And when the laughter had died down I said,
"That puts me in mind of a story I heard over in America. A man was passing an insane asylum and he noticed a clock up on one of the towers; but there was some half hour's difference between his watch and the clock; and while he was standing there trying to figure out which was right, one of the patients stuck his head out of a window right beside the clock. The man below saw him and called up to him,
"'Hey, there: is that clock right?'"
'No; if it was it wouldn't be in here.'"
Honest, if I hadn't known I was in Cork, Ireland, I should have thought I was playing Toronto, Canada; there wasn't a ripple; the driver gave me one disgusted look, hit the horse a cut with the whip and drove on in silence. My wife looked at me angrily and shook her head.
"All right," I said to myself. "You are a Mutt audience and I shall relate no more episodes of a comic nature." And I didn't.
When we had reached our rooms that night my wife turned on me and said sharply,
"What did you do that for?"
"What did I do what for?"