rt of my audience laughs good-humoredly. Perhaps the
stranger, for whose amusement the performance is given, is amused by
it and laughs too. But this practice continued is not moral. This
self-indulgence on your part, my dear Paterfamilias, is weak, vain--not
to say culpable. I can imagine many a worthy man, who begins unguardedly
to read this page, and comes to the present sentence, lying back in his
chair, thinking of that story which he has told innocently for fifty
years, and rather piteously owning to himself, "Well, well, it IS wrong;
I have no right to call on my poor wife to laugh, my daughters to affect
to be amused, by that old, old jest of mine. And they would have gone
on laughing, and they would have pretended to be amused, to their dying
day, if this man had not flung his damper over our hilarity." . . . I
lay down the pen, and think, "Are there any old stories which I
still tell myself in the bosom of my family? Have I any 'Grouse in
my gun-room?'" If there are such, it is because my memory fails; not
because I want applause, and wantonly repeat myself. You see, men with
the so-called fund of anecdote will not repeat the same story to the
same individual; but they do think that, on a new party, the repetition
of a joke ever so old may be honorably tried. I meet men walking the
London street, bearing the best reputation, men of anecdotal powers:--I
know such, who very likely will read this, and say, "Hang the fellow, he
means ME!" And so I do. No--no man ought to tell an anecdote more
than thrice, let us say, unless he is sure he is speaking only to give
pleasure to his hearers--unless he feels that it is not a mere desire
for praise which makes him open his jaws.

And is it not with writers as with raconteurs? Ought they not to have
their ingenuous modesty? May authors tell old stories, and how many
times over? When I come to look at a place which I have visited any time
these twenty or thirty years, I recall not the place merely, but the
sensations I had at first seeing it, and which are quite different to
my feelings to-day. That first day at Calais; the voices of the women
crying out at night, as the vessel came alongside the pier; the supper
at Quillacq's and the flavor of the cutlets and wine; the red-calico
canopy under which I slept; the tiled floor, and the fresh smell of
the sheets; the wonderful postilion in his jack-boots and pigtail;--all
return with perfect clearness to my mind, and I am seein