Dead Cats & Sacraments

O YE JIGS & JULEPS! (50 pp.)--Virginia Gary Hudson--Macmillan ($2.50).

Last year's flyweight bestseller was Winnie Ille Pu, a Latin translation of A. A. Milne's wonderful beary story. Almost no one could read it, but it sold awfully well (it looked impressive on the coffee table, and the English original made a dandy pony). The book that seems certain to be this year's small mad success is not written in Latin, and it is not really a children's book. But it is, or is claimed to be, a child's book. O Ye Jigs & Juleps!, a sheaf of very severe, very funny essays about adult nonsense, shows the world of Louisville as it was seen in 1904 by ten-year-old Virginia Cary Hudson, then a pupil in an Episcopal boarding school. Its publishers say, word of honor, that it is Virginia's work, discovered decades later in an attic trunk by her daughter. The story is that the little Virginia stammered, and her English teacher allowed her to write out her assignments.

Whatever the case, Jigs does not quite have the ring of authenticity achieved by that small classic The Young Visiters, supposedly written at the turn of the century by nine-year-old Daisy Ashford. Nevertheless, Jigs makes some of the best out-loud reading since the original Pooh. "Sacraments are what you do in Church. What you do at home is something else," Virginia began the rambling essays she wrote for her boarding-school teacher. "When you are little and ugly somebody carries you in church on a pillow, and you come out a child of God and inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven. They pour water on your head and that's a sacrament. When you are twelve you walk back in yourself with your best dress and shoes on, and you walk up to the Bishop, and he stands up, and you kneel down, and he mashes on your head and you are an Episcopal. Then you are supposed to increase in spirit." She added thoughtfully: "I tasted some of the bread in the choir room and it tasted just like my gold fish wafers."

Not all of Virginia's accounts are godly; she recalls that "Oscar Sargent bet me my whole bag of gumdrops that Miss Nelly McDonnell's cat couldn't scratch himself out if we buried him. I bet he could. But if he could, he didn't. Oscar says to me. he says 'What do people do with dead bodies?' " Still, she is a properly brought up little girl, and she ends every chapter with a prayer. The one that closes the chapter about her garden party (at which the bishop drank a triple julep and she danced with some little colored boys) goes like this: "Oh ye Sun and Moon, oh ye beans and roses, oh ye jigs and juleps. Bless ye the Lord. Praise Him and Magnify Him Forever. Amen."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.