.

To which the General, strange to say, only replied by the monosyllable
"Bo!"

"Why do you say 'Bo!' Martin?" asks the lady.

"I say 'Bo!' to a goose, my dear," answers the General.

And his wife vows she does not know what he means, or of what he is
thinking, and the General says--

"Of course not."

CHAPTER LIX. In which we are treated to a Play

The real business of life, I fancy, can form but little portion of the
novelist's budget. When he is speaking of the profession of arms, in
which men can show courage or the reverse, and in treating of which the
writer naturally has to deal with interesting circumstances, actions,
and characters, introducing recitals of danger, devotedness, heroic
deaths, and the like, the novelist may perhaps venture to deal with
actual affairs of life: but otherwise, they scarcely can enter into our
stories. The main part of Ficulnus's life, for instance, is spent in
selling sugar, spices and cheese; of Causidicus's in poring over musty
volumes of black-letter law; of Sartorius's in sitting, cross-legged,
on a board after measuring gentlemen for coats and breeches. What can a
story-teller say about the professional existence of these men? Would a
real rustical history of hobnails and eighteenpence a day be endurable?
In the days whereof we are writing, the poets of the time chose to
represent a shepherd in pink breeches and a chintz waistcoat, dancing
before his flocks, and playing a flageolet tied up with a blue satin
ribbon. I say, in reply to some objections which have been urged by
potent and friendly critics, that of the actual affairs of life the
novelist cannot be expected to treat--with the almost single exception
of war before named. But law, stockbroking, polemical theology,
linen-drapery, apothecary-business, and the like, how can writers manage
fully to develop these in their stories? All authors can do, is to
depict men out of their business--in their passions, loves, laughters,
amusements, hatreds, and what not--and describe these as well as they
can, taking the business part for granted, and leaving it as it were for
subaudition.

Thus, in talking of the present or the past world, I know I am
only dangling about the theatre-lobbies, coffee-houses, ridottos,
pleasure-haunts, fair-booths, and feasting- and fiddling-rooms of life;
that, meanwhile, the great serious past or present world is plodding in
its chambers, toiling at its humdrum looms, or jogging on