"Wellington said that the battle of Waterloo was won upon the cricket fields of England. Later—decades later—the bronzed and lithe-limbed athletes of the island kingdom gazed in open-eyed bewilderment upon the flaming indictment of Kipling, 'The muddled oafs at the wicket; the flannelled fools at the gate,' and seeking vainly to follow the poet's logic."
New York Times.
Presented in this form it would baffle anybody.
PETHERTON'S PARROT.
Matters are getting worse between Petherton and myself; in fact if any friendship had ever existed between us I am afraid one would say that we are now in a state of complete estrangement, resulting from the invasion of my premises by his parrot, and the ensuing correspondence. My opening gambit was as follows:—
Dear Mr. Petherton,—My immediate object in addressing you is to ask whether by any chance you have lost a parrot, because a bird of that species flew through an open bedroom window of my house this morning without invitation or encouragement from us.
I am inclined to think that the bird is yours, but have nothing but what I might term the synthetic process of reasoning for arriving at this conclusion. If you have lost anything of a parroty nature, and will write me a description of it, I will see whether it tallies with the bird in whose possession we are. I describe the situation in this way because it more truly expresses it than the converse would do.