from Busman's Honeymoon, Epithalamion, 3, Talboys: Crown Celestial (Dorothy L. Sayers)

One of the most admirable features of the English criminal law is said to be its dispatch.  You are tried as soon as possible after your arrest, the trial takes three or four days at most, and after your conviction (unless, of course, you appeal), you are executed within three weeks.

Crutchley refused to appeal, preferring to announce that he done it, that he'd do it again, and let them get on with it, it made no odds to him.

Harriet, in consequence, was left to form the opinion that three weeks was quite the worst period of waiting in the world.  A prisoner should be executed the morning after his conviction, as after a court-martial, so that one could get all the misery over in a lump and have done with it.  Or the business should be left to drag on for months and years, as in America, till one was so weary of it as to have exhausted all emotion.

An Infinite Number of Occasional Tables (Les Barker)

I've got an occasional table
There it is over there
You can tell it's an occasional table
Today's its day off, it's a chair

I've got an occasional table
I can't seem to get it to settle
It's all been a bit unexpected
I thought I was buying a kettle

I took it upstairs on the bus
I always get the bus back from town
It was then it turned into a wardrobe
Took six of us to get it back down

I've got an occasional table
But some of the time I've not
I always rush me dinner
You never know how long you've got

I think I might have another
Excuse the element of doubt
It's the kind of occasional table
That's only in when you're out

I thought if I had two they might breed
I really quite fancy a set
But with them both being occasional
I don't think they've actually met

I've got some occasional tables
I'm never quite sure where they are
I'd quite like to have a settee but
So far they've not gone, so far

I think therefore I am
All we believe stems from this
Except my occasional table
Which only occasionally, is

Perhaps there's a parallel universe
Where they all go to live quite a lot
Where they're called usual tables
And only occasionally, not

An infinite number of occasional tables
Well then sure there was always one there
I've got an occasional table
Look, here it is, it's a chair

from Middlemarch, chapter XX (George Eliot)

To those who have looked at Rome with the quickening power of a knowledge which breathes a growing soul into all historic shapes, and traces out the suppressed transitions which unite all contrasts, Rome may still be the spiritual centre and interpreter of the world. But let them conceive one more historical contrast: the gigantic broken revelations of that Imperial and Papal city thrust abruptly on the notions of a girl who had been brought up in English and Swiss Puritanism, fed on meagre Protestant histories and on art chiefly of the hand-screen sort; a girl whose ardent nature turned all her small allowance of knowledge into principles, fusing her actions into their mould, and whose quick emotions gave the most abstract things the quality of a pleasure or a pain; a girl who had lately become a wife, and from the enthusiastic acceptance of untried duty found herself plunged in tumultuous preoccupation with her personal lot. The weight of unintelligible Rome might lie easily on bright nymphs to whom it formed a background for the brilliant picnic of Anglo-foreign society; but Dorothea had no such defence against deep impressions. Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present, where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but yet eager Titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the monotonous light of an alien world: all this vast wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of breathing forgetfulness and degradation, at first jarred her as with an electric shock, and then urged themselves on her with that ache belonging to a glut of confused ideas which check the flow of emotion. Forms both pale and glowing took possession of her young sense, and fixed themselves in her memory even when she was not thinking of them, preparing strange associations which remained through her after-years. Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of dull forlornness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of St. Peter's, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina.

Cookies (Arnold Lobel)

Toad baked some cookies.
“These cookies smell very good,”
said Toad.
He ate one.
“And they taste even better,” he said. 
Toad ran to Frog’s house. 
“Frog, Frog,” cried Toad, 
 “taste these cookies
that I have made.”

Frog ate one of the cookies.
“These are the best cookies
I have ever eaten!” said Frog.

Frog and Toad ate many cookies,
one after another. 
“You know, Toad,” said Frog,
with his mouth full,
“I think we should stop eating.
We will soon be sick.”

“You are right,” said Toad.
“Let us eat one last cookie,
and then we will stop.”
Frog and Toad ate
one last cookie.
There were many cookies
left in the bowl.
“Frog,” said Toad,
“let us eat one very last cookie,
and then we will stop.”
Frog and Toad
ate one very last cookie. 

“We must stop eating!” cried Toad
as he ate another.
“Yes,” said Frog, 
reaching for a cookie, 
“we need will power.”
“What is will power?” asked Toad.

“Will power is trying hard
not to do something 
that you really want to do,”
said Frog.
“You mean like trying hard not 
to eat all of these cookies?”
asked Toad.
“Right,” said Frog.

Frog put the cookies in a box.
“There,” he said.
“Now we will not eat
any more cookies.”
“But we can open the box,”
said Toad.
“That is true,” said Frog.

Frog tied some string
around the box.
“There,” he said.
“Now we will not eat
any more cookies.”
“But we can cut the string
and open the box,” said Toad.
“That is true,” said Frog.

Frog got a ladder.
He put the box up on a high shelf.
“There,” said Frog.
“Now we will not eat
any more cookies.”

“But we can climb the ladder
and take the box
down from the shelf
and cut the string
and open the box,”
said Toad.
“That is true,” said Frog.
Frog climbed the ladder
and took the box
down from the shelf.
He cut the string
and opened the box.

Frog took the box outside.
He shouted in a loud voice.
“HEY BIRDS,
HERE ARE COOKIES!” 
Birds came from everywhere.
They picked up all the cookies 
in their beaks and flew away.
“Now we have no more cookies to eat,”
said Toad sadly.
“Not even one.”

“Yes,” said Frog,
“but we have lots and lots 
of will power.”
“You may keep it all, Frog,”
said Toad. 
“I am going home now 
to bake a cake.”