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Show " Tied His Horse to a Grasshopper. Miss Cooper, a daughter of the novelist, novel-ist, James Fenimore Cooper, states that when in Paris she saw a French translation transla-tion of her father's tale, "Tho Spy," In which there Wore several mistakes, but one of them wad such that it waa almost incredible that any one could possibly have been guilty of it. The residence of Mr. Wharton, one of the characters who figure in the story, is spoken of by the author as "The Locusts." Now, the translator had evidently been ignorant of the circumstance of there being any species of trees bearing this name. Having, therefore, looked up the word in his dictionary, and finding the definition defini-tion to be given as "Les Sautorelles" grasshoppers thus he rendered it in the text, Presently, however, ho came across a paragraph in the novel in which it was stated that a visitor to the house of Mr. Wharton had tied his horse to a locust. Then it might be naturally supposed that the translator would at once have discovered his error. Not a bit of it! His reasoning would appear to have been somewhat on a parity with that of a celebrated cele-brated countryman of his, when he declared de-clared that "if tho facts do not agree with the theory, so much the worse for the facts," Nevertheless, tho writer seems to have been conscious that some explanation was due of so extraordinary a statement as that a horseman had secured his steed to a grasshopper. So he went on gravely to inform his readers that in America these insects grow to an enormous size, and that in this case one of these, dead and stuffed, had been stationed at the door of the mansion for the convenience of the visitors on horseback! Bookmark. |