“. . . responded the undertaker, with a laugh.”
“. . . murmured the chambermaid, blushing.”
“. . . repeated the burglar, bursting into tears.”
“. . . replied the conductor, flipping the ash
from his cigar.”
“. . . responded Arkwright, with a laugh.”
“. . . murmured the chief of police, blushing.”
“. . . repeated the house-cat, bursting into
tears.”
And so on and so on; till at last it ceases to excite.
I always notice stage directions, because they fret
me and keep me trying to get out of their way, just
as the automobiles do. At first; then by and
by they become monotonous and I get run over.
Mr. Howells has done much work, and the spirit of
it is as beautiful as the make of it. I have
held him in admiration and affection so many years
that I know by the number of those years that he is
old now; but his heart isn’t, nor his pen; and
years do not count. Let him have plenty of them;
there is profit in them for us.
In the appendix to Croker’s Boswell’s
Johnson one finds this anecdote:
Cato’s soliloquy.—One day
Mrs. Gastrel set a little girl to repeat to him [Dr.
Samuel Johnson] Cato’s Soliloquy, which she went
through very correctly. The Doctor, after a
pause, asked the child:
“What was to bring Cato to an end?”
She said it was a knife.
“No, my dear, it was not so.”
“My aunt Polly said it was a knife.”
“Why, Aunt Polly’s knife may do,
but it was a Dagger, my dear.”
He then asked her the meaning of “bane and antidote,”
which she was unable to give. Mrs. Gastrel said:
“You cannot expect so young a child to know
the meaning of such words.”
He then said:
“My dear, how many pence are there in sixpence?”
“I cannot tell, sir,” was the half-terrified
reply.
On this, addressing himself to Mrs. Gastrel, he said:
“Now, my dear lady, can anything be more ridiculous
than to teach a child Cato’s Soliloquy, who
does not know how many pence there are in a sixpence?”
In a lecture before the Royal Geographical Society
Professor Ravenstein quoted the following list of
frantic questions, and said that they had been asked
in an examination:
Mention all names of places in the world derived from
Julius Caesar or
Augustus Caesar.
Where are the following rivers: Pisuerga, Sakaria,
Guadalete, Jalon,
Mulde?
All you know of the following: Machacha, Pilmo,
Schebulos, Crivoscia,
Basces, Mancikert, Taxhem, Citeaux, Meloria, Zutphen.
The highest peaks of the Karakorum range.
The number of universities in Prussia.
Why are the tops of mountains continually covered
with snow [sic]?
