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unearths some literary gems.
From Boon, by H. G. Wells:
***She wrote down his sentences (spelling without blemish in all the European languages) as they came from his lips, with the aid of a bright, efficient, new-looking typewriter. If he used a rare word or a whimsical construction, she would say, “I beg your pardon, Mr. Boon,” and he would at once correct it; and if by any lapse of an always rather too nimble imagination he carried his thoughts into regions outside the tastes and interests of that enormous ante-bellum public it was his fortune to please, then, according to the nature of his divagation, she would either cough or sigh or—in certain eventualities—get up and leave the room.***Many of the fragments would be at once put out of court as modern literature by the fact that they are written in pencil on both sides of the paper!***particularly the peculiar effect that the coincidence that both Nebraska and Nismes begin with an “N” and end so very differently, had had upon his imagination***I remember how Boon sat on the wall of his vegetable garden and discoursed upon James, while several of us squatted about on the cucumber-frames and big flowerpots and suchlike seats, and how over the wall Ford Madox Hueffer was beating Wilkins at Badminton. Hueffer wanted to come and talk too; James is one of his countless subjects—and what an omniscient man he is too!—but Wilkins was too cross to let him off….***He would touch a metaphor and then return and sip it, and then sip and drink and swill until it had intoxicated him hopelessly.***They are an incomplete report of the proceedings of a section S, devoted to Poiometry, apparently the scientific measurement of literary greatness.***
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