unearths some literary gems.
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Patrick said, "My kingdom for a flying red horse."
***
I was talking like a fish.
[Now, that took me by surprise. Sure, the narrator-protag uses "[oh,] fish!" as an oath on two or three occasions, but this is something else again. It seems to mean that she's talking like a fool. New to me! I see that Google Books brings up only a very few hits for talking like a fish; but at least one, by a different author, falls in with Crane's usage. Meanwhile, I was entertained to read a theatre-history account of how the line "You talk like a fish!" was cut from a J. B. Priestley work (though it's not clear to me what the line meant--maybe the character was talking foolishly, or maybe he literally sounded fishlike; cf. "Stop talking like an ostrich!").]
