Line items in a bill received by an English lord from an artist in 1865, for repairs and retouchings to a gallery of paintings:

• To filling up the chink in the Red Sea and repairing the damages of Pharaoh’s host.
• To cleaning six of the Apostles and adding an entirely new Judas Iscariot.
• To a pair of new hands for Daniel in the lions’ den and a set of teeth for the lioness.
• To an alteration in the Belief, mending the Commandments, and making a new Lord’s Prayer.
• To new varnishing Moses’s rod.
• To repairing Nebuchadnezzar’s beard.
• To mending the pitcher of Rebecca.
• To a pair of ears for Balaam and a new tongue for the ass.
• To planting a new city in the land of Nod.

From William Shepard Walsh, Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities, 1892.