The case was tried and a verdict found:
The jury, with great humanity,
Acquitted the prisoner on the ground
Of extemporary insanity.
MR. FINK’S DEBATING DONKEY.
Of a person known as Peters I will humbly
crave your leave
An unusual adventure into narrative to
weave—
Mr. William Perry Peters, of the town
of Muscatel,
A public educator and an orator as well.
Mr. Peters had a weakness which, ’tis
painful to relate,
Was a strong predisposition to the pleasures
of debate.
He would foster disputation wheresoever
he might be;
In polygonal contention none so happy
was as he.
’Twas observable, however, that
the exercises ran
Into monologue by Peters, that rhetorical
young man.
And the Muscatelian rustics who assisted
at the show,
By involuntary silence testified their
overthrow—
Mr. Peters, all unheedful of their silence
and their grief,
Still effacing every vestige of erroneous
belief.
O, he was a sore affliction to all heretics
so bold
As to entertain opinions that he didn’t
care to hold.
One day—’t was in pursuance
of a pedagogic plan
For the mental elevation of Uncultivated
Man—
Mr. Peters, to his pupils, in dismissing
them, explained
That the Friday evening following (unless,
indeed, it rained)
Would be signalized by holding in the
schoolhouse a debate
Free to all who their opinions might desire
to ventilate
On the question, “Which is better,
as a serviceable gift,
Speech or hearing, from barbarity the
human mind to lift?”
The pupils told their fathers, who, forehanded
always, met
At the barroom to discuss it every evening,
dry or wet,
They argued it and argued it and spat
upon the stove,
And the non-committal “barkeep”
on their differences throve.
And I state it as a maxim in a loosish
kind of way:
You’ll have the more to back your
word the less you have to say.
Public interest was lively, but one Ebenezer
Fink
Of the Rancho del Jackrabbit, only seemed
to sit and think.
On the memorable evening all the men of Muscatel Came to listen to the logic and the eloquence as well— All but William Perry Peters, whose attendance there, I fear. Was to wreak his ready rhetoric upon the public ear, And prove (whichever side he took) that hearing wouldn’t lift The human mind as ably as the other, greater gift. The judges being chosen and the disputants enrolled, The question he proceeded in extenso to unfold: “Resolved—The sense of hearing lifts the mind up out of reach Of the fogs of error better than the faculty of speech.” This simple proposition he expounded, word by word, Until they best understood it who least perfectly had heard. Even the judges comprehended as he ventured to explain— The impact of a spit-ball admonishing in vain. Beginning at a period before Creation’s morn, He had