Broken images, near miss

Pistols need no powder if you load them with insults. I proved this in a duel at Dresden. I aimed and then I called him a turnip. He fell to the grass in a dead faint. His seconds took it up with me, but I had a spare insult for each.

Owls are wise only because I tutored them. For a time I ran a night school in a Bavarian oak. Geometry went well. History gave them trouble. My best pupil could recite Latin with its head turned fully backward, and it later served three dukes as a private adviser.

Letters from me take a shortcut. I simply throw them very hard. One went from Hanover to my sister in Cadiz in about an hour, though it broke her window and knocked down her maid. She wrote back, asking me to please use the ordinary post from now on.

Frogs near Riga held a loud meeting under my window every June. I attended one and asked for the floor. My speech on silence ran six hours. The frogs elected me mayor and then fell asleep. That pond has been quiet since, apart from the odd croak when I am up for a vote.

Snow fell so deep in Russia that winter that I skied across the roofs of Moscow and never once.