TAM HTAB
(To the Editor of The London Mercury)
Sir,—May I point out what seems to me a very curious literary coincidence?
In No. 2 Mr. L. Pearsall Smith, in his delightful collection of "Misadventures," describes "a cabalistic inscription written in letters of large menace on my bath-room floor. TAM HTAB ... Like Belshazzar ... my knees smote one against the other. It was ... BATH MAT, lying there wrong side up."
In the second chapter of Forster's Life of Dickens, among some notes on the hardships of Dickens' childhood, the novelist himself thus describes a coffee shop in St. Martin's Lane: "In the door there was an oval glass-plate, with COFFEE ROOM painted on it.... If I ever find myself in a very different kind of coffee-room now, but where there is such an inscription on glass, and read it backward on the wrong side MOOR EEFFOC (as I often used to do then, in a dismal reverie), a shock goes through my blood."—Yours, etc.,
J. J. Biggs.
70 West Side, Clapham.
[These public inscriptions are responsible for much distress. There was a woman named Jones who had her child christened Nosmo King, having been taken by those names on two glass doors, which stood open. When she passed again the doors were drawn together.—Editor.]