ry and Miss Louisa, as they are prattling over their
five-o'clock tea.

Well, yesterday at dinner Jucundus was good enough 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 parlor, 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 frock sits some anil