WIST

Bilbo thought to kill the creature, but pity stayed his hand.
‘It’s a pity I’ve run out of bullets,’ he thought.

Henry N. Beard (b. c. 1945) American writer and humorist
Bored of the Rings, with Douglas C. Kenney

Perennial: Any plant which, had it lived, would have bloomed year after year.

Henry N. Beard (b. c. 1945) American writer and humorist
Gardening: A Gardener’s Dictionary (1982)
with Roy McKie

Boggies are an unattractive but annoying people whose numbers have increased rather precipitously since the bottom fell out of the fairy-tale market. Slow and sullen, and yet dull, they prefer to lead simple lives of pastoral squalor. They don’t like machines more complicated than a garrote, a blackjack, or a Luger, and they have always been shy of the ‘big folk’ or ‘biggers’ as they call us. As a rule they avoid us, except on rare occasions when a hundred or so will get together to dry-gulch a lone farmer or hunter. They seldom exceed three feet in height, but are fully capable of overpowering creatures half their size when they get the drop on them. … Their beginnings lie far back in the Good Ole Days when the planet was populated with the kind of colorful creatures you have to drink a quart of Old Overcoat to see nowadays.

Henry N. Beard (b. c. 1945) American writer and humorist
Bored of the Rings (1969) [with Douglas C. Kenney]