him for my museum, and will pay Dinosaur rates.  Will you say it isn’t infraction of the law, but only annual evasion of it?  Comfort yourselves with that nice distinction if you like —­for the present.  But by and by, when you arrive, I will show you something interesting:  a whole hell-full of evaders!  Sometimes a frank law-breaker turns up elsewhere, but I get those others every time.

To return to my muttons.  I wish you to remember that my rich perjurers are contributing to the American Board with frequency:  it is money filched from the sworn-off personal tax; therefore it is the wages of sin; therefore it is my money; therefore it is I that contribute it; and, finally, it is therefore as I have said:  since the Board daily accepts contributions from me, why should it decline them from Mr. Rockefeller, who is as good as I am, let the courts say what they may?

Satan.

INTRODUCTION TO “THE NEW GUIDE OF THE CONVERSATION IN

Portuguese and english”

by Pedro Carolino

In this world of uncertainties, there is, at any rate, one thing which may be pretty confidently set down as a certainty:  and that is, that this celebrated little phrase-book will never die while the English language lasts.  Its delicious unconscious ridiculousness, and its enchanting naivete, as are supreme and unapproachable, in their way, as are Shakespeare’s sublimities.  Whatsoever is perfect in its kind, in literature, is imperishable:  nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect, it must and will stand alone:  its immortality is secure.

It is one of the smallest books in the world, but few big books have received such wide attention, and been so much pondered by the grave and learned, and so much discussed and written about by the thoughtful, the thoughtless, the wise, and the foolish.  Long notices of it have appeared, from time to time, in the great English reviews, and in erudite and authoritative philological periodicals; and it has been laughed at, danced upon, and tossed in a blanket by nearly every newspaper and magazine in the English-speaking world.  Every scribbler, almost, has had his little fling at it, at one time or another; I had mine fifteen years ago.  The book gets out of print, every now and then, and one ceases to hear of it for a season; but presently the nations and near and far colonies of our tongue and lineage call for it once more, and once more it issues from some London or Continental or American press, and runs a new course around the globe, wafted on its way by the wind of a world’s laughter.