Page 14 - English

He preached to an egregious congregation.
The captain eliminated a bullet through the man’s heart.
You should take caution and be precarious.
The supercilious girl acted with vicissitude when the perennial time
came.

That last is a curiously plausible sentence; one seems to know
what it means, and yet he knows all the time that he doesn’t. Here is
an odd (but entirely proper) use of a word, and a most sudden
descent from a lofty philosophical altitude to a very practical and
homely illustration:

We should endeavor to avoid extremes—-like those of wasps and bees.

And here—with “ zoological” and “ geological” in his mind, but
not ready to his tongue—the small scholar has innocently gone and
let out a couple of secrets which ought never to have been divulged
in any circumstances :

There are a good many donkeys in theological gardens.
Some of the best fossils are found in theological cabinets.

Under the head of “Grammar” the little scholars furnish the
following information:

Gender is the distinguishing nouns without regard to sex.
A verb is something to eat.
Adverbs should always be used as adjectives and adjectives as adverbs.
Every sentence and name of God must begin with a caterpillar.

“Caterpillar” is well enough, but capital letter would have been
stricter. The following is a brave attempt at a solution, but it failed to
liquify:

When they are going to say some prose or poetry before they say the
poetry or prose they must put a semicolon just after the introduction of
the prose or poetry.

The chapter on “Mathematics” is full of fruit. From it I take a
few samples—mainly in an unripe state.

A straight line is any distance between two places.
Parallel lines are lines that can never meet until they run together.

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