Page:Carroll - Sylvie and Bruno Concluded.djvu/222

184 Not much, I admitted.

"Now see how that works!" he went on eagerly. "If you want to pump your wells so soonand I suppose you tell me that is what you must do?"

"We must," I said. "In an over-crowded country like this, nothing but Competitive Examinations"

Mein Herr threw up his hands wildly. "What, again?" he cried. "I thought it was dead, fifty years ago! Oh this Upas-tree of Competitive Examinations! Beneath whose deadly shade all the original genius, all the exhaustive research, all the untiring life-long diligence by which our fore-fathers have so advanced human knowledge, must slowly but surely wither away, and give place to a system of Cookery, in which the human mind is a sausage, and all we ask is, how much indigestible stuff can be crammed into it!"

Always, after these bursts of eloquence, he seemed to forget himself for a moment, and only to hold on to the thread of thought by some single word. "Yes, crammed" he repeated. "We went through all that stage of