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| [[File:Fontish weaponry.png|450px|thumb|center|[[Winthrop Grumman]] and [[A. J. N. Calder]] in the Royal Contrarian Society’s performance of {{dsh}}, 1926.]] | | [[File:Fontish weaponry.png|450px|thumb|center|[[Winthrop Grumman]] and [[A. J. N. Calder]] in the Royal Contrarian Society’s performance of {{dsh}}, 1926.]] |
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| ''TRIAGO'': There! That! Didst thou see ’t? <br>
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| The card-sharp’s fumbling misdirect? <br>
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| That tell-tale grin or worldly wink that <br>
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| Cracks heav’n apart and for a twinkling<br>
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| Throws rude light upon perfidious conjury! <br>
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| Spy the dark-clad stage boy! How he flies<br>
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| Yet bolts a trice too late to beat the curtain’s rise.<br>
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| :''Enter HERCULIO, eating an apple.''
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| ''HERCULIO'': How now, sweet [[Triago]]. What sorrow? <br>
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| ''TRIAGO'': A browful, sir. In foreign paper, densely ink’d. <br>
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| ''HERCULIO'': Pray tell. (''Aside'') I would pray there were a choice <br>
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| Had my prayers a hope of answer.<br>
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| ''TRIAGO'': See here, [[Herculio]]. ’Tis a slip. Behold the oily wires. <br>
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| O, Trickery! O, Falsity! Mark the cagey fingers<br>
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| Cross’d behind thy back!<br>
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| O, my career! My toil! My [[dreary]] occupation! <br>
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| Has it all been but a prank, [[Herculio]]? <br>
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| This long and wretched shift: just some saucy jape?<br>
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| ''HERCULIO'': All well-meant, good [[Triago]]. Be not sour —<br>
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| These are not grapes. <br>
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| ''TRIAGO'': Indeed not sir: rather, scrapes.<br>
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| And scars and knocks — the job-lot doggedly sustained.<br>
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| ''HERCULIO'': (''Aside'') Some more than others. The odd one feigned. <br>
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| But come, Sir Tig: what unrests you here? <br>
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| ''TRIAGO'' (''waving paper''): A tract from a brother clerk in America. <br>
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| ''HERCULIO'': Cripes abroad. Grim tidings?<br>
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| ''TRIAGO'': Forsooth: it wears the colours of a fight. <br>
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| A word-scape stain’d with tightly kernèd face <br>
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| And girded round with fontish weaponry. <br>
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| ''HERCULIO'' (''inspecting the document''): Verily, convenantry this dark <br>
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| Speaks of [[Litigation|litiginous]] untrust. <br>
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| Wherefore such cruel [[indemnities]]? <br>
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| Wherefore so dry a want of fun? <br>
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| A merchant wrapp’d with better sense <br>
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| Would just as soon injunct th’orbiting sun.<br>
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| What is this pact, [[Triago]]? Who demands <br>
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| Such fearsome consequence? <br>
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| ''TRIAGO'': An entente of secrecy, no more. <br>
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| ''HERCULIO'': Secrecy? Do my deceitful ears mislead?<br>
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| Say it again, my friend: ''secrecy'', didst thou say? <br>
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| ''TRIAGO'': I did, my Lord, I did. A trifling confi. An [[NDA|N.D.A.]] <br>
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| :—{{buchstein}}, {{dsh}}}}
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| Once in a long while<ref>Once every three or four days, about.</ref> you see a giveaway. A tell: a knowing look, a sly wink, fingers crossed behind the back, a stray wire, a stage-hand scampering away a moment too late to beat the rising curtain — just enough to wonder: is this whole thing, secretly, a gigantic ''have''? Are we stooges? Have we all been fitted up, Truman Burbank-style, in some epochal, multi-decade-long [[Game For A Laugh]]? Is the benign creator playing with us, for sport, like flies to wanton boys? | | Once in a long while<ref>Once every three or four days, about.</ref> you see a giveaway. A tell: a knowing look, a sly wink, fingers crossed behind the back, a stray wire, a stage-hand scampering away a moment too late to beat the rising curtain — just enough to wonder: is this whole thing, secretly, a gigantic ''have''? Are we stooges? Have we all been fitted up, Truman Burbank-style, in some epochal, multi-decade-long [[Game For A Laugh]]? Is the benign creator playing with us, for sport, like flies to wanton boys? |