try to put your finger on him. Now that’s a common,
ordinary, third-class flea’s gait; but you take an Eye-
talian FIRST-class, that’s been the pet of the nobility all
his life, and hasn’t ever knowed what want or sickness
or exposure was, and he can jump more than three
hundred times his own length, and keep it up all day,
five such jumps every second, which is fifteen hundred
times his own length. Well, suppose a man could go
fifteen hundred times his own length in a second — say,
a mile and a half. It’s ninety miles a minute; it’s
considerable more than five thousand miles an hour.
Where’s your man NOW? — yes, and your bird, and
your railroad, and your balloon? Laws, they don’t
amount to shucks ‘longside of a flea. A flea is just
a comet b’iled down small.”
Jim was a good deal astonished, and so was I. Jim
said:
“Is dem figgers jist edjackly true, en no jokin’ en
no lies, Mars Tom?”
“Yes, they are; they’re perfectly true.”
“Well, den, honey, a body’s got to respec’ a flea.
I ain’t had no respec’ for um befo’, sca’sely, but dey
ain’t no gittin’ roun’ it, dey do deserve it, dat’s
certain.”
“Well, I bet they do. They’ve got ever so much
more sense, and brains, and brightness, in proportion
to their size, than any other cretur in the world. A
person can learn them ‘most anything; and they learn
it quicker than any other cretur, too. They’ve been
learnt to haul little carriages in harness, and go this
way and that way and t’other way according to their
orders; yes, and to march and drill like soldiers, doing
it as exact, according to orders, as soldiers does it.
They’ve been learnt to do all sorts of hard and
troublesome things. S’pose you could cultivate a flea
up to the size of a man, and keep his natural
smartness a-growing and a-growing right along up,
bigger and bigger, and keener and keener, in the same
proportion — where’d the human race be, do you
reckon? That flea would be President of the United
States, and you couldn’t any more prevent it than you
can prevent lightning.”
“My lan’, Mars Tom, I never knowed dey was so
much TO de beas’. No, sir, I never had no idea of it,
and dat’s de fac’.”
“There’s more to him, by a long sight, than there
is to any other cretur, man or beast, in proportion to
size. He’s the interestingest of them all. People have
so much to say about an ant’s strength, and an ele-
phant’s, and a locomotive’s. Shucks, they don’t begin
with a flea. He can lift two or three hundred times his
own weight. And none of them can come anywhere
near it. And, moreover, he has got notions of his
own, and is very particular, and you can’t fool him;
his instinct, or his judgment, or whatever it is, is per-
fectly sound and clear, and don’t ever make a mistake.
People think all humans are alike to a flea. It ain’t
so. There’s folks that he won’t go near, hungry or
not hungry, and I’m one of them. I’ve never had one
of them on me in my life.”
“Mars Tom!”
“It’s so; I ain’t joking.”
“Well, sah, I hain’t ever heard de likes o’ dat befo’.”
Jim couldn’t believe it, and I couldn’t; so we had to
drop down to the sand and git a supply and see. Tom
was right. They went for me and Jim by the thou-
sand, but not a one of them lit on Tom. There warn’t
no explaining it, but there it was and there warn’t no
getting around it. He said it had always been just so,
and he’d just as soon be where there was a million of
them as not; they’d never touch him nor bother
him.
We went up to the cold weather to freeze ’em out,
and stayed a little spell, and then come back to the
comfortable weather and went lazying along twenty or
twenty-five miles an hour, the way we’d been doing for
the last few hours. The reason was, that the longer