"Allow yourself! Why, when you were unanimously elected president you spoke of the delight it would give you to serve."
"And you collected the subscriptions."
"Collected the subscriptions?"
"And deposited them in my tobacco jar, where, at the present moment, they repose. You appointed the first meeting for next Friday at my rooms, and promised you would occupy the chair."
"Gardiner, I have already alluded to the ill-health from which I am suffering--"
"Possibly," interrupted Finlayson, "it was the anchovy toast. You ate a plateful."
"I ate a plateful?" I looked at the speaker to see if he was gibing. He showed no signs of it. "If I ate anything like that quantity it probably was. But I do not wish to enter into that matter now. To show how constitutionally unfitted I am to become associated with such a scheme, I have only to point out that I am myself extremely superstitious in little things."
When I said that the man Finlayson broke into a gust of laughter, in which Gardiner immediately joined him. I observed their merriment with a growing sense of umbrage.
"I don't know what you see to laugh at in my plain statement of a plain fact. And to show you that it is a fact, I have only to inform you that with the fall of a great-aunt's portrait from its place against the wall I directly connect a long chain of disasters which presently followed."
On my volunteering that piece of information their screams of laughter increased to such an extent that I thought they would have done themselves an injury. It was some time before Gardiner was able to gasp out, between his guffaws, and with both hands held to his sides,--