Chapter III

_There was._--Here's explicitness! Here's directness! Here's explanatoryness! In my pap days I learned that without a verb there could not be a sentence, not even a judge's sentence. I know "was" ain't much of a word all alone by itself, but then chuck it in among a lot of other fellows, and how it does make them stand around. And then it's so deliciously incomprehensible--there was. Mind you, it don't say that the same thing isn't now. And, mind you, it don't say whether it refers to the day before yesterday, or the commencement of the Franco-Prussian opera bouffe, or our late unpleasantness, or the beginning of the world, or before that. No, it can't go back of the beginning, for before that there wasn't. Anyhow, it leaves you in such a pleasant state of uncertainty that you very willingly pass on to.