And I add:
"Sergeant, I have every respect for you, but I must say, you have given your Wagner-Devil one of my favourite ideas to talk on, and I put it to you that you have stolen it from me."
"Don't use strong language."
"All right, Sergeant, but that cackle about Richard II. and Strauss II. is my intellectual copyright."
When I was a tiny boy, the mater used to tell me the story of a shepherd who came, with his thousand sheep, to a bridge so narrow that only one sheep at a time could cross the brook which it spanned. "And now, little Pat," she would say, "you must wait until all the thousand sheep have passed, and in the meantime you may go and play with your ball."
Now, Mr. Reader, you believe yourself mighty clever because you think: Ha, ha! That's the trick he has employed, and while he told us Charlie Young's dream yarn, he may himself have got rid of his cold. Well, you are mistaken. It is not a trick, and the intermezzo of the preceding pages has its importance. Nor will you be spared to undergo the story of my cold, and the only thing I can do for you is to wish you that it may not prove contagious.
It was a bad cold.
Now, a cold where you merely weep and sneeze and sniff and blow your nose which by degrees becomes somewhat like a burning Zeppelin—by the way, if you never have seen a burning Zeppelin, I take this opportunity to inform you that it is, of course, like the splendid, brilliant, luminous, glaring nose of one who has such a cold—such a cold may be called a bad cold, but it is not. It is a coryza. It is a cold in the head, an unimportant part of the human body when the point in question is a cold. With such a cold you are only more or less ridiculous.
But when you begin coughing and spitting, and when high fever sets in, when you think that you would not like to die yet, especially from pneumonia, and when your Mr. Doblana recognizes with real regret that he must interrupt the lessons and will be unable to charge you for the time lost; when the doctor must be called, and when after a fortnight you begin to recover but still feel weaker than a child, then you have a bad cold, one of these perfidious colds you catch in May.