ck, the maker of the joke, sat unmoved,
sipping his claret with a serenity which might have roused the envy of
a Red Indian.

"I think that's something like a tooth!" said Dick.

"Prodigious--wonderful--tremendous!" ran round the board.

"Give it to me again," said one.

"Let me look at it once more," said another.

"Colossal!" exclaimed a third.

"Gigantic!" shouted all, as the tooth made the circuit of the table.

The Major was delighted, and never remembered his tooth to have created
such a sensation; and when at last it was returned to him, he turned it
about in his own hand, and cast many fond glances at the monstrosity,
before it was finally deposited in his waistcoat pocket. This was the
most ridiculous part of the exhibition: to see a gentleman, with the
use of his eyes, looking affectionately at a thumping horse's tooth,
and believing it to be his own. Yet this was a key to the Major's whole
character. A received opinion was with him unchangeable, no alteration
of circumstances could shake it: _it was his tooth_. A belief or a
doubt was equally sacred with him; and though his senses in the present
case should have shown him it was a horse's tooth--no, it was a piece
of himself--his own dear tooth.

After this party, the success which crowned his anecdote and its
attendant relic made him fonder of showing it off; and many a day did
Dick the Devil enjoy the astonishment of visitors as his father
exhibited the enormous tooth as his own. Fonder and fonder grew the
Major of his tooth and his story, until the unlucky day Edward O'Connor
happened to be in the museum with a party of ladies, to whom the old
gentleman was showing off his treasures with great effect and some
pains; for the Major, like most old soldiers, was very attentive to the
fair sex. At last the pet cabinet was opened, and out came the tooth.
One universal exclamation of surprise arose on its appearance: "What a
wonderful man the Major was to have such a tooth!" Just then, by an
unlucky chance, Edward, who had not seen the Major produce the wonder
from his cabinet, perceived the relic in the hand of one of the ladies
at the extremity of the group, and, fancying it had dropped from the
horse's head, he said--

"I suppose that is one of the teeth out of old Schomberg's skull."

The Major thought this an impertinent allusion to his political bias,
and said, very sharply, "What do you mean by old Schomberg?"

"The horse's head, sir," replied