Yours for caution,
Mordecai Mouseman
(for Mouseman, Mouseman and Forcemeat).
*
To Mouseman, Mouseman and Forcemeat.
Dear Sirs:
Your mealy-mouthed letter disgusts me! Settle out of court, indeed! What are you lawyers for, if not to go to court? Eh? Answer me, Mouseman! Don’t sit cringing there, in your stuffy office! Get on the job, man!
What do I care for Cicero Forcemeat’s cold? If he catches cold in court I will personally send him a mustard plaster.
Now, keep your temper, Mouseman, while I explain: you say that evidence is lacking that Dandiprat put the skunk in the car. I know that he did it; I can tell by the ugly leer he gives me whenever I see him, and by the way he pretends to sniff the air when he passes my house. If you want evidence, why don’t you send that sensible secretary of yours, Miss Prudence Bunn, to Dandiprat’s house, disguised as a government inspector, or a Hydro snooper, or something. Then when nobody is looking, she can nip upstairs, pinch one of Dandiprat’s handkerchiefs — an initialled one — and then we can say we found it at the scene of the crime.
What you lawyers need is enterprise. I shouldn’t have to do all your thinking for you.
Yours for brighter law,
Samuel Marchbanks.
*
To Samuel Marchbanks, ESQ.
Dear Sir:
It has been brought to our attention that you have several times and in divers places alleged that our client, Richard Dandiprat, ESQ., introduced a skunk into your motor vehicle and there induced, coerced or suborned the animal to misconduct itself in a characteristic manner. Should you persist in this allegation we shall take action against you for defamation.
Yours,
Craven and Raven, Attorneys.
*
To Mouseman, Mouseman and Forcemeat.
Dear Mouseman:
Now look what you have done! I am sending you a letter from Craven and Raven, a firm of cheap shysters who are Dandiprat’s lawyers, in which they threaten me with a libel action if I tell the truth about Dandiprat. Why don’t you get on the job and put Dandiprat in court for what he has done to me? I don’t want to be bothered with law: I just want Dandiprat thrown in the jug, where he belongs. Why don’t you do something.
Yours passionately,
S. Marchbanks.
*
To Samuel Marchbanks, ESQ.
Dear S.M.:
I should have written to you, I know, but I have been browsing in Canadian history, turning up the oddest things. For instance, have you read Weld’s “Travels in Canada”? In his thirty-fifth letter there is this interesting passage: “It is notorious that towards one another the Indians are liberal in the extreme, and for ever ready to supply the deficiencies of their neighbours with any superfluities of their own. They have no idea of amassing wealth for themselves individually; and they wonder that persons can be found in any society so destitute of every generous sentiment, as to enrich themselves at the expense of others, and to live in ease and affluence regardless of the misery and wretchedness of members of the same community to which they themselves belong.”
Obviously the Indians originated the welfare state, which we are now re-discovering for ourselves. And yet in spite of their enlightened economics the Indians seem to have felt the necessity, from time to time, of pounding, bashing, slicing and frying other Indians. A strange paradox, upon which I delight to ponder.
Adieu,
A. Pilgarlic.
*
To Raymond Cataplasm, M.D., F.R.C.P.
Dear Dr. Cataplasm:
Ever since the death of President Kennedy, American physicians have declared that rocking chairs are good for the heart, the back, and for tension of all kinds. I bring this to your attention, so that you can buy up a lot of old rocking-chairs and sell them in your dispensary at a high price. I am sure that this theory is a correct one, for all my Canadian ancestors were exceptionally long-lived and they were all great rockers. Indeed, it was reckoned that my Great-Aunt Sophonisba, during her 98 years, rocked to the moon and back again, counting each rock of her chair as 24 inches of distance covered. On a carpet with a deep pile she could go right around a good-sized room in an hour.
Do not let anyone persuade you that platform-rockers are healthy. Upon rising from a platform rocker you are likely to be kicked and severely hurt by the chair, which leaps from the ground in anger. I have seen frail and elderly people thrown down and trampled on by a platform rocker with strong springs.
