[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index][Subject Index][Author Index]
Re: tardiness, sloth and other things
After reading your post on what you found it necessary to do before
publishing your records of Texas footprints, I feel that Stephen Leacock's
story of 'The Retroactive Existence of Mr. Juggins' might have a salutary
effect. Following are the first three paragraphs of that story:
I first met Juggins,---really to notice him,---years and years ago as a boy
out camping. Someone was trying to nail up a board on a tree for a shelf
and Juggins interfered to help him.
"Stop a minute," he said, "you need to saw the end of that board off before
you put it up." Then Juggins looked round for a saw, and when he got it he
had hardly made more than a stroke or two with it before he stopped. "This
saw," he said, "needs to be filed up a bit." So he went and hunted up a
file to sharpen the saw, but found that before he could use the file he
needed to put a proper handle on it, and to make a handle he went to look
for a sapling in the bush, but to cut the sapling he found that he needed to
sharpen up the axe. To do this, of course, he had to fix the grindstone so
as to make it run properly. This involved making wooden legs for the
grindstone. To do this decently Juggins decided to make a carpenter's
bench. This was quite impossible without a better set of tools. Juggins
went to the village to get the tools required, and, of course, he never came
back.
He was re-discovered---weeks later---in the city, getting prices on
wholesale tool machinery.
Leacock was a great, Canadian humorist. Very sound on Shakespeare...