"
THE GENTLE READER
[Sidenote: _Anon._]
No British Museum the fisherman needs:
He simply goes down to the river and reeds.
CLERGYMEN AND CHICKENS
[Sidenote: _Samuel Butler_]
Why, let me ask, should a hen lay an egg, which egg can become a chicken
in about three weeks and a full-grown hen in less than a twelvemonth,
while a clergyman and his wife lay no eggs, but give birth to a baby
which will take three-and-twenty years before it can become another
clergyman? Why should not chickens be born and clergymen be laid and
hatched? Or why, at any rate, should not the clergyman be born
full-grown and in Holy Orders, not to say already beneficed?
MELCHISEDEC
[Sidenote: _Samuel Butler_]
He was a really happy man. He was without father, without mother, and
without descent. He was an incarnate bachelor. He was a born orphan.
EATING AND PROSELYTISING
[Sidenote: _Samuel Butler_]
All eating is a kind of proselytising--a kind of dogmatising--a
maintaining that the eater's way of looking at things is better than the
eatee's. We convert the food, or try to do so, to our own way of
thinking, and, when it sticks to its own opinion and refuses to be
converted, we say it disagrees with us. An animal that refuses to let
another eat it has the courage of its convictions, and, if it gets
eaten, dies a martyr to them.
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