Out of the Hurly-Burly; Or, Life in an Odd Corner

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Out of the Hurly-Burly, by Charles Heber Clark, Illustrated by Arthur B. Frost and Fred. B. Schell
E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Wayne Hammond, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)


OR
BY
BY
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by CHARLES HEBER CLARK, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C.

I have resolved to dedicate this book to a humorist who has had too little fame, to the most delicious, because the most unconscious, humorist, to that widely-scattered and multitudinous comedian who may be expressed in the concrete as
To his habit of perpetrating felicitous absurdities I am indebted for laughter that is worth a hundred groans. It was he who put into type an article of mine which contained the remark, Filtration is sometimes accomplished with the assistance of albumen, and transformed it into Flirtation is sometimes accomplished with the resistance of aldermen. It was he who caused me to misquote the poet's inquiry, so that I propounded to the world the appalling conundrum, Where are the dead, the varnished dead? And it was his glorious tendency to make the sublime convulsively ridiculous that rejected the line in a poem of mine, which declared that a comet swept o'er the heavens with its trailing skirt, and substituted the idea that a count slept in the haymow in a traveling shirt. The kind of talent that is here displayed deserves profound reverence. It is wonderful and awful; and thus I offer it a token of my marveling respect.