d I live?"

"I don't know," said Doctor Johnson, turning his head as he spoke so that
Boswell could not fail to hear. "I wasn't there."

Boswell nodded approvingly, chuckled slightly, and put the Doctor's
remark down for publication in _The Gossip_.

"You're doubtless right, there," retorted Diogenes. "What you don't know
would fill a circulating library. Well--I lived in a tub. Now, if I
believed in envy, I suppose you think I'd be envious of people who live
in brownstone fronts with back yards and mortgages, eh?"

"I'd rather live under a mortgage than in a tub," said Bonaparte,
contemptuously.

"I know you would," said Diogenes. "Mortgages never bothered you--but I
wouldn't. In the first place, my tub was warm. I never saw a house with
a brownstone front that was, except in summer, and then the owner cursed
it because it was so. My tub had no plumbing in it to get out of order.
It hadn't any flights of stairs in it that had to be climbed after
dinner, or late at night when I came home from the club. It had no front
door with a wandering key-hole calculated to elude the key ninety-nine
times out of every hundred efforts to bring the two together and
reconcile their differences, in order that their owner may get into his
own house late at night. It wasn't chained down to any particular
neighborhood, as are most brownstone fronts. If the neighborhood ran
down, I could move my tub off into a better neighborhood, and it never
lost value through the deterioration of its location. I never had to pay
taxes on it, and no burglar was ever so hard up that he thought of
breaking into my habitation to rob me. So why should I be jealous of the
brownstone-house dwellers? I am a philosopher, gentlemen. I tell you,
philosophy is the thief of jealousy, and I had the good-luck to find it
out early in life."

"There is much in what you say," said Confucius. "But there's another
side to the matter. If a man is an aristocrat by nature, as I was, his
neighborhood never could run down. Wherever he lived would be the swell
section, so that really your last argument isn't worth a stewed icicle."

"Stewed icicles are pretty good, though," said Baron Munchausen, with an
ecstatic smack of his lips. "I've eaten them many a time in the polar
regions."

"I have no doubt of it," put in Doctor Johnson. "You've eaten fried
pyramids in Africa, too, haven't you?"

"Only once," said the Baron, calmly. "And I can't say I enj