‘Pooh! Hard! Not a bit of it! Now I’ll put you up to a dodge that’ll put many a pound in your pocket. You see this piece of wood—now that’s roughened on purpose. You take that, and give your master’s coat a good scrubbing with it about the elbows and shoulders every day; and give the trousers a touch about the knees, and it will be a good five pounds a year in your pocket. We shan’t forget you.’
‘You are very kind,’ quoth the enlightened gentleman. ‘I will impart your instructions to my valet, though I fear while he remains in my service he will not be able to profit by them, as I shall not trouble you with my custom. I wish you good-day.’
We read in Lord Eldon’s Journal: ‘The most awkward thing that ever occurred to me was this. Immediately after I was married I was appointed Deputy Professor of Law at Oxford, and the Law Professor sent me the first lecture, which I had to read immediately to the students, and which I began without knowing a single word that was in it. It was upon the statute applying to young men running away with maidens. Fancy me reading with about one hundred and fifty boys and young men all giggling at the Professor! Such a tittering audience no one ever had.’ The comical coincidence may have been an accidental one; but as the Law Professor must, like the students, have known that his deputy ran away with his Bessie, the chances are against it. The great lawyer was fated to be reminded of the romantic episode of his life. A client whose daughter had been stolen from him, insisted upon the jury being told that a man who could run away with another man’s daughter was a rascal and a villain, and deserved to be hanged. ‘I cannot say that,’ said Scott. ‘And why not, Lawyer Scott—why not?’ inquired the irate father. ‘Because I did it myself!’ was the unanswerable reply.
After doing his office for a young couple, a clergyman was inveigled into proposing the health of bride and bridegroom at the wedding breakfast. He wound up a neat little speech by expressing the hope that the result of the union of the happy pair might prove strictly analogous to that of the bride’s honoured parents. The groom looked angry, the bride went into hysterics, the bridesmaids blushed and became interested in the pattern of the carpet, the master of the house blew his nose with extraordinary violence, and the speaker sat down wondering at the effect he had created; till his better-informed neighbour whispered that the lady was not the daughter of the host and hostess, but a niece who came to live with them when her mother and father were divorced.
During Mr Gladstone’s Premiership, Sir George Pollock called one morning in Downing Street to thank the Prime-minister for making him governor of the Tower. A cabinet council had just assembled; but rather than keep the veteran waiting, Mr Gladstone invited him into the council-chamber and introduced him to his colleagues. Sir George entertained his new acquaintances with a tedious story about a nobleman who had been detected cheating at cards, ending his narration with: ‘They turned him out of all the clubs he belonged to; even the Reform would have nothing more to say to him!’ A way of proving the enormity of the card-player’s offence that must have pleased his hearers amazingly, since all or nearly all of them were members of that famous Liberal club.
The old governor sincerely meant what his words implied. Such is not always the case with utterers of malapropos things. When a note was handed to Dr Fletcher in his pulpit intimating that the presence of a medical gentleman, supposed to be in the church, was urgently required elsewhere, the preacher read the letter out, and as the doctor was making for the door, fervently ejaculated: ‘May the Lord have mercy on his patient!’ A Scotch minister exchanging pulpits with a friend one Sunday, was accosted after service by an old woman anxious to know what had become of her ‘ain minister.’ ‘Oh,’ said he, ‘he is with my people to-day.’ ‘Indeed, indeed,’ said the dame; ‘they’ll be getting a treat the day!’ As flattering a remark as that of the wife of a popular lecturer, who on her lord telling her he was going to lecture at Sheffield, exclaimed: ‘I’m so glad; I always hated those Sheffield people.’
Epitaph writers sometimes display a talent for this kind of double-entendre. A couple of specimens will suffice. The first from Arbroath, running: ‘Here lie the bodies of John, William, Robert, and David Matthews, who all died in the hope of a glorious resurrection—excepting David.’ The other from an American burying-ground:
Here lies the mother of children five;
Two are dead and three are alive;
The two that are dead preferring rather