Officer. "WANT A NEW MESS-TIN, DO YOU? WHERE'S YOUR OLD ONE?"
Private. "I HAVEN'T GOT IT, SIR." Officer. "WHY NOT?"
Private. "PLEASE, SIR, THERE'S A CHATEAU ON TOP OF IT, SIR."
DR. SULLIVAN.
It had been decided that there never was such a resemblance as is to be traced between my homely features and those of a visitor to the same hotel last year—Dr. Sullivan of Wigley Street. This had become an established fact irrefutable like a proposition of Euclid and one of my new friends, who was also a friend of the Dr. Sullivan of Wigley Street who had so satisfyingly and minutely anticipated my countenance, made it the staple of his conversation. "Isn't Mr. Blank," he would say to this and that habitué of the smoking-room as they dropped in from the neighbouring farms at night, "the very image of Dr. Sullivan of Wigley Street, who was here last year?" And they would subject my physiognomy to a searching study and agree that I was. Perhaps the nose—a little bigger, don't you think? or a shade of dissimilarity between the chins (he having, I suppose, only two, confound him!), but taking it all round the likeness was extraordinary.
This had been going on for some time, until I was accustomed, if not exactly inured, to it, and was really rather looking forward to the time when, on returning to London, I could trump up a sufficient ailment to call upon my double in Wigley Street and scrutinize him with my own eyes. But last night my friend had something of a set-back, which may possibly, by deflecting his conversation to other topics, give me relief. I hope so.
It happened like this. We were sitting in the smoking-room as usual, he and I, when another local acquaintance entered—one who, I gathered, had been away for a few weeks and whom I had therefore not yet seen, and who (for this was the really important thing to my friend) consequently had not yet seen me.