Note 44 — CONTENTS. (continued 5)

A rather amusing mistake was made by the stenographers of a New York paper in reporting the above sentence, which I happened to quote in a lecture upon Comets and Meteors. Instead of Paradise they wrote Paris. Those acquainted with Pitman's system of short-hand, the one most commonly employed by reporters, will easily understand how the mistake was made, the marks made to represent the consonants p, r, d, and s differing little from those made to represent the consonants p, r, and s (the 'd' or 't' sound is represented, or may be represented, by simply shortening the length of the sign for the preceding consonant). The mistake led naturally to my remarking in my next lecture that I had not before known how thoroughly synonymous the words are in America, though I had heard it said that 'Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris.'