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The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons by James Fenimore Cooper
page 74 of 525 (14%)
Pippo, who had that useful tact which enables a man to measure his own
estimation with others, was not slow to perceive that the more enlightened
part of his audience began to tire of this pretending buffoonery.
Resorting to a happy subterfuge, by means of one of his sleight-of-hand
expedients, he succeeded in transferring the whole of that portion of the
spectators who still found amusement in his jugglery, to the other end of
the vessel, where they established themselves among the anchors, ready as
ever to swallow an aliment, that seems to find an unextinguishable
appetite for its reception among the vulgar. Here he continued his
exhibition, now moralizing in the quaint and often in the pithy manner,
which renders the southern buffoon so much superior to his duller
competitor of the north, and uttering a wild jumble of wholesome truths,
loose morality, and witty inuendoes, the latter of which never failed to
extort roars of laughter from all but those who happened to be their
luckless subjects.

Once or twice Baptiste raised his head, and stared about him with drowsy
eyes, but, satisfied there was nothing to be done in the way of forcing
the vessel ahead, he resumed his nap, without interfering in the pastime
of those whom he had hitherto seemed to take pleasure in annoying. Left
entirely to themselves, therefore, the crowd on the forecastle represented
one of those every-day but profitable pictures of life, which abound under
our eyes, but which, though they are pregnant with instruction, are
treated with the indifference that would seem to be the inevitable
consequence of familiarity.

The crowded and overloaded bark might have been compared to the vessel of
human life, which floats at all times subject to the thousand accidents of
a delicate and complicated machinery: the lake, so smooth and alluring in
its present tranquillity, but so capable of lashing its iron-bound coasts
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