The girl took it up, and by-and-by returned and said her mistress had consented to take threepence off the bill as he had provided the fish himself.
"No," he said, indignantly, "I'll have nothing off the bill, I'll pay the full amount," and pay it he did in his anger, then went off to say goodbye to his friend, to whom he related the case.
His friend, being in the same hilarious humour as on the previous day, burst out laughing and made a good deal of fun over the matter.
That, he said, was the whole story of how he went fishing and caught a mackerel, and what came of it. But it was not quite all, for he went on to tell us that he still visited Bristol regularly to receive big and ever bigger orders from that same old customer of his, whose business had gone on increasing ever since; and invariably after finishing their business his friend remarks in a casual sort of way: "By the way, old man, do you remember that mackerel you caught at Weymouth which you had for tea, and were charged two shillings for?" "Then he laughs just as heartily as if it had only happened yesterday, and I leave him in a good humour, and say to myself: 'Now, I'll hear no more about that blessed mackerel till I go round to Bristol again in three months' time.'"
"How long ago did you say it was since you caught the mackerel?" I inquired.
"About forty years."
"Then," I said, "it was a very lucky fish for you—worth more perhaps than if a big diamond had been found in its belly. The man had got his joke—the one joke of his life perhaps—and was determined to stick to it, and that kept him faithful to you in spite of his wife's wish to distribute their orders among a lot of travellers."
He replied that I was perhaps right and that it had turned out a lucky fish for him. But his old customer, though his business was big, was not so important to him now when he had big customers in most of the large towns in England, and he thought it rather ridiculous to keep up that joke so many years.