Was the breaking of Mr.
Schuyler's leg, fifteen years ago, the "distressing accident" that plunged Mr.Bloke into unspeakable grief, and caused him to come up here at dead of night and stop our press to acquaint the world with the circumstance?
Or did the "distressing accident" consist in the destruction of Schuyler's mother-in-law's property in early times?
Or did it consist in the death of that person herself three years ago (albeit it does not appear that she died by accident)?
In a word, what did that "distressing accident" consist in?
What did that driveling ass of a Schuyler stand in the wake of a runaway horse for, with his shouting and gesticulating, if he wanted to stop him?
And how the mischief could he get run over by a horse that had already passed beyond him?
And what are we to take "warning" by?
And how is this extraordinary chapter of incomprehensibilities going to be a "lesson" to us?
And, above all, what has the intoxicating "bowl" got to do with it, anyhow?
It is not stated that Schuyler drank, or that his wife drank, or that his mother-in-law drank, or that the horse drank--wherefore, then, the reference to the intoxicating bowl?
It does seem to me that if Mr.Bloke had let the intoxicating bowl alone himself, he never would have got into so much trouble about this exasperating imaginary accident.

I have read this absurd item over and over again, with all its insinuating plausibility, until my head swims; but I can make neither head nor tail of it.

There certainly seems to have been an accident of some kind or other, but it is impossible to determine what the nature of it was, or who was the sufferer by it.

I do not like to do it, but I feel compelled to request that the next time anything happens to one of Mr.Bloke's friends, he will append such explanatory notes to his account of it as will enable me to find out what sort of an accident it was and whom it happened to.

I had rather all his friends should die than that I should be driven to the verge of lunacy again in trying to cipher out the meaning of another such production as the above.
A MEDIEVAL ROMANCE [written about 1868].