I recently had the dubious pleasure of hearing the life story of one of the most unfortunate men in the history of the world. He was not bold or beautiful. He was not intelligent or interesting. His name was Phabmud. That is a terribly unfortunate name even by the standards of the Mugwumpi language, but it was an even more unfortunate name for a trill. His muscles were his only redeeming feature, and so he made a life for himself by lifting heavy objects and then putting them down again later. Some of the people who saw him would say that he was nothing more than a simple machine. Others were far less charitable.

Many of those people insulted him without any thought, but a few of them wanted to provoke a fight. It is, after all, something of a law of nature that where there are mortals, there is needless belligerence. Phabmud never gave them what they wanted. He remained aloof, and he did not fight them. No insult could ever move him to violence.

One of the more persistent fellows who mocked him refused to accept his peaceful nature. He would hurl insults at Phabmud one after the other, day after day and night after night. He raised personal invective to something that resembled an art form. When that failed to get any results, he debased it to something that resembled Gaudiguchi philosophy. He insulted Phabmud's face, and when that failed he insulted Phabmud's mother and father. He even went on to insult Phabmud for his complete failure to understand that he was being insulted. The man proved to be a habitual failure, in which regard he resembles most men who make a habit of such activities.

That fiend of a man soon hit upon a scheme that he expected to provoke the man into a fit of violence. He claimed that he was moving to Delport, and paid Phabmud his prized possessions to his new home. He even bought a home in the village to make his tale more convincing. He persuaded a charming young lady from the village to wait in that house, and he paid her a charmingly large sum of money to seduce Phabmud when he finally arrived. The tormentor was not there at the time, for he had resolved to hide outside the home so that he could put the second phase of his nefarious scheme into action.

The woman set upon Phabmud as soon as he came into the home. She tried to court him with poetry, but he could not understand it. She tried to flatter him, but he had so little experience with compliments that he could not understand them. She tried to dance with him, but Phabmud could not see the point of that sort of thing. She eventually realized that Phabmud was little more than a simple machine of a man, and that he would only respond to simple advances. She professed her love for him, and she did it without any sort of artful phrasing or clever poetry.

That was a new experience for Phabmud, but he liked it very much. Nothing had ever been so bold as to love him before, or at least none had ever admitted it. His parents might have loved him, but if they did they had always been far too embarassed to admit it. He had tried to befriend a dog, but it had never loved him. It had loved to bite him, but that is not the same thing.

Phabmud was immediately smitten with the woman. It did not matter that he did not know her name, or that they had never seen each other before. He was in love, because he had never been loved, and he rather wanted to change that. Their romance was only a few minutes old, but it was already fit for the stage.

Every good romance needs an element of heartbreak. Phabmud and his alleged lover had progressed from their first meeting to declarations of eternal love in only a few minutes, so it was only natural that the heartbreak would come shortly thereafter. It was at that time that Phabmud's old tormentor rushed into the house. He had a sword in his hand, and he called out for Phabmud to hand over everything of value. He even claimed that he would kill Phabmud's new lover if he did not comply. He ranted, he swore, and he waved his sword as he made his demands. He was certain that if he could not break Phabmud's composure and provoke a fight by doing that, then the man was simply incapable of violence.

Phabmud found this all rather upsetting. On one hand, he had an armed man urging him to fight and threatening the woman that he had loved for the past few minutes. On the other hand, he had no experience with violence of any kind. If even he had wanted to fight, he could not possibly hope to win. He was not a bright man, or a bold man, but even he realized that he had to find a solution to this problem. He thought for a rather long moment, and then he decided to do the one thing that he was good at doing.

He walked over to the man and placed both of hands firmly around his waist. He then lifted the man into his air. He had quite a lot of experience with lifting things, even things that had the potential to hurt him, so he managed to do it without any great difficulty. He carried the man out of the house and he carried the man down to a river. He carried the man until he found a boat, and then he put the man down inside it. It was exactly like a normal day of work for him, except that he had not been paid.

He took a risk once the man was in the boat. He tried something that he had never tried before. He shoved the boat away from the bank, and then he gave it a solid push to help it travel down the river. Phabmud's plan was a massive success, and it was only a few more minutes before the man drifted out of sight.

The woman had no intention of staying with Phabmud now that the affair was over, but she had a pressing question that she had to ask before she could make her escape. She went up to Phabmud, and she asked why he had simply carried the man away instead of striking him. Phabmud's answer was simple, for in truth the people who called him a simple machine had an accurate opinion of his mental powers. He turned the woman and he uttered his reply:

"Because I am a lever, not a fighter."