The Sunday herald and weekly national intelligencer., 1891-09-13
PRONUNCIATION TESTS.
"A Game That is Both Instructive
and Amusing.

written and printed. Some have been useful;
Others have not been. The Rev. William
Durant, cultivated Presbyterian minister,
prepared the following collection of words
more or less used in reading and conversa-
tion. 1t contains most of the words, in gen.
eral or frequent use, which persons are likely
to mispronounce. Whoever can pronounce
these words will seldom be caught in a serious
mistake. 1t can afford both profit and amuse-
ment. Procure dictionary at home or in
social company, and set one of your number
to reading. Whenever q pronunciation is
criticised turn at once to the dictionary, and
if there has been an error let the next one be-
gin to read at the place where the first broke
down. and so on till the whole is read. Thus
one will master the pronunciation of words
according to the standard dictionary and have
a great deal of diversion in reading
Last Tuesday, fortnight the blaspEemous
and sacrilegious Aaron Cromwell, alias Endy-
mion Disraeli, entered the ornate legislative
hall Of Cincinnati. He will be remembered
as the slothful but servile secretary and ally
of the alien Italian minister extraordinary,
accredited to the isolated and hospitable
Hawaiian Islands. Having tnveigled an idle
,ruflian, brigand from Palestine, in the
onerous scheme, he bade him fasten tiny
pristine idol with gum-arabic beneath the
corridor of the cupola, near the roof. The
figure OF this false god had been encased, with
much ceremony, in cerements of subtitle alpaca
and bombaZine or cashmere, and a cashmere
shawl wrapped deftly around the whole by
subtitle artlticer In. Balmoral Castle.
simultaneously with their entrance the
stewards sagacious and supple mongrel OF
the canine species leaped toward the mono
cmaniacs from his sinecure position on the
squalid mattress of the matron's Office bed
stead. Usually docile but hungry, the dog
was always fertile in resources and apt to
make an opponent of every aspirant for the
penitentiary. Its sudden and sonorous howls,
unlike the soft soughing of the wind on the
subsistence of storm in the forest, Were in
dicatory of splenetic wrath worthy of a vira-
go. With lamentably indecorous pathos the
men shouted, 'Begone to the antipodes, the
horizon, or the zenith,' and directly fled into
the international Museum the door of which
opened Immediately at their peremptory de-
mand
Now that the epoch of their ominous ordeal
was past, with jaunty air and hypocritical
raillery the scathless villains made inquiry of
courteous adult agriculturst for catalogue
of the curiosities in the museum. According
to placards and advertisements its sale was
obligatory in this alleged venue. "Brethren,"
said he, ''the robust and f1orld florist yonder
has one on salVer."
They purloined volume, and, although
it lacked preface, its contents were indis-
putably and without pretense not an incom-
parable romance. 1t gave the apparent area
of the mall in Berlin; named the cognomen of
him who wrote biography of the Magi; took
cognizance of the precedence of heraldic in
sigma connected with sovereignty, and the
irrevocable precedents Of parliamentary law
in precedent ages illustrated by the process
of lithography the obsequies of Give New
comes wife's patronizing parent; dilated on
the acoustic facilities required for the extern
pore patriotic vocables of the enervated juve-
niles in the legislature; exposed abstractly the
lesven of error in the seven sacraments OF
Rome recited the project of sanguine but
covetous tinancier to avoid the disaster of a
deficit, and to increase the increase OF assets
in the national finances; expatiated, with the
phanthrophic research of a vehement allo-
pathst, on the futile vagary of a homeo-
pathic practitioner to use nauseous quinine
and morphine, powdered under a pestle, as
restorative or preventive of nausea in cry
sipelas. bronchitis, or scrofula; but it said
nothing about the ratio OF rapine or OF a re-
creant and lenient police TO the squalor of
wan communists, or whether another presen-
tation would quash the indictment against
them which had been already interdicted.
Among the specialties to be seen in the suite
of rooms in the museum there were the fol-
lowing: breeches Bible, an old bellows, a
piece of a gallows that had been made from
an acclimated elm, the score of new pianist's
burlesque quadrille tune, some aerated bread,
stuffed dromedary, bottle of Worcester
shire sauce, the daguelTeotype or buoy, meer-
schaums, clapboards, greasy tarpaulin, the
helm, silver of the bowsprit, and the boat
swain's whistle from the brigantine Calliope;
the lapel of the vizer's coat and the visor of his
deaf coadjutors cap, bestial satyr, made of
caoutchouc; some tepid and volatile tartaric
acid to kill coral insects a plated seine, the
slough of a snake which the college provost
and the provost marshal had killed in the
lime-kilR, near the great Slough of Despond;
some bitumen for fuel microscopes, sar.
donyX or alabastar column from arctic and
hyperborean Asia, all the apparatus of teeg-
raphy carbines for cavalry, platinum, dish
of carrot soup, with sixty carat diamond in
the bottom; pncers, coffee, an onyx like an
orange, a camelopard with engorged Jugu-
lar and abdomen, quoits made OF
resolube pyrites from a meteorolite
which were notable as having been thrown
with notable precision by a choleric eonnois-
seur at a soiree In the lyceum; q convex kettle,
some transparent troches for tcklsh throats
the hymeueal tiara for a feminine forehead
when forsaking celibacy, several bass-yiols, q
bas-relief or bass relief, sculptured in basalt
representing a wrestler's levee in a cemetery
on the levee of a creek; mock collation. OF
ehestnuts, halibut, lettuce, and other victuals
for langu;d laborers on the wharf or quay
after their bath long treatise on the fran
ehise and on sacrifice, a sombre and uninter
esting history of the mythology, produce