th my camera, hoping to shoot him when he was sea-sick crossing from
Calais to Dover, and how St. Somebody protected him and said I might
shoot him when he was well, but not when he was sea-sick. I should like
to do it in the manner of the "Odyssey":
... And the steward went round and laid them all on the sofas and
benches, and he set a beautiful basin by each, variegated and adorned
with flowers; but it contained no water for washing the hands, and
Neptune sent great waves that washed over the eyelet-holes of the cabin.
But when it was now the middle of the passage and a great roaring arose
as of beasts in the Zoological Gardens, and they promised hecatombs to
Neptune if he would still the raging of the waves....
At any rate I shot him and have him in my snap-shot book; but he was not
sea-sick.
_From the Note-Books of Samuel Butler._
GOETHE'S MOTHER
[Sidenote: _G.H. Lewes_]
That he was the loveliest baby ever seen, exciting admiration wherever
nurse or mother carried him, and exhibiting, in swaddling clothes, the
most wonderful intelligence, we need no biographer to tell us. Is it not
said of every baby? But that he was in truth a wonderful child we have
undeniable evidence, and of a kind less questionable than the statement
of mothers and relatives. At three years old he could seldom be brought
to play with little children, and only on the condition of their being
pretty. One day, in a neighbour's house, he suddenly began to cry and
exclaim, "That black child must go away! I can't bear him!" And he
howled till he was carried home, where he was slowly pacified; the whole
cause of his grief being the ugliness of the child.
A quick, merry little girl grew up by the boy's side. Four other
children also came, but soon vanished. Cornelia was the only companion
who survived, and for her his affection dated from the cradle. He
brought his toys to her, wanted to feed her and attend on her, and was
very jealous of all who approached her. "When she was taken from the
cradle, over which he watched, his anger was scarcely to be quieted. He
was altogether much more easily moved to anger than to tears." To the
last his love for Cornelia was passionate.
In old German towns, Frankfurt among them, the ground-floor consists of
a great hall where the vehicles were housed. This floor opens in folding
trap-doors, for the passage of wine-casks into the cellars below. In one
corner of the hall there is a sort of lattice, ope
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