Orts #843

These are all from The White Deer by James Thurber (1945)

If you pluck one of the ten thousand toadstools that grow in the emerald grass at the edge of the wonderful woods, it will feel as heavy as a hammer in your hand, but if you let it go it will sail away over the trees like a tiny parachute, trailing black and purple stars.

The old man moaned and maundered, murmured, muttered, mumbled odds of this and ends of that, bits and pieces, shreds and edges, full of ifs and whens and theres and thens, amounting in the end and all to six times less than nothing.

In such confusion and caprice who knows his hound dog from his niece?

When all is dark within the house, who knows the monster from the mouse?

Of all assumptions in our law, the strongest one is this: Scribendum est, which is to say that if the scroll does not exist, the scroll does not exist. And if the scroll does not exist, the spell is null and void, violable, unviable, and tolerable only to the gullible. These present spells . . . should either be recast or just ignored, as never having been in legal fact, which holds that if a thing that should not be, has been, it never was. It's vastly more elastic and rewarding than the mundane or ordinary fact, which holds that just because a thing has been, it was.

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vignettes from the amazing world of the praying (and preying) mantis:
http://nyti.ms/2jXVsxx