prints, and so long as I supplied it with anecdotes from the country, I may say, without vanity, there was neither fire nor food, murder, rape nor robbery wanting to embellish it. I broke two or three necks at a horse-race, without any detriment to the community, and for the amusement of my readers, drove over blind beggars, drowned drunken farmers, and tossed women by mad bullocks, without adding one item to the bills of mortality: I made matches without number, which the register never recorded. I was at the same time a correspondent at Brussels, a resident in Spain and a traveller at Constantinople, who gave secret information of all proceedings in those several places, and by the mysterious style in which I enveloped my despatches, nobody could fix a falsehood on my intelligence, till I prudently fought a battle on the banks of the Danube, after the armies were gone into winter quarters, which did the Turk no mischief, and effectually blasted me with the compiler, and him with the public.

I am now out of business, and if you want any thing in my way, I shall be proud to serve you, being your very humble servant,
KIT CRACKER