5
CAME THE DAWN
The man in the corner took a sip of stout-and-mild, and proceeded to point the moral of the story which he had just told us.
'Yes, gentlemen,' he said, 'Shakespeare was right. There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.'
We nodded. He had been speaking of a favourite dog of his which, entered recently by some error in a local cat show, had taken first prize in the class for short-haired tortoiseshells; and we all thought the quotation well-chosen and apposite.
'There is, indeed,' said Mr Mulliner. 'A rather similar thing happened to my nephew Lancelot.'
In the nightly reunions in the bar-parlour of the Anglers' Rest we have been trained to believe almost anything of Mr Mulliner's relatives, but this, we felt, was a little too much.
'You mean to say your nephew Lancelot took a prize at a cat show?'
'No, no,' said Mr Mulliner hastily. 'Certainly not. I have never deviated from the truth in my life, and I hope I never shall. No Mulliner has ever taken a prize at a cat show. No Mulliner, indeed, to the best of my knowledge, has even been entered for such a competition. What I meant was that the fact that we never know what the future holds in store for us was well exemplified in the case of my nephew Lancelot, just as it was in the case of this gentleman's dog which suddenly found itself transformed for all practical purposes into a short-haired tortoiseshell cat. It is rather a curious story, and provides a good illustration of the adage that you never can tell and that it is always darkest before the dawn.'