I'm afraid it's not nonsense,' Genghis said, shaking his turbaned head and continuing his story. 'As I was saying before the little girl interrupted me, the baby didn't dash off with the other orphans. She just sat there like a sack of flour. So I walked over to her and gave her a kick to get her moving.'Excellent idea!' Nero said. 'What a wonderful story this is! And then what happened?'Well, at first it seemed like I'd kicked a big hole in the baby,' Genghis said, his eyes shining, 'which seemed lucky, because Sunny was a terrible athlete and it would have been a blessing to put her out of her misery.'Nero clapped his hands. 'I know just what you mean, Genghis,' he said. 'She's a terrible secretary as well.'But she did all that stapling,' Mr. Remora protested. 'Shut up and let the coach finish his story,' Nero said.'But when I looked down,' Genghis continued, 'I saw that I hadn't kicked a hole in a baby. I'd kicked a hole in a bag of flour! I'd been tricked!'That's terrible!' Nero cried.

If you were smart,' Genghis said, 'you would have borrowed the silverware of one of your friends.'We never thought of that,' Klaus said. When one is forced to tell atrocious lies, one often feels a guilty flutter in one's stomach, and Klaus felt such a flutter now. 'You certainly are an intelligent man.'Not only am I intelligent,' Genghis agreed, 'but I'm also very smart.

Yes, I know,' Isadora said, and then read her poem, leaning forward so Carmelita Spats would not overhear:'I would rather eat a bowl of vampire batsthan spend an hour with Carmelita Spats.'The Baudelaires giggled and then covered their mouths so nobody would know they were laughing at Carmelita.'That was great,' Klaus said. 'I like the part about the bowl of bats.

Read about things that wouldn't keep you up all night long, weeping and tearing out your hair.

In between bites of banana, Mr. Remora would tell stories, and the children would write the stories down in notebooks, and every so often there would be a test. The stories were very short, and there were a whole lot of them on every conceivable subject. 'One day I went to the store to purchase a carton of milk,' Mr. Remora would say, chewing on a banana. 'When I got home, I poured the milk into a glass and drank it. Then I watched television. The end.' Or: 'One afternoon a man named Edward got into a green truck and drove to a farm. The farm had geese and cows. The end.' Mr. Ramora would tell story after story, and eat banana after banana, and it would get more and more difficult for Violet to pay attention.

I'm jealous of your hooks,' Kevin replied. 'Having no hands is better than having two equally strong hands.'Don't be ridiculous,' one of the white-faced women replied. 'Having a white face is worse than both of your situations.'But you have a white face because you put makeup on,' Colette said, as Sunny climbed back out of the trunk and knelt down in the snow. 'You're putting powder on your face right now.

Occasionally, events in one's life become clearer through the prism of experience, a phrase which simply means that things tend to be clearer as time goes on. For instance, when a person is just born, they usually have no idea what curtains are and spend a great deal of their first months wondering why on earth Mommy and Daddy have hung large pieces of cloth over each window in the nursery. But as the person grows older, the idea of curtains becomes clearer through the prism of experience. The person will learn the word 'curtains' and notice that they are actually quite handy for keeping a room dark when it is time to sleep, and for decorating an otherwise boring window area. Eventually, they will entirely accept the idea of curtains of their own, or venetian blinds, and it is all due to the prism of experience.

You write poetry?' Klaus asked.He had read a lot about poets but had never met one.'Just a little bit,' Isadora said modestly. 'I write poems down in this notebook. It's an interest of mine.'Sappho!' Sunny shrieked, which meant something like, 'I'd be very pleased to hear a poem of yours!