the
Professorial Lecture given by Professor George Hardie
"Always eat grapes downwards - that is always eat the best
grape first; in this way there will be none better on the bunch, and
each grape will seem good down to the last. If you eat the other way,
you will not have a good grape in the lot. Besides you will be tempting
Providence to kill you before you come to the best.... In New Zealand
for a long time I had to do the washing up after each meal. I used to
do the knives first, for it might please God to take me before I came
to the forks, and then what a sell it would have been to have done the
forks rather than the knives."
Samuel Butler in Henry Festing Jones (ed), The Note-Books of
Samuel Butler, Fifield, London 1913.
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