The most impressive part of the spectacle was the defunct giantess, whose wide-spreading draperies and head-gear, as Brooks came down with a well-studied crash, took up so much of the floor that the rest of us had no room left to die in dignity.

Since you are going to be a literary giantess it is well that you should be initiated into the mysteries of producing what I shall call the illusion of spontaneity.

There were three brothers who, purely out of compliment to one another, kept up a good-natured and urbane controversy as to which should marry first, had been overtaken by old age before they had got the question settled; here was a little young wife with a great old husband; there, on the other hand, was a dapper little man and an unwieldy giantess.