one bad clip / and a pheasant becomes a duck

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Above Roy R. Behrens, La Scala. Digital montage, © 2021.

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Christopher Falconer, British gardener, as quoted in Ronald Blythe, Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village (New York: Dell Publishing, 1969), p. 113—

The garden was huge. The pleasure grounds alone, and not including the park, covered seven acres. The kind of gardening we did there is not seen nowadays. It was a perfect art. Topiary, there was a lot of that. It was a very responsible job. You had only to make one bad clip and a pheasant became a duck. The gardeners usually made up these creatures themselves. We were tempted to cut out something terrible sometimes, so that it grew and grew…but of course we never did.

we drank irish usquebaugh—and fired a volley

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Above Roy R. Behrens, Bell Jar. Digital montage, © 2021.

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John Fontaine, Diary, excerpted in David Colbert, ed., Eyewitness to the American West (New York: Penguin Books, 1999)—

We had a good dinner, and after it we got the men together, and loaded all their arms, and we drank the King's health in champagne, and fired a volley—the Princess's health in Burgundy, and fired a volley, and all the rest of the Royal Family in claret, and a volley. We drank the Governor's health and fired another volley. We had several sorts of liquors, viz., Virginia red wine and white wine, Irish usquebaugh, brandy, shrub, two sorts of rum, champagne, canary, cherry, punch, water, cider, &c.…

At seven in the morning we mounted our horses, and parted with the rangers…