Rambling On: An Apprentice’s Guide to the Gift of the Gab

At the gate I turned, feeling a stab in the back from a shiny knitting-needle… and there by the black grand piano stood the old solicitor, shading his nightmarish features against the spray of sharp sunlight with his basket, his frame all twisted, and firing at me with the death-ray of his eye, which passed through me and cast such a bright light on the white brickwork of the gatepost like if I’d focussed a lens so as to burn a hole in the back of my hand or was waiting for my cotton sleeve to catch fire. Such was the power of this human stare, this fine wire of a strange aqueous humour emitted by the wretched, but triumphant old solicitor. I called out: “Who are you?” And the old man gibbered, bowing towards me: “I’m a corpse who’s forgotten to die.” And the sun shone on the rabbit house, which, divided into separate hutches, reared up behind him, with the does basking in it, their babies before them, fond does, perhaps impelled by their love to cherish the day when their offspring would grow up and have the good fortune to move into the body of the Petrof grand, where they would wage that age-old, terrible struggle, which goes on among men as much as among animals, for sexual supremacy, a struggle victorious until one even stronger comes along and bites off the vitals of the strongest rabbits, depriving them of their power, because this is the only way of progress, the only way for the strong to maintain their position, while all that awaits those who have lost out is the knife or a blow to the skull, though the meat of the emasculated, the castrated, is always more tender and free of the obnoxious odour of sex, that odour that makes the world go round.

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6 JUMBO