... “No, you needn’t drive her out of the grounds. Cows are not allowed to run in the street, and the owner is liable for trespass if they do. Shut her up in the yard, and if the owner don’t come for her to-morrow—Pound her—because there is a law against it.”
“Aha!” said a Hibernian gentleman, surprised at his neighbor’s unusual promptness; “Aha! So you’re first, at last! you were always behind before!”
Another Emerald Islander, speaking at his breakfast table of the difference between travel by steam and the old mode, thus illustrated the point: “Afore the rail-road was built, if ye left Elmira at noon, and drove purty fast, ye might likely get to Corning to tea. But to-day, if ye were to start from Elmira at noon on an Express train for Corning, why, ye’re there Now!”
Caledonian shrewdness and the Caledonian dialect, alike speak for themselves, in a “bonny Scot’s” definition of metaphysics: “When the mon wha is listenin’, dinna ken what the ither is talkin’ aboot, and the mon wha is talkin’ dinna ken it himsel’, that is metapheesicks.”
“Be what you would seem to be,” said the Duchess, in Lewis Carroll’s delightfully droll story of “Alice’s Adventures,”—“or, if you like it put more simply: Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others, that what you were or might have been, was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.”
That is slightly metapheesickal, perhaps; and the same objection might be urged against Dr. Hunter’s favorite motto: “It is pretty impossible, and, therefore, extremely difficult for us to convey unto others those ideas whereof we are not possessed of ourselves.”
It was Dr. Hunter, who, some years before the war, returned from Florida, where he had spent the winter in a vain quest of health, and exhibited to one of his friends a thermometer he had procured there, marked from 120° only down to zero.