At dinner the first night out he
incautiously mentioned that during the two months of his convalescence
he had taken the opportunity of reading the whole of Shakespeare's
plays.
Too late he realized his mistake. Mr. Pulitzer took the matter up, and
for the next hour and a half we listened to the unfortunate ex-invalid
while he gave a list of the principal characters in each of the
historical plays, in each of the tragedies, and in each of the comedies,
followed by an outline of each plot, a description of a scene here and
there, and an occasional quotation from the text.
At the end of this heroic exploit, which was helped out now and then by
a note from one of the rest of us, scribbled hastily on a card and
handed silently to the victim, Mr. Pulitzer merely said, "Well, go on,
go on, didn't you read the sonnets?" But this was too much for our
gravity, and in a ripple of laughter the sitting was brought to a close.
The trouble with the meals, however, was not only that we were all kept
at a very high strain of alertness and attention, singularly inconducive
to the enjoyment of food or to the sober business of digestion, but that
they were of such interminable length. The plain fact was that by
utilizing almost every moment between eight o'clock in the morning and
nine o'clock at night we could fortify ourselves with enough material to
fill in the hour or two spent with Mr.
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