THE LAUREATE'S STORY.

Mataura Ensign, 27 September 1913, Page 5

THE LAUREATE'S STORY.

Dr Brides, the new Poet Laureate, tells some "good stories in his book on "English Pronunciation." "My friend, the late Dr Geo, going his round of tlie hospital wards one day cam© to the bedside of a newlyadmitted patient. After examining him carefully and finding little the matter with him he called for the bed-card and in his deliberate; maimer prescribed thereon a diet with a placebo to be taken, three times a day. The. man, frightened by the gravity and silence, feared the worst (he may perhaps have been reading Mr Stephen Coleridge's letters in the newspapers), and was no sooner left alone than lie snatched down the board and seeing cabalistic signs and at the foot of them the awful words 'ter die,' and reading them, this learned man, with much the same kind of pronunciation as the Public Orator will use at Oxford, saw, as lie thought, his death-warrant, so ho whipped lit of bed and fled for his life; to add, no doubt, a new talc to the 'terrors' of the hospital." .