a tip from me, just you let into the
smokin' room shots a bit; you know the sort I mean, fellows who are
reg'lar devils at killin' birds when they haven't got a gun in their
hands. Why, there's that little son of a corn-crake, FLICKERS--when
once he gets talkin' in a smokin' room nothing can hold him. He'd talk
the hind leg off a donkey. I know he jolly nearly laid me out the
last time I met him with all his talk--No, you don't," continued the
Captain, imagining, perhaps, that I was going to rally him on his
implied connection of himself with the three-legged animal he had
mentioned, "no you don't--it wouldn't be funny; and besides, I'm not
donkey enough to stand much of that ass FLICKERS. So just you pitch
into him, and the rest of 'em, my bonny boy, next time you put pen
to paper." At this moment my cheerful friend observed a hansom that
took his fancy. "Gad!" he said, "I never can resist one of those
india-rubber tires. Ta, ta, old cock--keep your pecker up. Never
forget your goloshes when it rains, and always wear flannel next your
skin," and, with that, he sprang into his hansom, ordered the cabman
to drive him round the town as long as a florin would last, and was
gone.

Had the Captain only stayed with me a little longer, I should have
thanked him for his hint, which set me thinking. I know FLICKERS well.
Many a time have I heard that notorious romancer holding forth on
his achievements in sport, and love, and society. I have caught him
tripping, convicted him of imagination on a score of occasions; dozens
of his acquaintances must have found him out over and over again; but
the fellow sails on, unconscious of a reverse, with a sort of smiling
persistence, down the stream of modified untruthfulness, of which
nobody ought to know better than FLICKERS the rapids, and shallows,
and rocks on which the mariner's bark is apt to go to wreck. What
is there in the pursuit of sport, I ask myself, that brings on this
strange tendency to exaggeration? How few escape it. The excellent,
the prosaic DUBSON, that broad-shouldered, whiskered, and eminently
snub-nosed Nimrod, he too, gives way occasionally. FLICKERS'S, I own,
is an extreme case. He has indulged himself in fibs to such an extent,
that fibs are now as necessary to him as drams to the drunkard. But
DUBSON the respectable, DUBSON the dull, DUBSON the unromantic--why
does the gadfly sting him too, and impel him now and then to wonderful
antics. For was it not DUBSON w