“See here,” said I, “what are you doing with this book, if you are off for a rest? This is no book for a nervous wreck to be reading.”
“Who said I was a nervous wreck?” she answered. “I’m just tired, that’s all. I guess it’s really spring fever. I saw a spear of real grass in Central Park, and ran away.”
“From what?” I asked.
“From the dictionary,” she replied.
“The which?” said I.
“The dictionary. Would you like me to sing you a song of the things that begin with ’hy’?”
She laughed again, and began to chant in burlesque Gregorian, “Hyopotamus, hyoscapular, hyoscine, Hyoscyameæ, hyoscyamine, Hyoscyamus––-”
“Stop!” I cried. “You will have me hypnotized. See, I’m on the ’hy’s’ myself! Please explain–not sing.”
“Well,” she laughed, “you see it’s this way. I have to eat, drink, and try to be merry, or to-morrow I die, so to postpone to-morrow I am working on a new dictionary. Somebody has to work on dictionaries, you know, and justify the pronunciation of America to man. I’m sort of learned, in a mild, harmless, anti-militant way. It isn’t fair to keep the truth from you–I have a degree in philology! My doctor’s thesis was published by the press of my kind University, at $1.50 per copy, of which as many as seventeen were sold, and I’m still paying up the money I borrowed while preparing it. I stood the dictionary pretty well down to the ’hy’s,’ and then one day something snapped inside of me, and I began to cry. That wouldn’t have been so bad, if I hadn’t made the mistake of crying on a sheet of manuscript by a learned professor, about Hyoscyamus (which is a genus of dicotyledonous gamopetalous plants), and the ink ran. Then I knew I should have to take a rest in the cause of English, pure and well defined. So here I am. The doctor tells me I must live out of doors and saw wood.”
“Madam,” I cried, “God has sent you! I shall get my orchard cleaned up at last!”