I can't honestly say that we made much progress at our first meeting. It
was Brown's fault. He would begin by telling us a story about a dog. It
was the old, old story of the dog who had been in the habit of going
every morning to a certain baker's shop with a penny in his mouth, in
exchange for which he always received a penny bun. One day, the baker,
thinking he would not know the difference, tried to palm off upon the
poor animal a ha'penny bun, whereupon the dog walked straight outside and
fetched in a policeman. Brown had heard this chestnut for the first time
that afternoon, and was full of it. It is always a mystery to me where
Brown has been for the last hundred years. He stops you in the street
with, "Oh, I must tell you!--such a capital story!" And he thereupon
proceeds to relate to you, with much spirit and gusto, one of Noah's best
known jokes, or some story that Romulus must have originally told to
Remus. One of these days somebody will tell him the history of Adam and
Eve, and he will think he has got hold of a new plot, and will work it up
into a novel.

He gives forth these hoary antiquities as personal reminiscences of his
own, or, at furthest, as episodes in the life of his second cousin. There
are certain strange and moving catastrophes that would seem either to
have occurred to, or to have been witnessed by, nearly every one you
meet. I never came across a man yet who had not seen some other man
jerked off the top of an omnibus into a mud-cart. Half London must, at
one time or another, have been jerked off omnibuses into mud-carts, and
have been fished out at the end of a shovel.

Then there is the tale of the lady whose husband is taken suddenly ill
one night at an hotel. She rushes downstairs, and prepares a stiff
mustard plaster to put on him, and runs up with it again. In her
excitement, however, she charges into the wrong room, and, rolling down