SAME PUPIL. Yes, sir; thank you, sir. But I don’t quite understand what it means by “encompassing the plausibility of capillary promulgation”!
COM. Oh—ahem!—that is very simple—ahem! ahem! in fact it is simplicity itself. It means—it means—well, I don’t want to overtax your young brain, my dear, so I will not explain now; but one of these days, when you are as wise as me and your teacher, you will understand all these profound thoughts. Hain’t that so, Mr. Snodgrass? Next, terbacker.
SEVENTH PUPIL. T-e-r, ter—b-a-c-k, back—terback—k-e-r, ker—terbacker. A poisonous leaf with niggertine in it; and ef the niggertine gets into the cistern, it’ll kill a man quicker’n a dog.
FIRST PUPIL. I don’t believe it’s a poison. My brother smokes and he ain’t dead; ’nd my father’s fifty years old ’nd he’s smoked for most forty years ’nd he ain’t dead yet.
FOURTH PUPIL. Pooh! That’s nothing. Ef your father hedn’t smoked, he mighter been a hundred by this time.
EIGHTH PUPIL. My grandfather’s ninety years old and he’s smoked too!
FOURTH PUPIL. Well, and ef my grandfather was alive he’d be a hundred and fifty years old! So that don’t prove nothing.
THIRD PUPIL. Tobacco ain’t no poisoner nor pickles, anyhow. (Groan from the girls.) I went into the store t’other day to get some pickles for ma, and a feller—he was one o’ them city chaps that sells things—and he said, “You ain’t going to eat them sour green things, are you?” and I said, “No, I hain’t; why?” And he told me of a girl seventeen years old who eat pickuls and died! (Horrified look on girls’ faces.) And they opened her stummick and them pickuls had turned everything in it tu glass!! (Confusion and whispering among the girls. They indignantly shake their heads and say, “I don’t believe it,” etc., etc.)
COM. Order! (Pounding table.) Order! The next may explain “phenomena.”
GIRL (glibly). Phenomena is that immaculate preponderance of preternatural possibility as to make an exaggerated conception of auxiliary precedents, and oleaginous metamorphosis into an indivisible synthetical analysis.