“I once,” said his interlocutor, “thrashed an English postilion after the same fashion; but your Russian, with his enormous boots, must have afforded capital sport. When I travel I always look out for fun. What else is the use of travelling? I and young B——, whom you may remember at Oxford, were at a ball together at Brussels, and what do you think we did? We strewed cayenne pepper on the floor, and no sooner did the girls begin to dance than they began incontinently to sneeze. Ladies and gentlemen were curtsying, and bowing, and sneezing to one another in the most ludicrous manner conceivable.”
“Ha! ha! ha! Excellent! By the way,” rejoined the other, “talking of Brussels, do you know who has the glory of that famous joke practised there upon the statues in the park? They give the credit of it to the English, but on what ground, except the celebrity they have acquired in such feats, I could never learn.”
“I know nothing of it. What was it?”
“Why, you see, amongst the statues in the little park at Brussels are a number of those busts without arms or shoulders. I cannot call to mind their technical name. First you have the head of a man, then a sort of decorated pillar instead of a body, and then again, at the bottom of the pillar, there protrude a couple of naked feet. They look part pillar and part man, with a touch of the mummy. Now, it is impossible to contemplate such a figure without being struck with the idea, how completely at the mercy of every passer-by are both its nose—which has no hand to defend it—and its naked toes, which cannot possibly move from their fixed position. One may tweak the one, and tread upon the other, with such manifest impunity. Some one in whom this idea, no doubt, wrought very powerfully, took hammer and chisel, and shied off the noses and the great toes of several of these mummy-statues. And pitiful enough they looked next morning.”
“Well, that was capital!”
“And the best of it is, that even now, when the noses have been put on again, the figures look as odd as if they had none at all. The join is so manifest, and speaks so plainly of past mutilation, that no one can give to these creatures, let them exist as long as they will, the credit of wearing their own noses. The jest is immortal.”
The recital of this excellent piece of fun was followed by another explosion of laughter. The Frenchman who sat opposite to me—a man, as I have said, of grave but urbane deportment, became curious to know what it was that our neighbours had been conversing about, and which had occasioned so much hilarity. He very politely expressed this wish to me. If it was not an indiscretion, he should like to partake, he said, in the wit that was flowing round him; adding, perhaps superfluously, that he did not understand English.
“Monsieur, I am glad of it,” I replied.
Monsieur, who concluded from my answer that I was in a similar predicament with respect to the French language, bowed and remained silent.
Here the conversation to my left ceased to flow, or subsided into its former murmuring channel, and I was again able to listen to my fair neighbours to the right. The lively dame who sat by my side had now the word; she was administering consolations and philosophy to the young widow.