Dottings of a Lounger Author:Frank Fowler General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1859 Original Publisher: Routledge, Warne, and Routledge Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.c... more »om where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: III. NUISANCES. Beyond all computation -- like flies hovering about a barrel of molasses -- are the nuisances of this world. The little nuisances, like the little flies, plague one most, and it is on some of these that I am going to say a word or two. The larger nuisances I let pass. Their very proportions save them. We kill the fly, when, for the sake of our glove and the window-pane, we spare the blue-bottle. Ah! my dear reader, how many nuisances are there like the blue-bottle -- dashing across our path with a buzz, running their heads against the fine webs of wisdom and decency we have set up, and defiling the comely effigies of all our household deities ? But it is not with nuisances like these I have to deal just now. I stick my pen through tliein, and keep them fixed upon my desk until a fitting opportunity arrives for their dissection. The nuisances I am about to catalogue are, apparently, of an insignificant description. It is their very smallness, however, which makes them so annoying. The conferva splits the flint -- the hair disarranges the chronometer -- and it is the pettiness of my numerous list of grievances which pesters and plagues me most. Why should I, for instance, as I am walking quietly along the street be struck in the face, or -- to put it under the mark -- have my hat knocked into the mud, because it has become an institution with all the oilmen in the metropolis to have their bundles of wood thrown from hand to hand into their shops, rather than carried in by the basket-full ? We have been told, for I don't know how lo...« less