Some savants were the other day puzzling their heads to find a convenient and familiar word for the illumination produced by the electric spark. Surely it is Edisunlight.
"BEROOFEN !"
"Well," quoth the Baron DE BOOK-WORMS, as he sat down to dinner on a Friday, a week ago, "I must say I have never, never been better in my life! Why, dear me, it is quite a year since I was ill!"
"Beroofen!" exclaimed an Italian Countess of dazzling beauty, at the same time rapping the table with one of the bejewelled forks which form part of the Baron's second-best dinner-service.
"Why 'Beroofen'?" asked the Baron.
"It is a spell against the consequences of boasting," the lady explained. "My mother was a bit of a magician."
"And you, my dear Countess, are bewitching. Your health!" And, pledging her, the Baron drank off a bumper of Pommery '80 très sec, and laughed joyously at the notion of his rapping the table—all "table-rapping" being a past superstition, or supperstition when not at dinner,—and murmuring, "Beroofen!" And so he didn't do it. "Beroofen" never passed his lips: the champagne did; but not "Beroofen."