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The following short sentence was dictated by the late Lord Palmerston to eleven Cabinet ministers, not one of whom, it is said, spelled it correctly:

“It is disagreeable to witness the embarrassment of a harassed pedler gauging the symmetry of a peeled potato.”

Lord Cecil, in the House of Commons, quoted the following lines, which he said were given as a dictation exercise by an assistant commissioner to the children of a school in Ipswich:

“While hewing yew Hugh lost his ewe, and put it in the Hue and Cry.

To name its face’s dusky hues

Was all the effort he could use.

You brought the ewe back, by-and-bye,

And only begged the hewer’s ewer,

Your hands to wash in water pure,

Lest nice-nosed ladies, not a few,

Should cry, on coming near you, ‘Ugh!’”

The absurdity of that Indian grunt in our language, “ugh,” is shown in the following:

Hugh Gough, of Boroughbridge, was a rough soldier on furlough, but a man of doughty deeds in war, though before he fought for this country he was a thorough dough-faced ploughman. His horse having been houghed in an engagement with the enemy, Hugh was taken prisoner, and, I ought to add, was kept on a short enough clough of food, and suffered from drought as well as from hunger. Having, on his return home, drank too large a draught of usquebaugh, he became intoxicated, and was laughing, coughing, and hiccoughing by a trough, against which he sought to steady himself. There he was accosted by another rough, who showed him a chough which he had caught on a clough near, also the slough of a snake, which he held at the end of a tough bough of eugh-tree, and which his shaggy shough had found and had brought to him from the entrance to a sough which ran through and drained a slough that was close to a lough in the neighborhood.