(no subject)

Mrs West was with her, who is a great prude, having but two lovers at a time: I think those are Lord Haddington and Mr Lindsay; the one for use, the other for show.
- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, letter to her sister, 31/10/1723

(no subject)

Before he could finish the sentence she had kissed him. She declared afterwards that he was the first man she had ever kissed, and he declared that she was the first woman who had ever kissed him in the Mall, so they both secured a record of a kind.
- 'Saki' (H.H.Munro), The Threat

(no subject)

Assuredly a badger is the animal that one most resembles in this trench warfare, that drab-coated creature of the twilight and darkness, digging, burrowing, listening; keeping itself as clean as possible under unfavourable circumstances, fighting tooth and nail on occasion for possession of a few yards of honeycombed earth...
In Zoological Gardens one has gazed at an elk or a bison loitering at its pleasure more than knee-deep in a quagmire of greasy mud, and one has wondered what it would feel like to be soused and plastered, hourlong, in such a muck-bath. One knows now. In narrow-dug support trenches, when thaw and heavy rain have come suddenly atop of a frost, when everything is pitch-dark around you, and you can only stumble about and feel your way against streaming mud walls, when you have to go down on hands and knees in several inches of soup-like mud to creep into a dug-out, when you stand deep in mud, wink away mud, grasp mud-slimed objects with mud-caked fingers, wink mud away from your eyes, and shake it out of your ears, bite muddy biscuits with muddy teeth then at least you are in a position thouroughly to understand what it feels like to wallow - on the other hand the bison's idea of pleasure becomes more and more incomprehensible.

- 'Saki' (H.H.Munro), The Square Egg. Hector Hugh Munro died on the 14th of November, 1916.