Page:Complete Works of Lewis Carroll.djvu/1221

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LAWN TENNIS TOURNAMENTS
1201

And when that day shall come, O my brother-man, you who claim for yourself and for me so proud an ancestry—tracing our pedigree through the anthropomorphoid ape up to the primeval zoöphyte—what potent charm have you in store to win exemption from the common doom? Will you represent to that grim spectre, as he gloats over you, scalpel in hand, the inalienable rights of man? He will tell you that this is merely a question of relative expediency—that, with so feeble a physique as yours, you have only to be thankful that natural selection has spared you so long. Will you reproach him with the needless torture he proposes to inflict upon you? He will smilingly assure you that the hyperæsthesia, which he hopes to induce, is in itself a most interesting phenomenon, deserving much patient study. Will you then, gathering up all your strength for one last desperate appeal, plead with him as with a fellow-man, and with an agonized cry for "Mercy!" seek to rouse some dormant spark of pity in that icy breast? Ask it rather of the nether mill-stone.



LAWN TENNIS TOURNAMENTS

The True Method of Assigning Prizes with a Proof of the Fallacy of the Present Method

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I. INTRODUCTORY

At a Lawn Tennis Tournament, where I chanced, some while ago, to be a spectator, the present method of assigning prizes was brought to my notice by the lamentations