A pushing young actor who was playing understudy in one of Mr. Barrie’s plays found his opportunity one night through the illness of his principal. He accordingly flooded his managerial and influential acquaintances with telegrams announcing: “I play So-and-So’s part to-night.” Except that the theater was comparatively empty this breathless disclosure produced no result, except a telegram in reply from Mr. Barrie, to this effect: “Thanks for the warning.”
It was a busy day in the butcher-shop. The butcher yelled to the boy who helped him out in the shop: “Hurry up, John, and don’t forget to cut off Mrs. Murphy’s leg, and break Mrs. Jones’s bones, and don’t forget to slice Mrs. Johnson’s tongue.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, like other men of genius, was absent-minded, and, when a fit of inspiration seized him, he was oblivious to the things of earth to a ludicrous extent. A story that is vouched for as true illustrates this.
The old-fashioned matches, in use in New England in Emerson’s time, were made in cards, or flat slabs, the matches being joined at the foot, and separating at the top, like the teeth of a deep comb. Emerson was accustomed, in the midnight watches, to lie awake communing with his own thoughts, and, if any especial inspiration developed itself, he would get up and write it down, lighting the lamp for that purpose.
One night, Mrs. Emerson was awakened by her gifted husband’s voice, as he called to her plaintively:
“What is the matter with the matches, my dear? I have struck seven, and not one will light. Where can I get some good ones?”
Mrs. Emerson got out of bed at once, and found the matches in their accustomed place. Her husband had not touched them.
“Why, what can you have been striking, in mistake for matches?” she asked, anxiously, and beheld her best carved tortoise-shell comb, which the absorbed philosopher, had broken up, tooth by tooth, in mistake for the card of matches.
Instructor in Public Speaking--“What is the matter with you, Mr. Jones; can’t you speak any louder? Be more enthusiastic. Open your mouth and throw yourself into it.”
“I confess that the subject of psychical research makes no great appeal to me,” Sir William Henry Perkin, the inventor of coal-tar dyes, told some friends in New York. “Personally, in the course of a fairly long career, I have heard at first hand but one ghost story. Its hero was a man whom I may as well call Snooks.