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ion, and perhaps enabled him to popularize his subject, but for his Satanic contempt for all academic dignitaries and persons in general who thought more of Greek than of phonetics. Once, in the days when the Imperial Institute rose in South Kensington, and Joseph Chamberlain was booming the Empire, I induced the editor of a leading monthly review to commission an article from Sweet on the imperial importance of his subject. When it arrived, it contained nothing but a savagely derisive attack

of this kind, of overtones and undertones that illuminate the hackish psyche.But there is more. Hackers, as a rule, love wordplay and are very conscious and inventive in their use of language. These traits seem to be common in young children, but the conformity-enforcing machine we are pleased to call an educational system bludgeons them out of most of us before adolescence. Thus, linguistic invention in most subcultures of the modern West is a halting and largely unconscious process. Hackers,

ch of delicate pink dust in the hole. Iput my finger in, to feel it, and said OUCH! and took it out again. Itwas a cruel pain. I put my finger in my mouth; and by standing first onone foot and then the other, and grunting, I presently eased my misery;then I was full of interest, and began to examine.I was curious to know what the pink dust was. Suddenly the name of itoccurred to me, though I had never heard of it before. It was FIRE! Iwas as certain of it as a person could be of anything in the

evil give to him with his own hands, and told him he could cure anybody with it and fetch witches whenever he wanted to just by saying something to it; but he never told what it was he said to it. Niggers would come from all around there and give Jim anything they had, just for a sight of that five-center piece; but they wouldn't touch it, because the devil had had his hands on it. Jim was most ruined for a servant, because he got stuck up on account of having seen the devil and been rode by

ast in the carp-pond at the end of the King's Walk. With the enthusiastic egotism of the true artist, he went over his most celebrated performances, and smiled bitterly to himself as he recalled to mind his last appearance as "Red Reuben, or the Strangled Babe," his début as "Guant Gibeon, the Blood-sucker of Bexley Moor," and the furore he had excited one lovely June evening by merely playing ninepins with his own bones upon the lawn-tennis ground. And after all this some

ck. That is nonsense. If I marry a charming girl like Gwendolen, and she is the only girl I ever saw in my life that I would marry, I certainly won't want to know Bunbury.Algernon. Then your wife will. You don't seem to realise, that in married life three is company and two is none. Jack. [Sententiously.] That, my dear young friend, is the theory that the corrupt French Drama has been propounding for the last fifty years. Algernon. Yes; and that the happy English home has proved in half the

managers of big city shops once lifted the rule prescribing certain modes for their female working staffs--if they should give their women clerks a free hand in choosing their own wardrobes for store hours--well, you know how women are!Nevertheless and to the contrary notwithstanding, I will admit while I am on this phase of my topic that there likewise is something to be said in dispraise of my own sex too. In the other--and better half of this literary double sketch-team act, my admired and

down and wrote out a prescription,and folded it up and gave it me, and I put it in my pocket and went out.I did not open it. I took it to the nearest chemist's, and handed it in.The man read it, and then handed it back. He said he didn't keep it. I said: "You are a chemist?" He said: "I am a chemist. If I was a co-operative stores and family hotelcombined, I might be able to oblige you. Being only a chemist hampersme." I read the prescription. It ran: "1 lb. beefsteak,

as stumped, and set still. I was most ready to cry; but all at once I thought of a way, and so I offered them Miss Watson--they could kill her. Everybody said:"Oh, she'll do. That's all right. Huck can come in." Then they all stuck a pin in their fingers to get blood to sign with, and I made my mark on the paper. "Now," says Ben Rogers, "what's the line of business of this Gang?" "Nothing only robbery and murder," Tom said. "But who are we going to

"I didn't mean so bad as that, Aleck; I didn't really mean immoral piety, I only meant--meant--well, conventional piety, you know; er--shop piety; the--the--why, YOU know what I mean. Aleck--the--well, where you put up that plated article and play it for solid, you know, without intending anything improper, but just out of trade habit, ancient policy, petrified custom, loyalty to--to--hang it, I can't find the right words, but YOU know what I mean, Aleck, and that there isn't any harm in