“A very wise idea,” said Sir Walter. Whereupon the resolution was suitably worded, and passed unanimously.
Just where the Poets’ Corner is to be located the members of the committee have not as yet decided, although Confucius is strongly in favor of having it placed in a dingy situated a quarter of a mile astern of the house-boat, and connected therewith by a slight cord, which can be easily cut in case the squeaking of the poets’ slate-pencils becomes too much for the nervous system of the members who have no corner of their own.
CHAPTER VI: SOME THEORIES, DARWINIAN AND OTHERWISE
“I observe,” said Doctor Darwin, looking up from a perusal of an asbestos copy of the London Times—“I observe that an American professor has discovered that monkeys talk. I consider that a very interesting fact.”
“It undoubtedly is,” observed Doctor Livingstone, “though hardly new. I never said anything about it over in the other world, but I discovered years ago in Africa that monkeys were quite as well able to hold a sustained conversation with each other as most men are.”
“And I, too,” put in Baron Munchausen, “have frequently conversed with monkeys. I made myself a master of their idioms during my brief sojourn in—ah—in—well, never mind where. I never could remember the names of places. The interesting point is that at one period of my life I was a master of the monkey language. I have even gone so far as to write a sonnet in Simian, which was quite as intelligible to the uneducated as nine-tenths of the sonnets written in English or American.”
“Do you mean to say that you could acquire the monkey accent?” asked Doctor Darwin, immediately interested.
“In most instances,” returned the Baron, suavely, “though of course not in all. I found the same difficulty in some cases that the German or the Chinaman finds when he tries to speak French. A Chinaman can no more say Trocadéro, for instance, as the Frenchman says it, than he can fly. That peculiar throaty aspirate the Frenchman gives to the first syllable, as though it were spelled trhoque, is utterly beyond the Chinese—and beyond the American, too, whose idea of the tonsillar aspirate leads him to speak of the trochedeero, naturally falling back upon troches to help him out of his laryngeal difficulties.”
“You ought to have been on the staff of Punch, Baron,” said Thackeray, quietly. “That joke would have made you immortal.”
“I am immortal,” said the Baron. “But to return to our discussion of the Simian tongue: as I was saying, there were some little points about the accent that I could never get, and, as in the case of the German and Chinaman with the French language, the trouble was purely physical. When you consider that in polite Simian society most of the talkers converse while swinging by their tails from the limb of a tree, with a sort of droning accent, which results from their swaying to and fro, you will see at once why it was that I, deprived by nature of the necessary apparatus with which to suspend myself in mid-air, was unable to quite catch the quality which gives its chief charm to monkey-talk.”