Alice took her seat, and did nothing but laugh till the end of the chapter. I laughed, too, but without exactly knowing why. But laughter (singularly enough,—for it is a blessing) is contagious. And then the julep had been stiff; so that the very tables and chairs about the room seemed to beam upon me with a certain twinkling, kindly Bushwhackerishness.[[1]]
“Here’s a lot of stuff that I shall skip,” began Charley; and he turned over, with careless finger, leaf after leaf. As he did so Alice rose slightly from her seat with a peering look.
“Who is reading this Essay on Military Glory?” asked Charley, with a severe look at his wife over his glasses (alas, alas, nec pietas moram?).
“Very well; go on,” said Alice, dropping back into her chair with a fresh burst of laughter. She had had no julep. What was she laughing at?
“It consists (my opening) of a series of illustrations, showing how much nonsense comes to be believed through people’s not going to the bottom of things. We suppose ourselves to have an opinion (there is no commoner delusion), but we fail to subject that opinion to any crucial test; though nothing is easier. The crucial test, for example, of sulphuretted hydrogen, is a certain odor which we encounter, when, with incautious toe, we explode an egg in some outlying nest which no boy could find during the summer—”
“That will do,” said Alice; though why women should turn up their blessed little noses at such allusions is hard to understand, seeing what keen and triumphant pleasure they all derive from the detection of unparliamentary odors at unexpected times and places.
“I have here,” continued Charley, carelessly turning the leaves of his manuscript, “a nestful of such illustrations.”
“We will excuse you from hatching them in our presence,” said Alice; and with wrinkled nose she disdainfully sniffed a suppositious egg of abandoned character.
“I have already passed them over. After all, what is the use of them? You and Charley can understand what I mean without them; and if you can, why not the reader, too? Are readers idiots? I’ll plunge in medias res. Let us begin here:” (reading) “It is the same with military glory. How many battles have been fought since the world began? Arithmetic stands pale in the presence of such a question! In every one of these conflicts one or the other commander had the advantage. How many of them are famous? Count them. For every celebrated general that you show me, I will show you a finger—or a toe—”
“You are too anatomical by half,” protested Alice.