MDCCIX.—ALL THE DIFFERENCE.
A Glasgow professor met a poor student passing along one of the courts, and remarked to him that his gown was very short. "It will be long enough before I get another," answered the student. The reply tickled the professor's fancy so much that he continued in a state of suppressed laughter after passing on. Meeting a brother professor, who asked him what was amusing him so much, he told the story with a slightly varied reading. "I asked that fellow why he had so short a gown, and he answered, it will be a long time before I get another."—"Well, there's nothing very funny in that."—"Neither there is," said the professor, "I don't understand how it amused me so much. It must have been something in the way he said it."
MDCCX.—FOOTE'S LAST JOKE.
When Foote was on his way to France, for change of air, he went into the kitchen at the inn at Dover, to order a particular dish for dinner. The true English cook boasted that she had never set foot out of her country. On this, the invalid gravely observed, "Why, cookey, that's very extraordinary, as they tell me up stairs that you have been several times all over grease!"—"They may tell you what they please above or below stairs," replied the cook, "but I was never ten miles from Dover in my life!"—"Nay, now, that must be a fib," says Foote, "for I have myself seen you at Spithead!" The next day (October 21, 1777) the exhausted wit "shuffled off this mortal coil."
MDCCXI.—L'Envoy.
There is so much genuine humor in the following jocular dinner code, that we cannot do better than close our little volume with it.
DINNER CODE.
Of the Amphitryon.—His Rights.
Art. 1.—The Amphitryon is the king of the table: his empire lasts as long as the meal, and ends with it.
Art. 2.—It is lawful for his glass to exceed in capacity those of his guests.