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1. The most skillful gauger I ever knew was a maligned cobbler, armed with a poniard, who drove a peddler's wagon, using a mullein stalk as an instrument of coercion to tyrannize over his pony shod with calks. He was a Galilean Sadducee, and he had a phthisicky catarrh, diphtheria, and the bilious intermittent erysipelas.
2. A certain sibyl, with the sobriquet of "Gypsy," went into ecstasies of cachinnation at seeing him measure a bushel of peas and separate saccharine tomatoes from a heap of peeled potatoes, without dyeing or singeing the ignitible queue which he wore, or becoming paralyzed with hemorrhage.
3. Lifting her eyes to the ceiling of the cupola of the capitol to conceal her unparalleled embarrassment, making him a rough courtesy, and not harrassing him with mystifying, rarefying, and stupefying innuendoes, she gave him a couch, a bouquet of lilies, mignonette, and fuchsias, a treatise on mnemonics, a copy of the Apocrypha in hieroglyphics, daguerreotypes of Mendelssohn and Kosciusko, a kaleidoscope, a dram-phial of ipecacuanha, a teaspoonful of naphtha for deleble purposes, a ferrule, a clarionet, some licorice, a surcingle, a carnelian of symmetrical proportions, a chronometer with a movable balance-wheel, a box of dominoes, and a catechism.
4. The gauger, who was also a trafficking rectifier and a parishioner of mine, preferring a woolen surtout (his choice was referrible to a vacillating, occasionally occurring idiosyncrasy), wofully uttered this apothegm: "Life is checkered; but schism, apostasy, heresy and villainy shall be punished." The sibyl apologizingly answered: "There is a ratable and allegeable difference between a conferrable ellipsis and a trisyllabic diæresis." We replied in trochees, not impugning her suspicion.