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 the bedclothes, presses it lovingly upon the wrong man.
I have heard that story so often that I am quite nervous about going to bed in an hotel now. Each man who has told it me has invariably slept in the room next door to that of the victim, and has been awakened by the man's yell as the plaster came down upon him. That is how he (the story-teller) came to know all about it.
Brown wanted us to believe that this prehistoric animal he had been telling us about had belonged to his brother-in-law, and was hurt when Jephson murmured, sotto voce, that that made the twenty-eighth man he had met whose brother-in-law had owned that dog--to say nothing of the hundred and seventeen who had owned it themselves.
We tried to get to work afterwards, but Brown had unsettled us for the evening. It is a wicked thing to start dog stories among a party of average sinful men. Let one man tell a dog story, and every other man in the room feels he wants to tell a bigger one.
There is a story going--I cannot vouch for its truth, it was told me by a judge--of a man who lay dying. The pastor of the parish, a good and pious man, came to sit with him, and, thinking to cheer him up, told him an anecdote about a dog. When the pastor had finished, the sick man sat up, and said, "I know a better story than that. Ihad a dog once, a big, brown, lop-sided--"The effort had proved too much for his strength. He fell back upon the pillows, and the doctor, stepping forward, saw that it was a question only of minutes.
The good old pastor rose, and took the poor fellow's hand in his, and pressed it. "We shall meet again," he gently said.
The sick man turned towards him with a consoled and grateful look.
"I'm glad to hear you say that," he feebly murmured. "Remind me about that dog."Then he passed peacefully away, with a sweet smile upon his pale lips.
Brown, who had had his dog story and was satisfied, wanted us to settle our heroine; but the rest of us did not feel equal to settling anybody just then. We were thinking of all the true dog stories we had ever heard, and wondering which was the one least likely to be generally disbelieved.
MacShaughnassy, in particular, was growing every moment more restless and moody. Brown concluded a long discourse--to which nobody had listened--by remarking with some pride, "What more can you want? The plot has never been used before, and the characters are entirely original!"Then MacShaughnassy gave way. "Talking of plots," he said, hitching his chair a little nearer the table, "that puts me in mind. Did Iever tell you about that dog we had when we lived in Norwood?""It's not that one about the bull-dog, is it?" queried Jephson anxiously.
"Well, it was a bull-dog," admitted MacShaughnassy, "but I don't think I've ever told it you before."We knew, by experience, that to argue the matter would only prolong the torture, so we let him go on.
"A great many burglaries had lately taken place in our neighbourhood," he began, "and the pater came to the conclusion that it was time he laid down a dog. He thought a bull-dog would be the best for his purpose, and he purchased the most savage and murderous-looking specimen that he could find.
"My mother was alarmed when she saw the dog. 'Surely you're not going to let that brute loose about the house!' she exclaimed.
'He'll kill somebody. I can see it in his face.'
"'I want him to kill somebody,' replied my father; 'I want him to kill burglars.'
"'I don't like to hear you talk like that, Thomas,' answered the mater; 'it's not like you. We've a right to protect our property, but we've no right to take a fellow human creature's life.'
"'Our fellow human creatures will be all right--so long as they don't come into our kitchen when they've no business there,'
retorted my father, somewhat testily. 'I'm going to fix up this dog in the scullery, and if a burglar comes fooling around--well, that's HIS affair.'
"The old folks quarrelled on and off for about a month over this dog. The dad thought the mater absurdly sentimental, and the mater thought the dad unnecessarily vindictive. Meanwhile the dog grew more ferocious-looking every day.
