If to me you prefix two letters more,
I mean exactly what I meant before.”
The other parts of the letter-press consist of “Anagrams,” “Transpositions,” &c.
When a clever patterer “works conundrums”—for the trade is in the hands of the pattering class—he selects what he may consider the best, and reads or repeats them in the street, sometimes with and sometimes without the answer. But he does not cripple the probable quickness of his sale by a slavish adherence to what is in type. He puts the matter, as it were, personally. “What gentleman is it,” one man told me he would ask, “in this street, that has—
‘Eyes like saucers, a back like a box,
A nose like a pen-knife, and a voice like a fox?’
You can learn for a penny. Or sometimes I’ll go on with the patter, thus,” he continued, “What lady is it that we have all seen, and who can say truly—
‘I am brighter than day, I am swifter than light,
And stronger than all the momentum of might?’
More than once people have sung out ‘the Queen,’ for they seem to think that the momentum of might couldn’t fit any one else. It’s ‘thought’ as is the answer, but it wouldn’t do to let people think it’s anything of the sort. It must seem to fit somebody. If I see a tailor’s name on a door, as soon as I’ve passed the corner of the street, and sometimes in the same street, I’ve asked—