The world is full of funny things. All to myself I Laugh at them. I
lounge at my desk in the small night hours, and I finger a pencil or
a box or a rubber or a knife and rest my chin on my hand, and sit on
my right foot, and Laugh intermittently at this or that.
Ha! ha! ha! I say inwardly: with all my Heart: relishingly.
I laugh at the thought of a mouse I once encountered lying dead--so
neat, so virtuous--though soft and o’er-long dead--with its tail
folded around it--in a porcelain tea-pot: a strong inimical anomaly
to all who viewed it. It had a look of a saint in effigy in a whited
sepulcher. Looked at as a mouse it seemed out of place. Looked at as
a saint it was perfect.
I Laugh at the recollection of a lady I once met who had thick
black furry eyebrows incongruous to her face, which she took off
at night and laid on her bureau. They were at once ‘detached’ and
detachable: itself a subtle phenomenon. She referred to her mind as
her ‘intellects’ and talked with a quaint bogus learnedness, and in
remarkable grammar, of the Swedenborgian doctrines. Looked at as a
person she was inadequate. Looked at as a conundrum she was gifted
and profound.
I Laugh at that extraordinary tailor in the Mother Goose rhyme--him
‘whose name was Stout,’ who cut off the petticoats of the little old
woman ‘round about,’ herself having recklessly fallen asleep on the
public highway. The tale leaves me the impression that such were the
straitly economic ideas of the tailor that he obtained all his cloth
by wandering about with his shears until he happened upon persons
slumbering thus publicly and vulnerably. Looked at in any light that
tailor is ever surprising, ever original, ever rarely delectable.