Much more satisfactory to the recipient was Lord Eldon’s note to his friend, Dr. Fisher, of the Charter House:—“Dear Fisher—I cannot to day give you the preferment for which you ask. Your sincere friend, Eldon. (Turn over)—I gave it to you yesterday.”
At the Virginia Springs a Western girl name Helen was familiarly known among her admirers as Little Hel. At a party given in her native city, a gentleman, somewhat the worse for his supper, approached a very dignified young lady and asked: “Where’s my little sweetheart? You know,—Little Hel?” “Sir?” exclaimed the lady, “you certainly forgot yourself.” “Oh,” said he quickly, “you interrupted me; if you had let me go on I would have said Little Helen.” “I beg your pardon,” answered the lady, “when you said Little Hel, I thought you had reached your final destination.”
The value of an explanation is finely illustrated in the old story of a king who sent to another king, saying, “Send me a blue pig with a black tail, or else——.” The other, in high dudgeon at the presumed insult, replied: “I have not got one, and if I had——.” On this weighty cause they went to war for many years. After a satiety of glories and miseries, they finally bethought them that, as their armies and resources were exhausted, and their kingdoms mutually laid waste, it might be well enough to consult about the preliminaries of peace; but before this could be concluded, a diplomatic explanation was first needed of the insulting language which formed the ground of the quarrel. “What could you mean,” said the second king to the first, “by saying, ‘Send me a blue pig with a black tail, or else——?’” “Why,” said the other, “I meant a blue pig with a black tail, or else some other color. But,” retorted he, “what did you mean by saying, ‘I have not got one, and if I had——?’” “Why, of course, if I had, I should have sent it.” An explanation which was entirely satisfactory, and peace was concluded accordingly.
It is related of Dr. Mansel, that when an undergraduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, he chanced to call at the rooms of a brother Cantab, who was absent, but who had left on his table the opening of a poem, which was in the following lofty strain:—
“The sun’s perpendicular rays
Illumine the depths of the sea,”
Here the flight of the poet, by some accident, stopped short, but Mansel, who never lost an occasion for fun, completed the stanza in the following facetious style:—
“And the fishes beginning to sweat,
Cried, ‘Goodness, how hot we shall be.’”
That not very brilliant joke, “to lie—under a mistake,” is sometimes indulged in by the best writers. Witness the following. Byron says:—