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.
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