e, with a roar that was heard
across the Atlantic, and stood there on his little isle, gazing,
red-eyed, out over the glooming seas, snow-flecked with driving
spindrift, and lathing his tail--a most scary spectacle to see.

The lion was outraged because we, a nation of children, without any
grown-up people among us, with no property in the language, but using it
merely by courtesy of its owner the English nation, were trying to
defile the sacredness of it by removing from it peculiarities which had
been its ornament and which had made it holy and beautiful for ages.

In truth there is a certain sardonic propriety in preserving our
orthography, since ours is a mongrel language which started with a
child's vocabulary of three hundred words, and now consists of two
hundred and twenty-five thousand; the whole lot, with the exception of
the original and legitimate three hundred, borrowed, stolen, smouched
from every unwatched language under the sun, the spelling of each
individual word of the lot locating the source of the theft and
preserving the memory of the revered crime.

Why is it that I have intruded into this turmoil and manifested a desire
to get our orthography purged of its asininities? Indeed I do not know
why I should manifest any interest in the matter, for at bottom I
disrespect our orthography most heartily, and as heartily disrespect
everything that has been said by anybody in defence of it. Nothing
professing to be a defence of our ludicrous spellings has had any basis,
so far as my observation goes, except sentimentality. In these
"arguments" the term venerable is used instead of mouldy, and hallowed
instead of devilish; whereas there is nothing properly venerable or
antique about a language which is not yet four hundred years old, and
about a jumble of imbecile spellings which were grotesque in the
beginning, and which grow more and more grotesque with the flight of the
years.

[_Dictated Monday, November 30, 1906._]

Jean and Papa were walking out past the barn the other day when
Jean saw some little newly born baby ducks, she exclaimed as she
perceived them "I dont see why God gives us so much ducks when
Patrick kills them so."

Susy is mistaken as to the origin of the ducks. They were not a gift, I
bought them. I am not finding fault with her, for that would be most
unfair. She is remarkably accurate in her statements as a historian, as
a rule, and it would not be just to