r. Like many provincial newspapers, that to which I am
attached makes a feature of printing the social happenings in villages
of the surrounding country, and these out-of-town correspondents "don't
do a thing to" the English language. One of them invariably refers to
the social lights of his vicinity as "our prominent socialists," and
describes some individual as "happening to an accident." To another,
every festal occasion is "a bower of beauty and a scene of fairyland."
Blue-penciling they resent, and one of them wrote to complain that a
descriptive effort of his had been "much altered and deranged." The
paper also publishes portraits of children and young women, and it is in
the descriptions accompanying these pictures that the rural
correspondent excels himself. One wound up his eulogy in an apparently
irrepressible burst of enthusiasm: "She is indeed a _tout ensemble_." A
child of six months was described as "studious"; and another
correspondent went into details thus: "Little Willie has only one large
blue eye, the other having been punched out by his brother with a stick,
by accident." A small child was accredited with "a pleasing disposition
and a keen juvenile conception."

The following are some of the descriptive phrases applied to village
belles: "She is perfectly at home on the piano, where her executions
have attained international celebrity." ... "She possesses a mine of
repartee and the qualities which have long rendered illustive her noble
family." ... "Her carriage and disposition are swan-like." ... "Her eyes
can express pathetic pathos, but flash forth fiery independence when her
country's name is traduced." ... "She has a molded arm, and her
Juno-like form glides with a rhythmic move in the soft swell of a
Strauss." ... "Her chestnut hair gives a rich recess to her lovely,
fawnlike eyes, which shine like a star set in the crown of an angel."
... One writer becomes absolutely incoherent in his admiration, and
lavishes a mixture of metaphors upon his subject: "She portrays a
picture worthy of a Raphael. She dances like the fairies before the
heavenly spirits. She looks like a celestial goddess from an outburst of
morning-glories; her lovely form would assume a phantomlike flash as she
glides the floor, as though she were a mystic dream."

Scarcely less rich in unconscious humor are some of the effusions of
those who have literary aspirations. A descriptive article contains a
reference to "a lonely ho