Therefore, though the whole point of his "Current Shorthand" is that it can express every sound in the language perfectly, vowels as well as consonants, and that your hand has to make no stroke except the easy and current ones with which you write m, n, and u, l, p, and q, scribbling them at whatever angle comes easiest to you, his unfortunate determination to make this remarkable and quite
legible script serve also as a Shorthand reduced it in his own practice to the most inscrutable of cryptograms.
(with nothing
legible but the two words "Bond Street"), and there was an end of Sir Jervis's proposal.
Only here and there was a sentence or a part of a sentence
legible. The first that I could read was near the middle of the little volume:
[At this place the entry in the Diary ceases to be
legible. The two or three lines which follow contain fragments of words only, mingled with blots and scratches of the pen.
My writing is at least
legible, neat, and pleasant to look upon--and his Excellency is satisfied with it.
Taking for granted (what was perhaps doubtful enough) that the fragments of the letter could be recovered, my own conviction was that the writing on them, though it might be faded, would certainly still be
legible. The very accumulations which Mr.
* * * don't think of me * * *" There was a little more, but not so much as one word, in those last lines, was
legibleHe corroborated every circumstance which the other had deposed; nay, he produced the record upon his breast, where the handwriting of Mr Jones remained very
legible in black and blue.
The petitioner, the widow of a staff captain Kalinin, came with a request impossible and unreasonable; but Stepan Arkadyevitch, as he generally did, made her sit down, heard her to the end attentively without interrupting her, and gave her detailed advice as to how and to whom to apply, and even wrote her, in his large, sprawling, good and
legible hand, a confident and fluent little note to a personage who might be of use to her.
But sometimes a letter may be
legible even when burned.
Pretending to read a smeary newspaper long out of date, which had nothing half so
legible in its local news, as the foreign matter of coffee, pickles, fish-sauces, gravy, melted butter, and wine, with which it was sprinkled all over, as if it had taken the measles in a highly irregular form, I sat at my table while he stood before the fire.
But what distressed him greatly was not having another hermit there to confess him and receive consolation from; and so he solaced himself with pacing up and down the little meadow, and writing and carving on the bark of the trees and on the fine sand a multitude of verses all in harmony with his sadness, and some in praise of Dulcinea; but, when he was found there afterwards, the only ones completely
legible that could be discovered were those that follow here: