An Old English Home and Its Dependencies. Baring-Gould Sabine

should rain fall, may I take the children into the old hall?"

      "By all means," said the new squire; "but it will be stuffy: I will have it ventilated."

      He at once went down with two carpenters and ripped strips through the lovely ceiling from one end of the room to the other, utterly destroying this incomparable work, that must have occupied the artist months of patient labour, and which had called forth the best efforts of his genius.

      That is how mulish stupidity is every day destroying the achievements of genius. It is on a level with that of the chawbacon who, having got hold of a Stradella violin, broke it up to light his fire with the splinters.