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The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce
page 36 of 302 (11%)

CEMETERY, n. An isolated suburban spot where mourners match lies,
poets write at a target and stone-cutters spell for a wager. The
inscriptions following will serve to illustrate the success attained
in these Olympian games:

His virtues were so conspicuous that his enemies, unable to
overlook them, denied them, and his friends, to whose loose lives
they were a rebuke, represented them as vices. They are here
commemorated by his family, who shared them.
In the earth we here prepare a
Place to lay our little Clara.

Thomas M. and Mary Frazer

P.S. -- Gabriel will raise her.

CENTAUR, n. One of a race of persons who lived before the division of
labor had been carried to such a pitch of differentiation, and who
followed the primitive economic maxim, "Every man his own horse." The
best of the lot was Chiron, who to the wisdom and virtues of the horse
added the fleetness of man. The scripture story of the head of John
the Baptist on a charger shows that pagan myths have somewhat
sophisticated sacred history.

CERBERUS, n. The watch-dog of Hades, whose duty it was to guard the
entrance -- against whom or what does not clearly appear; everybody,
sooner or later, had to go there, and nobody wanted to carry off the
entrance. Cerberus is known to have had three heads, and some of the
poets have credited him with as many as a hundred. Professor
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