A Series of Unfortunate Events #4: The Miserable Mill

To Beatrice—

My love flew like a butterfly

Until death swooped down like a bat

As the poet Emma Montana McElroy said:

“That’s the end of that.”

you never know until you try it out.

and so far each home had been a catastrophe, a word which here means “an utter disaster involving tragedy, deception, and Count Olaf.”

if Paltryville had been listed in a guidebook the only helpful hint about what to do when you got there would be: “Leave.”

A new experience can be extremely pleasurable, or extremely irritating, or somewhere in between, and you never know until you try it out

using a phrase which here means “working with

ostentatiously—a word which here means “really, really”—horrendous,

hanging askew, a phrase which here means “tilted to one side

nefarious” here means “Baudelaire-hating

The Baudelaire orphans did not answer this question, because it seemed to them the answer was obvious. A fair deal, as everyone knows, is when both people give something of more or less equal value. If you were bored with playing with your chemistry set, and you gave it to your brother in exchange for his dollhouse, that would be a fair deal. If someone offered to smuggle me out of the country in her sailboat, in exchange for free tickets to an ice show, that would be a fair deal. But working for years in a lumbermill in exchange for the owner’s trying to keep Count Olaf away is an enormously unfair deal, and the three youngsters knew it.