say; but he would not suffer fools gladly.

Those who knew him will recognize in my third act the allusion to
the patent Shorthand in which he used to write postcards, and
which may be acquired from a four and six-penny manual published
by the Clarendon Press. The postcards which Mrs. Higgins
describes are such as I have received from Sweet. I would
decipher a sound which a cockney would represent by zerr, and a
Frenchman by seu, and then write demanding with some heat what on
earth it meant. Sweet, with boundless contempt for my stupidity,
would reply that it not only meant but obviously was the word
Result, as no other Word containing that sound, and capable of
making sense with the context, existed in any language spoken on
earth. That less expert mortals should require fuller indications
was beyond Sweet's patience. Therefore, though the whole point of
his "Current Shorthand" is that it can express every sound in the
language perfectly, vowels as well as consonants, and that your
hand has to make no stroke except the easy and current ones with
which you write m, n, and u, l, p, and q, scribbling them at
whatever angle comes easiest to you, his unfortunate
determination to make this remarkable and quite legible script
serve also as a Shorthand reduced it in his own practice to the
most inscrutable of cryptograms. His true objective was the
provision of a full, accurate, legible script for our noble but
ill-dressed language; but he was led past that by his contempt
for the popular Pitman system of Shorthand, which he called the
Pitfall system. The triumph of Pitman was a triumph of business
organization: there was a weekly paper to persuade you to learn
Pitman: there were cheap textbooks and exercise books and
transcripts of speeches for you to copy, and schools where