"In June, '58."
"It is a good many years ago. Have you told it several times since?"
"Yes, I have, a good many times."
"How many?"
"Why, I don't know how many."
"Well, strike an average. How many times a year do you think you have told it?"
"Well, I have told it as many as six times a year, possibly oftener."
"Very well, then you've told it, we'll say, seventy or eighty times since it happened?"
"Yes," I said, "that's a conservative estimate."
"Now then, Mark, a very extraordinary thing happened to me a great many years ago, and I used to tell it a number of times—a good many times—every year, for it was so wonderful that it always astonished the hearer, and that astonishment gave me a distinct pleasure every time. I never suspected that that tale was acquiring any auxiliary advantages through repetition until one day after I had been telling it ten or fifteen years it struck me that either I was getting old, and slow in delivery, or that the tale was longer than it was when it was born. Mark, I diligently and prayerfully examined that tale with this result: that I found that its proportions were now, as nearly as I could make oat, one part fact, straight fact, fact pure and undiluted, golden fact, and twenty-four parts embroidery. I never told that tale afterwards—I was never able to tell it again, for I had lost confidence in it, and so the pleasure of telling it was gone, and gone permanently. How much of this tale of yours is embroidery?"