Idleness, Like Kisses, To Be Sweet Must

I Will Not Take Up Your Time, Dear Boy, With Telling You What Is The Matter With Me. Life Is Brief, And You Might Pass Away Before I Had Finished. But I Will Tell You What Is Not The Matter With Me. I Have Not Got Housemaid’s Knee. Why I Have Not Got Housemaid’s Knee, I Cannot Tell You; But The Fact Remains That I Have Not Got It. Everything Else, However, I Have Got.

Truth And Fact Are Old-fashioned And Out-of-date, My Friends, Fit Only For The Dull And Vulgar To Live By. Appearance, Not Reality, Is What The Clever Dog Grasps At In These Clever Days. We Spurn The Dull-brown Solid Earth; We Build Our Lives And Homes In The Fair-seeming Rainbow-land Of Shadow And Chimera.

I Like Cats.... When I Meet A Cat, I Say, "poor Pussy!" And Stoop Down And Tickle The Side Of Its Head; And The Cat Sticks Up Its Tail In A Rigid, Cast-iron Manner, Arches Its Back, And Wipes Its Nose Up Against My Trousers; And All Is Gentleness And Peace.

So, Eventually, He Made One Final Arrangement With Himself, Which He Has Religiously Held To Ever Since, And That Was To Count Each Fish That He Caught As Ten, And To Assume Ten To Begin With. For Example, If He Did Not Catch Any Fish At All, Then He Said He Had Caught Ten Fish - You Could Never Catch Less Than Ten Fish By His System; That Was The Foundation Of It. Then, If By Any Chance He Really Did Catch One Fish, He Called It Twenty, While Two Fish Would Count Thirty, Three Forty, And So On.

We Want Everything. All The Happiness That Earth And Heaven Are Capable Of Bestowing. Creature Comforts, And Heart And Soul Comforts Also; And, Proud-spirited Beings That We Are, We Will Not Be Put Off With A Part. Give Us Only Everything, And We Will Be Content. And, After All, Cinderella, You Have Had Your Day. Some Little Dogs Never Get Theirs. You Must Not Be Greedy. You Have Known Happiness. The Palace Was Paradise For Those Few Months, And The Prince's Arms Were About You, Cinderella, The Prince's Kisses On Your Lips; The Gods Themselves Cannot Take That From You.