Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)

by Jerome K. Jerome

George and Harris and Montmorency are not poetic ideals, but things of flesh and blood—especially George, who weighs about twelve stone.

I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee. I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight. Why hadn’t I got housemaid’s knee?

There were no more diseases after zymosis, so I concluded there was nothing else the matter with me.

I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.

And don’t stuff up your head with things you don’t understand.”

In the present instance, going back to the liver-pill circular, I had the symptoms, beyond all mistake, the chief among them being “a general disinclination to work of any kind.” What I suffer in that way no tongue can tell. From my earliest infancy I have been a martyr to it.

They were the most disgraceful pickles I ever tasted in a respectable boat.

the constant change of scene would occupy our minds (including what there was of Harris’s);

Harris said, however, that the river would suit him to a “T.” I don’t know what a “T” is (except a sixpenny one, which includes bread-and-butter and cake ad lib., and is cheap at the price, if you haven’t had any dinner).

I believe that if you met Harris up in Paradise (supposing such a thing likely), he would immediately greet you with: “So glad you’ve come, old fellow; I’ve found a nice place round the corner here, where you can get some really first-class nectar.”

To look at Montmorency you would imagine that he was an angel sent upon the earth, for some reason withheld from mankind, in the shape of a small fox-terrier.

Cheese, like oil, makes too much of itself. It wants the whole boat to itself. It goes through the hamper, and gives a cheesy flavour to everything else there.

I never saw two men do more with one-and-twopence worth of butter in my whole life than they did.

he pretended that the lemons were rats, and got into the hamper and killed three of them

Montmorency had invited two other dogs to come and see him off, and they were whiling away the time by fighting on the doorstep.

this “weather-forecast” fraud is about the most aggravating. It “forecasts” precisely what happened yesterday or a the day before, and precisely the opposite of what is going to happen to-day.

It would be the houses that he had never entered that would become famous. “Only house in South London that Harris never had a drink in!” The people would flock to it to see what could have been the matter with it.

He was full of weird and unnatural notions about being a credit to his parents and an honour to the school;

He was never without a cold, except once for nine weeks while he had scarlet fever; and he always had chilblains.

the less taste a person has in dress, the more obstinate he always seems to be.

He was bewildered for a moment. He rubbed his eyes, and looked hard at me. I seemed human enough on the outside: he couldn’t make it out.

I don’t understand German myself. I learned it at school, but forgot every word of it two years after I had left, and have felt much better ever since.

There may be tow-lines that are a credit to their profession—conscientious, respectable tow-lines—tow-lines that do not imagine they are crochet-work, and try to knit themselves up into antimacassars the instant they are left to themselves.

Six shillings a week does not keep body and soul together very unitedly. They want to get away from each other when there is only such a very slight bond as that between them;