uly served,
the port went round, the twenty men were smoking, two waiters
loitered, when he after carefully reading the best of the jokes told
it down the table. They laughed. One man accidentally inhaled his
cigar smoke and spluttered, the two waiters overheard and tittered
behind their hands, one man, a bit of a raconteur himself, quite
clearly wished not to laugh, but his veins swelled dangerously in
trying to keep it back, and in the end he laughed too. The joke had
succeeded; my friend smiled at the thought; he wished to say little
deprecating things to the man on his right; but the laughter did not
stop and the waiters would not be silent. He waited, and waited
wondering; the laughter went roaring on, distinctly louder now, and
the waiters as loud as any. It had gone on for three or four minutes
when this frightful thought leaped up all at once in his mind: _it was
forced laughter!_ However could anything have induced him to tell so
foolish a joke? He saw its absurdity as in revelation; and the more he
thought of it as these people laughed at him, even the waiters too,
the more he felt that he could never lift up his head with his brother
touts again. And still the laughter went roaring and choking on. He
was very angry. There was not much use in having a friend, he thought,
if one silly joke could not be overlooked; he had fed them too. And
then he felt that he had no friends at all, and his anger faded away,
and a great unhappiness came down on him, and he got quietly up and
slunk from the room and slipped away from the club. Poor man, he
scarcely had the heart next morning even to glance at the papers, but
you did not need to glance at them, big type was bandied about that
day as though it were common type, the words of the headlines stared
at you; and the headlines said:--Twenty-Two Dead Men at a Club.

Yes, he saw it then: the laughter had not stopped, some had probably
burst blood vessels, some must have choked, some succumbed to nausea,
heart-failure must have mercifully taken some, and they were his
friends after all, and none had escaped, not I even the waiters. It
was that infernal joke.

He thought out swiftly, and remembers clear as a nightmare, the drive
to Victoria Station, the boat-train to Dover and going disguised to
the boat: and on the boat pleasantly smiling, almost obsequious, two
constables that wished to speak for a moment with Mr. Watkyn-Jones.
That was his name.

In a third-class carri