Thurber's So Funny!

Dear Reader,

I'm still laughing my gut out after reading James Thurber's hilarious fable, "The Unicorn in the Garden." It goes something like this:

One night, the husband spotted a unicorn in the garden through the bedroom window. He woke his wife up and told her that there was a unicorn in the garden. The wife opened an eye and growled, "The unicorn is a mythical beast."

So the husband went down to check whether it was indeed a unicorn. Sure it was one, with a golden horn right in the middle of its forehead! He ran upstairs to wake his wife up and give her the news. She looked at him coldly and told him not to be such a booby, or she'd just have him put in a booby-hatch. Now "booby" and "booby-hatch" were two words he could never stand. So he went back into the garden, offered a lily to the unicorn, and fell asleep watching the magnificent creature chew on it.

The next morning, his wife woke up with eyes sparkling with an idea. She rung up the police and the psychiatrist. They came in shortly and the wife sat at the edge of her seat and began to tell them the story of how her husband saw a unicorn in the garden. The policeman and the psychiatrist looked at each other. They asked the husband who had just then walked into the house if he had seen a unicorn.

"Of course not!" he said. "The unicorn is a mythical beast."

Then in a flash, they grabbed the wife, straitjacketed her, and drove her off to an institution. And there she remained for the rest of her life. As for the husband, he lived happily ever after.

Here's the moral that Thurber has placed below his story: Never count your boobies until they hatch.

Dear reader, this gives me a juicy idea for my next experiment!

With love,
Ann