in'
Nonsense"--or "Wordy mass of repulsive rubbish."

When they were busy making Italy, and were just going to put it in
the oven to bake: that is, when Garibaldi and Vittorio Emmanuele had
won their victories at Caserta, Naples prepared to give them a
triumphant entry. So there sat the little king in his carriage: he had
short legs and huge swagger mustaches and a very big bump of
philoprogeniture. The town was all done up, in spite of the rain. And
down either side of the wide street were hasty statues of large,
well-fleshed ladies, each one holding up a fore-finger. We don't know
what the king thought. But the staff held their breath. The king's
appetite for strapping ladies was more than notorious, and naturally
it looked as if Naples had done it on purpose.

As a matter of fact, the fore-finger meant _Italia Una_! "Italy shall
be one." Ask Don Sturzo.

Now you see how risky statues are. How many nice little asses and
poets trot over the Atlantic and catch sight of Liberty holding up
this carrot of desire at arm's length, and fairly hear her say, as one
does to one's pug dog, with a lump of sugar: "Beg! Beg!"--and "Jump!
Jump, then!" And each little ass and poodle begins to beg and to jump,
and there's a rare game round about Liberty, zap, zap, zapperty-zap!

Do lower the carrot, gentle Liberty, and let us talk nicely and
sensibly. I don't like you as a _carotaia_, precious.

Talking about the moon, it is thrilling to read the announcements of
Professor Pickering of Harvard, that it's almost a dead cert that
there's life on our satellite. It is almost as certain that there's
life on the moon as it is certain there is life on Mars. The professor
bases his assertions on photographs--hundreds of photographs--of a
crater with a circumference of thirty-seven miles. I'm not satisfied.
I demand to know the yards, feet and inches. You don't come it over me
with the triteness of these round numbers.

"Hundreds of photographic reproductions have proved irrefutably the
springing up at dawn, with an unbelievable rapidity, of vast fields of
foliage which come into blossom just as rapidly (sic!) and which
disappear in a maximum period of eleven days."--Again I'm not
satisfied. I want to know if they're cabbages, cress, mustard, or
marigolds or dandelions or daisies. Fields of foliage, mark you. And
_blossom_! Come now, if you can get so far, Professor Pickering, you
might have a shrewd guess as to whether the blossoms are