“How much time do you suppose you have gained by writing ‘&’ for ‘and’, papa?” asked Jean one afternoon at tea.
“Not enough to waste it on answers to foolish questions,” replied her father severely.
Then he gave her a dollar, kissed her and sent her away rejoicing.
“That little blackmailer,” he said, “was impertinent only to make me mad, knowing full well that later I would chastise myself for being a brute—still with a dollar fine I got off cheap enough.”
“He was a King even in his undershirt and drawers.”—(A verse in one of Grillparzer’s Tragedies—which caused the play to be put on the Index by the censor.) This amused Mark hugely. But he had no sympathy with the author, saying: “He ought to have put pajamas on the cuss.”
Mark Twain, when speaking of a king was fond of quoting Shakespeare’s: “I have an humour to knock you indifferently well.” (Henry V.)
“I have been blowing the heads off frothing pots of porter.”—Mark Twain after writing his Czar’s Soliloquy.