This just in; the subject is museum guards:
I knew all those old fellows in
uniform well. It was a funny life
they led … One of the things they had to do was to look out for bomb-throwers. Why people should want to throw bombs or set infernal
machines in museums, of all places, I don’t know. But they do -- or, at all events, it is always expected that
they will. That’s why the
attendants won’t allow visitors to bring in parcels: they are afraid they may contain dynamite.
From this evening’s headlines? No. The speaker
is a little mouse, telling his tale to Doctor Dolittle, in a book from 1925, Doctor
Dolittle’s Zoo (p. 134). (The expression "infernal machines", now obsolete, dates from then and earlier.) It is
the most wholesome, and generally uneventful, narrative you can imagine; my wife and I have been reading from it
as a bedtime story (it is, one must confess, somewhat soporific, but in the circumstances that is all to the purpose). So it was startling to read
of this scene, foreshadowing the TSA scanning your baggage for forbidden
shampoo.
For further examples of the theme “Nothing New Under the Sun”,
click here.
For more about nice Dr Dolittle, here.
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