[…]and it turned out, if you just dumped pure oxygen and kerosene into the combustion chamber, the torpedo would travel at fairly-high speed... just instantaneously in all directions at once, disassembling itself, and any nearby people, with considerable enthusiasm. Explaining that this was entirely-unacceptable behavior for a torpedo that was designed to smite the Emperor's enemies didn't really tend to work out that well, since they hadn't yet invented the Machine Spirit, and, in any case, working out which bit of the torpedo you were supposed to talk to, or possibly scrape off the wall, was somewhat difficult once it had decided to launch a several-hundred-meter search into the realm of the honorable ancestors.

VVhat gad flye tickles ſo this Macrinus, / That up flinging thy taile, he breakes thus from me.

Then Condy promptly got the hiccoughs from drinking his tea too fast, and fretted up and down the room like a chicken with the pip.

1909, Sidney Heath, Romance of Symbolism: Fonts and the symbols of baptism - The times [for baptism] of which Whitsun Eve is one, are specified by ... the constitutions for Orthobon for England, Gerona, 517, c. iv.