“What is that dog barking at?” asked a fop, whose boots were more polished than his ideas. “Why,” said the bystander, “he sees another puppy in your boots.”
A Quaker gentleman, riding in a carriage with a fashionable lady decked with a profusion of jewelry, heard her complaining of the cold. Shivering in her lace bonnet and shawl, as light as a cobweb, she exclaimed: “What shall I do to get warm?” “I really don’t know,” replied the Quaker solemnly, “unless thee puts on another breastpin.”
I dined once with Curran, said one of his friends, in the public room of the chief inn at Greenwich, when he talked a great deal, and, as usual, with considerable exaggeration. Speaking of something which he would not do on any inducement, he exclaimed: “I had rather be hanged upon twenty gibbets.” “Don’t you think, sir, that one would be enough for you?” said a girl, a stranger, who was sitting at the table next to us. You ought to have seen Curran’s face just then.
A tourist being exceedingly thirsty, stopped at a house by the roadside, and asked for a drink of milk. He emptied several cups, and asked for more. The woman of the house at length brought out a large bowl filled with milk, and setting it down on the table, remarked, “A person would think, sir, that you had never been weaned.”
Theodore Hook was walking, in the days of Warren’s blacking, where one of the emissaries of that shining character had written on the wall, “Try Warren’s B——,” but had been frightened by the approach of the owner of the property, and had fled. “The rest is lacking,” said the wit.