THE CHAMPION LIAR.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXI, Issue 4794, 3 August 1876, Page 3

THE CHAMPION LIAR.

(" M. Quad," in the Detroit Free Press.) • One evening last week, when the winter blasts moaned sadly around the street corners, and the captains of the terry-boats wore anxious looks, seven or eight vessel owners and "laid up " lake captains sat around a baseburoer in a saloon near the river. After the usual amount of growling about the weather, one of them told a story. There might have been an ounce of truth about it, but the crowd felt certain that the one ounce was offset by twenty-four pounds of the " awfullest kind " of lying. Therefore, a second man told a storyto beat it, and then a third man beat the second. When the fourth man started out he said :.'■. " Gentlemen, I have also seen tough times. When I was sailing the schooner Fortune forty years ago, two of us were swept overboard in a storm on Lake Erie one black'night, a hatch cover, went with us, and it happened that we both clutched it. . It was hot large enough' to support two. I was a captam-—he a sailor. I had a family—he had none. I shouted to him to quit his hold, and Wne'h he would not, I reached over, clutched his. throat, and held on till his fingers loosened, and he went to the bottom of the lake. It was twenty miles off Point Betsy, and with a. shrill, wild shriek, which yet lingers in my ears, the poor wretch went to his death ! May'the Lord forgive me !" , With his chair tilted against the wall, a lanky, sunflowerish. chap had been nodding his head right and left, as if sleeping. As the captain's narrative was concluded, the stranger rose up and solemnly said: " I am that man !" The crowd, looded at him in astonishment, and he continued: " I landed on Point Betsy next morning in time for breakfast, and I swore a solemn oath that I'd liek you for choldng me if I had to live a hundred years to do it !" "you can't be the man," replied the captain, looking suspiciously at the fellow's big fists; " it was forty years ago." "I know it was, and for forty years I have been aching to lick you out of your boots !"''.' The captain had lied, but be didn't want to own it, and he said : " The sailor a name wa3 Dick Rice." " Kerect !" bowed the stranger, " that's my name !" ' . . " But he was taller than you." " Being in .the water so long that night I shrunk just a foot," was the cool rejoinder. " Well, I know you can't be the man," said the captain. " I am, the man, and now I'm going to maul you to pulp ! No man can choke me and then brag about it !" .' He sailed in and upset the captain, but was then set jipon by the whole crowd. Ho got into the eye of the wind, and hung there for a time, but presently he paid off a little, got the wind on his quarter, and went in to lick ten times his weight in old liars. He was a very ambitious man, and those who could get out of doors got out, and those who . could'nt offered him a gallon of whisky to come to anchor. He furled his sails on this understanding, and as he set his glass down for the third drink he wiped his bleeding ear, and remarked—- " When a man tries to sacrifice me in order to save himself, he don't know who he's fooling with 1" , 'He was the biggest liar of them all, but he made the most out of it