"Once on a time, a notion was started that if all the people in the world would shout at once, it might be heard in the moon. So the projectors agreed it should be done in just ten years. Some thousand shiploads of chronometers were distributed to the selectmen and other great folks of all the different nations. For a year beforehand, nothing else was talked about but the awful noise that was to be made on the great occasion. When the time came everybody had their ears so wide open to hear the universal ejaculation of boo--the word agreed upon--that nobody spoke except a deaf man in one of the Fejee Islands, and a woman in Pekin, so that the world was never so still since the creation." At the close of the year when the twelve numbers of _The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table_ were completed in the _Atlantic Monthly_ and published in book form, the _British Review_ wrote of the illustrious author as follows: "Oliver Wendell Holmes has been long known in this country as the author of some poems written in stately classic verse, abounding in happy thoughts and bright bird-peeps of fancy, such as this, for example: The punch-bowl's sounding depths were stirred, Its silver cherubs smiling as they heard. And this first glint of spring-- The spendthrift Crocus, bursting through the mould, Naked and shivering with his cup of gold. He is also known as the writer of many pieces which wear a serious look until they break out into a laugh at the end, perhaps in the last line, as with those on _Lending a Punch Bowl_, a cunning way of the writer's; just as the knot is tied in the whip cord at the end of the lash to enhance the smack. "But neither of these kinds of verse prepared us for anything so good, so sustained, so national, and yet so akin to our finest humorists, as _The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table_; a very delightful book--a handy book for the breakfast table. A book to conjure up a cosey winter picture of a ruddy fire and singing kettle, soft hearth-rug, warm slippers, and easy chair; a musical chime of cups and saucers, fragrance of tea and toast within, and those flowers of frost fading on the windows without as though old Winter just looked in, but his cold breath was melted, and so he passed by. A book to possess two copies of; one to be read and marked, thumbed and dog-eared; and one to stand up in its pride of place with the rest on the shelves, all ranged in shining rows, as dear old friends, and not merely as nodding acquaintances.