“Ah! Grant, Grant!” said Lord Vincent, eagerly, who saw another opportunity of whipping in a pun. “He slept there also the same night I did; and when I saw his unwieldy person waddling out of the door the next morning, I said to Temple, ‘Well, that’s the largest Grant I ever saw from the Crown.’” [Note: It was from Mr. J. Smith that Lord Vincent purloined this pun.]
“Very good,” said Wormwood, gravely. “I declare, Vincent, you are growing quite witty. Do you remember Jekyl? Poor fellow, what a really good punster he was—not agreeable though—particularly at dinner—no punsters are. Mr. Davison, what is that dish next to you?”
Mr. Davison was a great gourmand: “Salmi de perdreaux aux truffes,” replied the political economist.
“Truffles!” said Wormwood, “have you been eating any?”
“Yes,” said Davison, with unusual energy, “and they are the best I have tasted for a long time.”
“Very likely,” said Wormwood, with a dejected air. “I am particularly fond of them, but I dare not touch one—truffles are so very apoplectic—you, I make no doubt, may eat them in safety.”
Wormwood was a tall, meagre man, with a neck a yard long. Davison was, as I have said, short and fat, and made without any apparent neck at all—only head and shoulders, like a cod-fish.
Poor Mr. Davison turned perfectly white; he fidgeted about in his chair; cast a look of the most deadly fear and aversion at the fatal dish he had been so attentive to before; and, muttering “apoplectic,” closed his lips, and did not open them again all dinner-time.
Mr. Wormwood’s object was effected. Two people were silenced and uncomfortable, and a sort of mist hung over the spirits of the whole party. The dinner went on and off, like all other dinners; the ladies retired, and the men drank, and talked indecorums. Mr. Davison left the room first, in order to look out the word “truffle,” in the Encyclopaedia; and Lord Vincent and I went next, “lest (as my companion characteristically observed) that d—d Wormwood should, if we stayed a moment longer, ‘send us weeping to our beds.’”