r.
Montagu-Montague, hereinafter to be called the agent, and warranted to
be as by him stated and described, do assign to him, yield, abrogate
and give up all recognitions, emoluments, perquisites or rewards due
to me Here or Elsewhere on account of the following virtue, to wit and
that is to say . . . . . that all women are to me equally ugly." The
last eight words being filled in in ink by Mr. Montagu-Montague.

My poor friend duly signed it. "These are the jokes," said the agent.
They were boldly written on three slips of paper. "They don't seem
very funny," said the other when he had read them. "You are immune,"
said Mr. Montagu-Montague, "but anyone else who hears them will simply
die of laughter: that we guarantee."

An American firm had bought at the price of waste paper a hundred
thousand copies of The Dictionary of Electricity written when
electricity was new,--and it had turned out that even at the time its
author had not rightly grasped his subject,--the firm had paid
L10,000 to a respectable English paper (no other in fact than
the Briton) for the use of its name, and to obtain orders for The
Briton Dictionary of Electricity was the occupation of my unfortunate
friend. He seems to have had a way with him. Apparently he knew by a
glance at a man, or a look round at his garden, whether to recommend
the book as "an absolutely up-to-date achievement, the finest thing of
its kind in the world of modern science" or as "at once quaint and
imperfect, a thing to buy and to keep as a tribute to those dear old
times that are gone." So he went on with this quaint though usual
business, putting aside the memory of that night as an occasion on
which he had "somewhat exceeded" as they say in circles where a spade
is called neither a spade nor an agricultural implement but is never
mentioned at all, being altogether too vulgar. And then one night he
put on his suit of dress clothes and found the three jokes in the
pocket. That was perhaps a shock. He seems to have thought it over
carefully then, and the end of it was he gave a dinner at the club to
twenty of the members. The dinner would do no harm he thought--might
even help the business, and if the joke came off he would be a witty
fellow, and two jokes still up his sleeve.

Whom he invited or how the dinner went I do not know for he began to
speak rapidly and came straight to the point, as a stick that nears a
cataract suddenly goes faster and faster. The dinner was d