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Bangs, John Kendrick, 1862-1922

"The Water Ghost and Others"

'"
"I wonder if Boswell was there?" I ventured, interrupting 5010 in his
extraordinary narrative for an instant.
"Yes, he was there," returned the prisoner. "I met him later in the
evening; but he isn't the spook he might be. He never had much spirit
anyhow, and when he died he had to leave his nose behind him, and that
settled him."
"Of course," I answered. "Boswell with no nose to stick into other
people's affairs would have been like _Othello_ with Desdemona left out.
But go on. What did you do next?"
"Well," 5010 resumed, "after I'd looked about me, and drunk my fill of
the magnificence on every hand, Hawley took me into the music-room, and
introduced me to Mozart and Wagner and a few other great composers. In
response to my request, Wagner played an impromptu version of 'Daisy
Bell' on the organ. It was great; not much like 'Daisy Bell,' of course;
more like a collision between a cyclone and a simoom in a tin-plate
mining camp, in fact, but, nevertheless, marvellous.


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