a little judgment must, at the end of three years,
be in receipt of an income of two thousand a year, rising rapidly; he
simply could not help himself. He might not want the money. He might
not know what to do with it when he had it. But there it was for him. I
have never met a rabbit farmer myself worth two thousand a year, though I
have known many start with the twelve necessary, assorted rabbits.
Something has always gone wrong somewhere; maybe the continued atmosphere
of a rabbit farm saps the judgment.

We told our readers how many bald-headed men there were in Iceland, and
for all we knew our figures may have been correct; how many red herrings
placed tail to mouth it would take to reach from London to Rome, which
must have been useful to anyone desirous of laying down a line of red
herrings from London to Rome, enabling him to order in the right quantity
at the beginning; how many words the average woman spoke in a day; and
other such like items of information calculated to make them wise and
great beyond the readers of other journals.

We told them how to cure fits in cats. Personally I do not believe, and
I did not believe then, that you can cure fits in cats. If I had a cat
subject to fits I should advertise it for sale, or even give it away. But
our duty was to supply information when asked for. Some fool wrote,
clamouring to know; and I spent the best part of a morning seeking
knowledge on the subject. I found what I wanted at length at the end of
an old cookery book. What it was doing there I have never been able to
understand. It had nothing to do with the proper subject of the book
whatever; there was no suggestion that you could make anything savoury
out of a cat, even when you had cured it of its fits. The authoress had
just thrown in this paragraph out of pure generosity. I can only say
that I wish she had left it out; it was the cause of a deal of angry
correspondence and of the loss of four subscribers to the paper, if not
more. The man said the result of following our advice had been two
pounds worth of damage to his kitchen crockery, to say nothing of a
broken window and probable blood poisoning to himself; added to which the
cat's fits were worse than before. And yet it was a simple enough
recipe. You held the cat between your legs, gently, so as not to hurt
it, and with a pair of scissors made a sharp, clean cut in its tail. You
did not cut off any part of the tail; you were to b