to tell me a story
about myself, which he had heard from a lady of his acquaintance, to
whom I send my best compliments. The tale is this. At nine o'clock on
the evening of the 31st of November last, just before sunset, I was
seen leaving No. 96 Abbey Road, St. John's Wood, leading two little
children by the hand, one of them in a nankeen pelisse, and the other
having a mole on the third finger of his left hand (she thinks it was
the third finger, but is quite sure it was the left hand). Thence I
walked with them to Charles Boroughbridge's, pork and sausage man, No.
29 Upper Theresa Road. Here, whilst I left the little girl innocently
eating a polony in the front shop, I and Boroughbridge retired with the
boy into the back parlour, where Mrs. Boroughbridge was playing
cribbage. She put up the cards and boxes, took out a chopper and a
napkin, and we cut the little boy's little throat (which he bore with
great pluck and resolution), and made him into sausage-meat by the aid
of Purkis's excellent sausage-machine. The little girl at first could
not understand her brother's absence, but, under the pretence of taking
her to see Mr. Fechter in _Hamlet_, I led her down to the New River at
Sadler's Wells, where a body of a child in a nankeen pelisse was
subsequently found, and has never been recognized to the present day.
And this Mrs. Lynx can aver, because she saw the whole transaction with
her own eyes, as she told Mr. Jucundus.

I have altered the little details of the anecdote somewhat. But this
story is, I vow and declare, as true as Mrs. Lynx's. Gracious goodness!
how do lies begin? What are the averages of lying? Is the same amount
of lies told about every man, and do we pretty much all tell the same
amount of lies? Is the average greater in Ireland than in Scotland, or
_vice versa_--among women than among men? Is this a lie I am telling
now? If I am talking about you, the odds are, perhaps, that it is. I
look back at some which have been told about me, and speculate on them
with thanks and wonder. Dear friends have told them of me, have told
them to me of myself. Have they not to and of you, dear friend? A
friend of mine was dining at a large dinner of clergymen, and a story,
as true as the sausage story above given, was told regarding me, by one
of those reverend divines in whose frocks sit some anile chatterboxes,
as any man who knows this world knows. They take the privilege of their
gown. They cabal, and tattle, and