“You cannot quote a proverb,” earnestly responded the prisoner, “any more than you can butter a hypothesis. But I perceive,” he went on more gently, “that I have fallen into the fault of heat. Forgive a hotheadedness which has more than once ruined my conversation.”
“But I have nothing to forgive,” cried the custodian, much affected. “It is I who am the more to blame.”
“That, indeed, is true,” interjected the Governor of the gaol, who had come up unobserved during the latter part of the conversation, “and, much as I shall regret your loss, I must reconcile myself to it. While you,” he went on, turning to the convict, “will have leisure, when consuming bread and water, to reflect whether, after all, there is not something to be said for silence.”
XIX
LOOK BEFORE YOU LEAP: OR, REFLECTIONS BEFORE YOU JUMP
“I AM tired of reflection,” said the looking-glass, “I will now live my own life.” As a first step to that end he succeeded in rolling himself right out of his seventeenth-century uprights and falling off the spindle-legged dressing-table, oval face downwards, on to a deep grey carpet.
“Dear me,” said the carpet, who was rather a simple old-fashioned thing, though of an excellent texture, “here is somebody come down in the world. Ahem! I hope, sir, that you are none the worse for your fall.”
“Certainly not,” replied the mirror, who was rather bewildered by the fall and the complete darkness in which his new situation had placed him, “I precipitated myself to the ground on purpose.” “What!” cried the carpet, who feared that she had to do with a self-murderer, “after full reflection?”
“Without any reflection whatever,” cried the mirror testily. “I am,” he added more suavely, “entirely incapable of such an act.”