MOUSE, n. An animal which strews its path with fainting women. As in
Rome Christians were thrown to the lions, so centuries earlier in
Otumwee, the most ancient and famous city of the world, female
heretics were thrown to the mice. Jakak-Zotp, the historian, the only
Otumwump whose writings have descended to us, says that these martyrs
met their death with little dignity and much exertion. He even
attempts to exculpate the mice (such is the malice of bigotry) by
declaring that the unfortunate women perished, some from exhaustion,
some of broken necks from falling over their own feet, and some from
lack of restoratives. The mice, he avers, enjoyed the pleasures of
the chase with composure. But if "Roman history is nine-tenths
lying," we can hardly expect a smaller proportion of that rhetorical
figure in the annals of a people capable of so incredible cruelty to a
lovely women; for a hard heart has a false tongue.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
most of us learned about love the hard way. Even warnings are probably
usele for somehow, despite the severest warnings of parents and friends,
hundreds, thousands of women have forgotten themselves at the last minute
and succumbed to the lies, promises, flatteries, or mere attentions of
lusting, lovely men, landing themselves in complicated predicaments from
which some of them never recovered during their entire lives....
