HOW TO MAKE ANAGRAMS.
“Now that’s too bad!” exclaimed little Bess, striking her pencil down quickly on the slate, which had for five minutes been shaded by her brown curls, as she bent earnestly over it. “I do say it’s too bad.”
“What is too bad, Bess?” asked her oldest sister, Mary, who, apparently occupied with her history, had been stealing occasional glances at the animated face over the slate, and watching with pleasing interest the busy fingers putting down letters, and tripping back and forth among them with her pencil-point. “What is too bad, Bess? I thought something was pleasing you very much.”
“Oh! did you? Well, I was just ready to have such a good one—these anagrams, you know. I surely thought I had extra axes, and just because of an r, it’s all spoiled!”
“What were you going to make your extra axes out of?” asked Mary, with a curious smile.
“Now, don’t make fun of me, please. Artaxerxes was my word.”
“Well, I should think that would just make it,” said Mary, thoughtfully. “Are you sure it will not?”
“Don’t you see that r?” asked Bess, holding up her slate and giving a bayonet thrust to the offending letter.
“Yes; but what has that r, all alone by itself, to do with it?”
“Why, it’s my proof. You see I write down my word, and rub out each letter of it as I use it in picking out my new words, so if none are left, my anagram is complete.”
“So you found an extra r, instead of an extra axe, in your way? Well, that is rather trying; but then there are plenty of more words, and it isn’t much work to get them out. You have a capital way. Besides, that wouldn’t have been so very good a one. You know ‘Aunt Sue' says the word and the sentence should bear some relation to each other. Now, if Artaxerxes had been a famous wood-cutter instead of a Persian king, it might have been too bad.”
“But wasn’t he a warrior, too and mightn’t they be battle-axes?”
Mary admitted the force of this, with a smile, as she went on to say:
“When we see such anagrams as ‘astronomers—no more stars,’ and ‘parishioners—I hire parsons,’ there is a certain sense of fitness that produces all the pleasure I can find in an anagram.”
“I know they’re better; but, then, not half of them do mean anything. I never could make such ones.”
“I should try, if I made them out at all, to have them just right. You must remember it takes some patience to get them, as well as to make them. You want the satisfaction of feeling paid when you’re through.”
“Patience! I should think it did!” said Bess, laughing and repeating, “Oh, Sam, cut my pen!” in a very comical manner. “If that didn’t take the patience of Job! And what did it mean, after all? I’m sure Webster don’t know! I think they ought to be fair, at least!”
“So do I,” said Mary, laughing at Bessie’s earnestness. “Now try the word homestead, Bess, and see what you can make of that.”
“Why, is it one?”
“I’m not quite sure; I was running it over in my mind to-day; but I had no slate to prove my canceling correct.”
“What did you think it made?”
“Do-eat-hams.”
“Oh, so it will,” said Bess, hastily putting down the letters; “and you know they do eat hams at homesteads!” Then Bess began drawing the tip of her forefinger slowly through each letter, repeating slowly, “do e-a-t-h- —There, now, that’s worse than Artaxerxes! If that e was only an a!”
Mary looked on the slate a moment, and then said, pleasantly, “But you see it isn’t!”
“How easy you do take things, Mary! Now, that would be so good, and it comes so near!”
“That’s the best way to take things, isn’t it, Bess?” said Mary, gently lifting Bessie’s face by the little fat chin, and looking into her large blue eyes lovingly. “Anagrams, you see, may teach us a lesson.”
“Almost anagrams, you should say,” said Bess. “Well, let’s try something else. Shall we try ‘Aunt Sue?’”
“Yes, put it down.”
“I can get—let me see—yes, ‘use-a-nut;’ but that don’t mean anything like ‘Aunt Sue.’”
“Oh, yes, that will do as well as your ‘battle-axes.’ You know, she keeps ‘nuts’ for the 20,000 to crack in her ‘drawer.’”
“Oh, that’s it!—let me send it.”
“Very well; and if I get time, we will try and have two or three more ready by the next number, and every one with a meaning.”
When Bess gave Mary her good-night kiss, she said to herself, “I like to get out puzzles; but I’d rather have Mary’s patience than all the anagrams in the world. I wonder if I should try very hard, if I ever could be like her!”