THE PHILOSOPHER'S JOKE
By JEROME K. JEROME

THE PHILOSOPHER'S JOKE

Myself, I do not believe this story. Six persons are persuaded of its
truth; and the hope of these six is to convince themselves it was an
hallucination. Their difficulty is there are six of them. Each one
alone perceives clearly that it never could have been. Unfortunately,
they are close friends, and cannot get away from one another; and when
they meet and look into each other's eyes the thing takes shape again.

The one who told it to me, and who immediately wished he had not, was
Armitage. He told it to me one night when he and I were the only
occupants of the Club smoking-room. His telling me--as he explained
afterwards--was an impulse of the moment. Sense of the thing had been
pressing upon him all that day with unusual persistence; and the idea
had occurred to him, on my entering the room, that the flippant
scepticism with which an essentially commonplace mind like my own--he
used the words in no offensive sense--would be sure to regard the
affair might help to direct his own attention to its more absurd
aspect. I am inclined to think it did. He thanked me for dismissing
his entire narrative as the delusion of a disordered brain, and begged
me not to mention the matter to another living soul. I promised; and
I may as well here observe that I do not call this mentioning the
matter. Armitage is not the man's real name; it does not even begin
with an A. You might read this story and dine next to him the same
evening: you would know nothing.

Also, of course, I did not consider myself debarred from speaking