“Some sailors belonging to a ship of war had a monkey on board. The monkey had often watched the men firing off a cannon, so one day when they were all at dinner he thought he should like to fire it too. So he took a match, as he had seen the men do, struck it, put it to the touch-hole, and looked into the mouth of the cannon, to see the ball come out. The ball did come out, and alas! alas! the poor little monkey fell down dead.”
CHAPTER V.
MR. ADJECTIVE.
A BRAVE PRINCE
A GOOD QUEEN
ADJECTIVES
QUALIFY
NOUNS
THE next Part-of-Speech called up before Judge Grammar was Mr. Adjective.
“My young friends in Schoolroom-shire,” said Serjeant Parsing, “must know Mr. Adjective well. He is the greatest chatterbox and the veriest gossip that ever lived. You never in all your life, my lord, knew any one who could say so much about one thing as Mr. Adjective. Mr. Noun cannot mention a word, but Mr. Adjective is ready to tell all about it, whether it is little or big, blue or green, good or bad, and mischief enough he does in Schoolroom-shire. For instance, if Noun mentions Willy’s pen—‘Nasty, spluttering, cross-nibbed thing,’ whispers Adjective, and Willy thinks that is why he wrote such a bad copy, and did not dot his i’s. If Mr. Noun points out pussy, who is coming into the room, purring and rubbing her head against the leg of each chair as she passes, Adjective whispers that she is a ‘dear, sweet, soft, warm, little pet,’ so Milly leaves off her sums to pick her up and play with her. Ann, the housemaid, finds dirty boot-marks on her nice clean stairs, and as soon as she sees Tom she tells him he is a ‘tiresome, untidy, disobedient, and naughty boy,’ not knowing that Mr. Adjective was whispering all those words in her ear. Indeed, Mr. Adjective causes more quarrels in Schoolroom-shire, and other places too, than any one can tell. Only yesterday Jane and Lucy had a quarrel, I hear, because Jane pulled the arm off Lucy’s doll. If Adjective had not put into Lucy’s head to call Jane naughty and unkind, Jane would not have answered that Lucy was cross and disagreeable. She would most likely have said, ‘I beg your pardon, I did not mean to do it,’ and they would have been friends again directly. See how much mischief is caused by talkative, gossiping Mr. Adjective.”
“Really, Mr. Parsing,” remarked Adjective, now putting in his word for the first time, “you have made a long speech to show how mischievous I am. Pray, have you nothing to say about the good that my kind, loving words do?”