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Mr Jabberjee is taken by surprise.
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XII
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Diligent perusers of my lucubrations to Punch will remember that I have devoted sundry jots and tittles to the subject of Miss Jessiminia Mankletow, and already may have concluded that I was long since up to the hilt in the tender passion. In this deduction, however, they would have manufactured a stentorian cry from an extreme paucity of wool; the actual fact being that, although percipient of the well-proportionate symmetry of her person and the ladylike liveliness of her deportment, I did never regard her except with eyes of strictly platonic philandering and calf love.
It is true that, at certain seasons, the ostentatious favours she would squander upon other young masculine boarders in my presence did reduce me to the doleful dump of despair, so that even the birds and beasts of forest shed tears at my misery, and frequently at meal-times I have sought to move her to compassion by neighing like horse, or by the incessant rolling of my visual organs; though she did only attribute such ad misericordiam appeals to the excessive gravity of the cheese, or the immaturity of the rhubarb pie.
