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The World’s Wit and Humor: An Encyclopedia in 15 Volumes. 1906.

Robert Jones Burdette (1844–1914)

The Legend of Mimir

IT is a beautiful legend of the Norseland. Amilias was the village blacksmith, and under the spreading chestnut treekjn his village smithopjken stood. He the hot iron gehammered and sjhod horsee for fifty cents all round, please. He made tin hjelmets for the gjodds, and stovepipe trousers for the hjeroes.

Mimir was a rival blacksmith. He didn’t go in very much for defensive armor, but he was lightning on two-edged Bjswords and cut-and-slash svjcutlassssses. He made chyjeese knives for the gjodds, and he made the great Bjsvsstnsen an Arkansaw toothpick that would make a free incision clear into the transverse semicolon of a cast-iron Ichthyosaurus and never turn its edge. That was the kind of a Bhjairpin Mimir said he was.

One day Amilias made an impenetrable suit of armor for a second-class gjodd, and put it on himself to test it, and boastfully inserted a card in the Svensska Norderbjravisk jkanaheldes plvtdenskgorodtrvusaken, saying that he was wearing a suit of home-made, best-chilled Norway merino underwear that would nick the unnumbered saw-teeth in the pot-metal cutlery of the ironmongery over the way. That, Amilias remarked to Bjohnn Bjrobinssson, was the kind of a Bdjucckk he was.

When Mimir spelled out the card next morning, he said “Bjjj!” and went to work with a charcoal furnace, a cold anvil, and the new isomorphic process, and in a little while he came down street with a sjword that glittered like a dollar-store diamond, and met Amilias down by the new opera house. Amilias buttoned on his new Bjarmour, and said:

“If you have no hereafter use for your chyjeese-kjnife, strike.”

Mimir spat on his hands, whirled his skjword above his head, and fetched Amilias a swipe that seemed to miss everything except the empty air, through which it softly whistled. Amilias smiled, and said, “Go on,” adding that it “seemed to him he felt a general sense of cold iron somewhere in the neighborhood, but he hadn’t been hit.”

“Shake yourself,” said Mimir.

Amilias shook himself, and immediately fell into halves, the most neatly divided man that ever went beside himself.

“That’s where the boiler-maker was away off in his diagnosis,” said Mimir, as he went back to his shop to put up the price of cutlery sixty-five per cent. in all lines, with an unlimited advance on special orders.

Thus do we learn that a good action is never thrown away, and that kind words and patient love will overcome the harshest natures.