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.