Professor Gargoyle, you must understand, has travelled to and fro in the earth, culling flowers of speech:  a kind of recording angel he is, but without any sentimental tears.  To be plain, he studies swearing.  His collection, however, only approaches completeness in the western departments of European language.  Going eastward he found such an appalling and tropical luxuriance of these ornaments as to despair at last altogether of even a representative selection.  “They do not curse,” he says, “at door-handles, and shirt-studs, and such other trifles as will draw down the meagre discharge of an Occidental, but when they do begin——­

“I hired a promising-looking man at Calcutta, and after a month or so refused to pay his wages.  He was unable to get at me with the big knife he carried, because the door was locked, so he sat on his hams outside under the verandah, from a quarter-past six in the morning until nearly ten, cursing—­cursing in one steady unbroken flow—­an astonishing spate of blasphemy.  First he cursed my family, from me along the female line back to Eve, and then, having toyed with me personally for a little while, he started off along the line of my possible posterity to my remotest great-grandchildren.  Then he cursed me by this and that.  My hand ached taking it down, he was so very rich.  It was a perfect anthology of Bengali blasphemy—­vivid, scorching, and variegated.  Not two alike.  And then he turned about and dealt with different parts of me.  I was really very fortunate in him.  Yet it was depressing to think that all this was from one man, and that there are six hundred million people in Asia.”

“Naturally,” said the Professor in answer to my question, “these investigations involve a certain element of danger.  The first condition of curse-collecting is to be unpopular, especially in the East, where comminatory swearing alone is practised, and you have to offend a man very grievously to get him to disgorge his treasure.  In this country, except among ladies in comparatively humble circumstances, anything like this fluent, explicit, detailed, and sincere cursing, aimed, missile-fashion, at a personal enemy, is not found.  It was quite common a few centuries ago; indeed, in the Middle Ages it was part of the recognised procedure.  Aggrieved parties would issue a father’s curse, an orphan’s curse, and so forth, much as we should take out a county court summons.  And it played a large part in ecclesiastical policy too.  At one time the entire Church militant here on earth was swearing in unison, and the Latin tongue, at the Republic of Venice—­a very splendid and imposing spectacle.  It seems to me a pity to let these old customs die out so completely.  I estimate that more than half these Gothic forms have altogether passed out of memory.  There must have been some splendid things in Erse and Gaelic too; for the Celtic mind, with its more vivid sense of colour, its quicker transitions, and deeper emotional quality, has ever over-cursed the stolid Teuton.  But it is all getting forgotten.