s to get outside
and break the vow. A vow is always a pledge of some kind or other for
the protection of your own morals and principles or somebody else's, and
generally, by the irony of fate, it is for the protection of your own
morals.

Hence we have pledges that make us eschew tobacco or wine, and while
you are taking the pledge there is a holy influence about that makes you
feel you are reformed, and that you can never be so happy again in this
world until--you get outside and take a drink.

I had forgotten that I was a member of this club--it is so long ago. But
now I remember that I was here five-and-twenty years ago, and that I was
then at a dinner of the Whitefriars Club, and it was in those old days
when you had just made two great finds. All London was talking about
nothing else than that they had found Livingstone, and that the lost Sir
Roger Tichborne had been found--and they were trying him for it.

And at the dinner, Chairman (I do not know who he was)--failed to come
to time. The gentleman who had been appointed to pay me the customary
compliments and to introduce me forgot the compliments, and did not know
what they were.

And George Augustus Sala came in at the last moment, just when I was
about to go without compliments altogether. And that man was a gifted
man. They just called on him instantaneously, while he was going to sit
down, to introduce the stranger, and Sala, made one of those marvellous
speeches which he was capable of making. I think no man talked so fast
as Sala did. One did not need wine while he was making a speech. The
rapidity of his utterance made a man drunk in a minute. An incomparable
speech was that, an impromptu speech, and--an impromptu speech is a
seldom thing, and he did it so well.

He went into the whole history of the United States, and made it
entirely new to me. He filled it with episodes and incidents that
Washington never heard of, and he did it so convincingly that although
I knew none of it had happened, from that day to this I do not know any
history but Sala's.

I do not know anything so sad as a dinner where you are going to get up
and say something by-and-by, and you do not know what it is. You sit
and wonder and wonder what the gentleman is going to say who is going
to introduce you. You know that if he says something severe, that if he
will deride you, or traduce you, or do anything of that kind, he will
furnish you with a text, because anybody can get u