Page:The king's English (IA kingsenglish00fowlrich).pdf/311
ficting with this requirement, we have the exorbitant claims of a complete anecdote, containing within itself an elaborately accented speech. To represent the anecdote as an insignificant appendage to pupils was a fault of sense; it is revealed to the few who would not have perceived it by the impossibility of reading the passage naturally.
'Are Japanese Aprils always as lovely as this?' asked the man in the light tweed suit of two others in immaculate flannels with crimson sashes round their waists and puggarees folded in cunning plaits round their broad Terai hats.–D. Sladen.
'Here we are', he said presently, after they had turned off the main road for a while and rattled along a lane between high banks topped with English shrubs, and looking for all the world like an outskirt of Tunbridge Wells.–D. Sladen.
I doubt if Haydn would have passed as a composer before a committee of lords like one of his own pupils, who insisted on demonstrating to him that he was continually sinning against the rules of counterpoint; on which Haydn said to him, 'I thought I was to teach you, but it seems you are to teach me, and I do not want a preceptor', and thereon he wished his lordship a good morning.–Peacock.
She wondered at having drifted into the neighbourhood of a person resembling in her repellent formal chill virtuousness a windy belfry tower, down among those districts of suburban London or appalling provincial towns passed now and then with a shudder, where the funereal square bricks-up the church, that Arctic hen-mother sits on the square, and the moving dead are summoned to their round of penitential exercise by a monosyllabic tribulation-bell.–Meredith.
The verb wonder presupposes the reader's familiarity with the circumstance wondered at; it will not do the double work of announcing both the wonder and the thing wondered at. 'I wondered at Smith's being there' implies that my hearer knew that Smith was there; if he did not, I should say 'I was surprised to find...'. Accordingly, in this very artificial sentence, the writer presupposes the inconceivable question: 'What were her feelings on finding that she had drifted...tribulation-bell?'. To read a sentence of minute and striking description with the declining accentuation that necessarily follows the verb wondered is of course impossible.