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"A healthy book!" said one of his countrymen to me, who had ventured to give that appellation to John Buncle, "did I catch rightly what you said? I have heard of a man in health, and of a healthy state of body, but I do not see how that epithet can be properly applied to a book." Above all, you must beware of indirect expressions before a Caledonian.
There's a queer old book that's been chasing me for years: The Life and Opinions of John Buncle, Esq., it's called. I've tried to escape it, but every now and then it sticks up its head somewhere. It'll get me some day, and I'll be compelled to read it. Ten Thousand a Year trailed me the same way until I surrendered. Words can't describe the cunning of some books.
Then I doot you gave it a bit kick with your foot," replied the inflexible Buncle. "Or got some other body tae luft it for him!" suggested Private Nigg, looking hard at Tosh's habitual accomplice, Cosh. "I had it pitten in an auld envelope from hame, addressed with my name," continued the mourner. "It couldna hae got oot o' that by accident!"
Romances there were, like Gulliver's Travels and Peter Wilkins, in which the incidents were much more incredible, but there was no supposition that these would be treated as real history. The curious feature of John Buncle is that the story is told with the strictest attention to realism and detail, and yet is embroidered all over with the impossible.
"You have found a new trade, comrade, since I left you," said one of the rowers to the other. "I left you engaged in tending a sick knight, and I find you employed in purloining a dead body from the gallows." "A living body, so please your squirehood, Master Buncle, or else my craft hath failed of its purpose."
Thus, neither vein nor windpipe being compressed, the man will breathe as free, and his blood, saving from fright and novelty of situation, will flow as temperately as your valiancie's when you stand up in your stirrups to view a field of battle." "By my faith, a quaint and rare device!" quoth Buncle.
Gerald had stumbled on to the corpse, and had turned his discovery, we afterwards admitted, to remarkably good advantage. It was "Mr Standish's turn," as Miss Buncle, in the picturesque but mysterious vernacular of her race, remarked at luncheon, "to hold the baby this time."
I remind myself now and then of certain other travellers: of Benjamin of Tudela, going from the hospitalities of one son of Abraham to another; of John Buncle, finding the loveliest of women under every roof that sheltered him; sometimes, perhaps, of that tipsy rhymester whose record of his good and bad fortunes at the hands of landlords and landladies is enlivened by an occasional touch of humor, which makes it palatable to coarse literary feeders.
You shove down a platform in a heavy sea, lower a light cage, put your wounded man in it, and steam away. There you are; you may make your calls like the postman. Bill Buncle breaks his leg on Sunday; his mates say, 'All right, William, the doctor's coming to-morrow. You take me? Tell me, how will you manage if you have a vessel short of hands to work her?"
I'm just mad to know all those cunning tartans by heart." "The moment the service was over," continued my wife severely, "I saw her edging through the crowd in the churchyard towards the chieftain. For a moment I thought she was going to ask him his name." "I wasn't!" declared Miss Buncle indignantly. "No, you did worse.
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