mince-pie for him, and his slippers warmed and in front of the fire for
him; and, when he was in Cayenne, he died, and they brought his body home
in a ship Frederic Marsters was the captain of. It was there that I met
Florence's sister,--not so pretty as Florence, but I think a nice girl.
She is married now and lives at Ashland, and has two nice children, a boy
and a girl. They are all coming to see us at Thanksgiving. I was so glad
to see that Florence was with you, and I did not know it when I came in,
and when I met her in the entry I was very much surprised, and she saw I
was coming in here, and she said, 'Please, will you tell him that dinner
is ready?'"

Now it is not simply, you see, that, while an announcement of that nature
goes on, the mutton grows cold, your wife grows tired, the children grow
cross, and that the subjugation of the world in general is set back, so
far as you are all concerned, a perceptible space of time on The Great
Dial. But the tale itself has a wearing and wearying perplexity about it.
At the end you doubt if it is your dinner that is ready, or Fred
Marsters's, or Florence's, or nobody's. Whether there is any real dinner,
you doubt. For want of a vigorous nominative case, firmly governing the
verb, whether that verb is seen or not, or because this firm nominative is
masked and disguised behind clouds of drapery and other rubbish, the best
of stories, thus told, loses all life, interest, and power.

Leave out then, resolutely. First omit "Speaking of hides," or "That
reminds me of," or "What you say suggests," or "You make me think of," or
any such introductions. Of course you remember what you are saying. You
could not say it if you did not remember it. It is to be hoped, too, that
you are thinking of what you are saying. If you are not, you will not help
the matter by saying you are, no matter if the conversation do have firm
and sharp edges. Conversation is not an essay. It has a right to many