（五年一月四日）
Punctilious Punctuation
Talking of the supreme importance of the comma, a correspondent states that Thomas Campbell once walked six miles to a printing office to have a comma in one of his poems changed into a semicolon. There is a remarkable resemblanee between this and the story of Sir William Hamilton, Astronomer Royal of Ireland, making a lengthy expedition to Dublin to have a semi-colon substituted for a colon.
——London Evening Standard
〔中译〕
谨小慎微之句读
言及逗号之重要性，有一位记者报道：托马斯·坎贝尔曾经步行六英里，去一家印刷所，为的是要将他一篇诗作中之一逗号改成分号。另有一件事与此极其类似。爱尔兰皇家天文学家维廉·哈密顿爵士也曾长途跋涉，去都柏林，为的是要将一分号改为冒号。
——《伦敦标准晚报》
此二则甚有趣。人之视句读如是其重也！此与“吟成一个字，捻断几根髭”，同一精神，同一作用。