I hope that you will be wildly successful with this wonderful new cardiac therapy.
Your perennial patient,
S. Marchbanks.
*
To Mrs. Morrigan.
My dear Mrs. Morrigan:
Looking through the paper this morning I found an advertisement for a book which undertook to tell its readers how to be “mature.” “Maybe you are well-adjusted, but are you mature?” it asked.
What do you suppose they mean by maturity? I think it is one of the most abused words of our time. So many people say, “He is mature,” when they should say, “He is resigned to failure,” or “His feelings are so blunted that nothing hurts him any more,” or “He has been dead for years, but he doesn’t know it.”
I have never known anyone who was mature in every respect. In men and women whom I like, even the wisest of them, there is some strain of petulance, of caprice, of sensitive vanity — of the things which are thought to be signs of immaturity. And I would not sacrifice these endearing foibles for a chilly perfection.
Your immature servant,
Samuel Marchbanks.
*
To Samuel Marchbanks, ESQ.
Ignoring your rudeness in your last letter, I write to inform you that Outraged Womanhood is once more upon the march. You have heard (as who has not?) that a quarter-pint of rum has been added to the birthday cake of H.R.H. The Prince Edward Antony Richard Louis. Now I ask you, what will happen when that infant has eaten his piece of cake? Staggering, bleary-eyed, he will drive his kiddy-car recklessly around his nursery, his co-ordination reduced perhaps 30 per cent, until he maims his nurse. And what sort of example is that, I ask you, for the infants of the Empire? Rum in cake will lead to demands for rum-and-butter toffee, and then his little bootees will be firmly set upon the Road to Ruin.
I enclose a protest for you to sign. If you do not sign it, never hope again to hear from
Yours,
(Mrs.) Kedijah Scissorbill.
*
To Amyas Pilgarlic, ESQ.
Dear Pil:
I don’t suppose you have seen the movie of Madame Bovary? I beguiled an idle hour with it last night when some fragments appeared on tv, and was moved to reflect that there is something deeply phoney about American actors pretending to be Frenchmen. And when a French classic is translated into American all illusion of French atmosphere is lost. In this piece, for instance, Mme Bovary goes to her aristocratic lover and says:
Mme Bovary: I must have 150,000 francs.
Aristocratic Lover: Uh don’t have ut.
Mme Bovary: Yuh don’t have ut?
Aristocratic Lover: Naw, uh don’t have ut.
Mme Bovary: (collapsing) Aw, yuh don’t have ut!
Frankly this seems as un-French as if they had spoken with Scottish or Lancashire accents. There was a time when actors had a good clear speech of their own, which was not related to any special place and so was suitable for everything, but this excellent tradition was never incorporated in the movies. Ah, well —
Yours,
Sam.
*
To Samuel Marchbanks, ESQ.
Dear Mr. Marchbanks:
May I ask you a somewhat intimate question? What do you do with your empty bottles? For some years I have been accustomed to convey mine privately to a hardware store, which used them as containers for turpentine. But now, alas, they buy their turpentine ready-bottled, and a situation of the deepest embarrassment is pending in my cellar.
My bottles are, of course, of the type generally associated with vinegar.
Yours in perplexity,
Simon Goaste.
*
To the Rev. Simon Goaste, B.D.
Dear Rector:
I, too, have a mounting source of concern in my cellar. I know some people who drive by night to distant farms, where they dump their bottles. Yet others throw their bottles into nearby lakes. Quite a few people, the Librarian tells me, deposit their bottles in the alley behind the public library. But I, like yourself, have not as yet found any solution for the problem. Alack that the rag-bone-and-bottle entrepreneur has vanished from our midst!
My bottles, too, are of a sort that might well contain vinegar.
Yours unhelpfully,
S. Marchbanks.
*
To Samuel Marchbanks, ESQ.
Dear S.M.:
Last night I was at a party at which someone commented on the premature greyness of Canadians, and at once three English people present hastened to attribute this to the great heat in our houses during the winter months.