"London Globe" made the Registrar General
say that the city was suffering from a high rate of _morality_. The
ingenuity of our readers will supply the missing letter, as it also will
the the true reading of the following passage which appeared in an
English newspaper: "Sir Robert Peel has been out with a party of fiends
shooting peasants." It was an easy but astonishing blunder made in
German, in the substitution of "Maedchen" (girls) for "Maechten" (powers),
according to which Bismarck was asserted to be "trying to keep up honest
and straightforward relations with all the girls."

The Imp of the Perverse, when he descends upon the printing office,
sometimes becomes the Imp of the Perverted. Here his achievements will
not bear reproducing. Suffice it to say that in point of indecency he
displays the same superhuman ingenuity as in his more innocent pranks.
His indecencies are all, indeed, in print, but fortunately scattered,
and it would be a groveling nature that should seek to collect them; yet
the absence of this chapter from the world's book of humor means the
omission of a comic strain that neither Aristophanes nor Rabelais has
surpassed. Even as I write, a newspaper misprint assures me that
typesetting machines are no protection against the Imp of the Perverted.
Perhaps we may be pardoned the reproduction of one of the mildest of
these naughtinesses. A French woman novelist had written: "To know truly
what love is, we must go out of ourselves" (sortir de soi). The
addition of a single letter transformed this eminently respectable
sentiment into the feline confession: "To know truly what love is, we
must go out nights" (sortir de soir).

Sometimes the Blunder Sprite deliberately pits himself against author,
proof reader, and all their allies. The books printed by Aldus are
famous for their correctness, yet a few errors crept into them, so much
to the disgust of the great printer that he said he would gladly have
given a gold crown for each one to be rid of them. The famous Oxford
University Press is said to have posted up the first sheet of one of its
Bibles, with the offer of a guinea for every misprint that could be
found in it. None was found--until the book was printed. James Lenox,
the American collector, prided himself on the correctness of his reprint
of the autograph manuscript of "Washington's Farewell Address," which he
had acquired. On showing the book to Henry Stevens, the bookseller, the
latter, glan