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There was the Hell-fire Club, where they played at being impious.  It was a joust of sacrilege.  Hell was at auction there to the highest bidder in blasphemy.

There was the Butting Club, so called from its members butting folks with their heads.  They found some street porter with a wide chest and a stupid countenance.  They offered him, and compelled him, if necessary, to accept a pot of porter, in return for which he was to allow them to butt him with their heads four times in the chest, and on this they betted.  One day a man, a great brute of a Welshman named Gogangerdd, expired at the third butt.  This looked serious.  An inquest was held, and the jury returned the following verdict:  “Died of an inflation of the heart, caused by excessive drinking.”  Gogangerdd had certainly drunk the contents of the pot of porter.

There was the Fun Club. Fun is like cant, like humour, a word which is untranslatable.  Fun is to farce what pepper is to salt.  To get into a house and break a valuable mirror, slash the family portraits, poison the dog, put the cat in the aviary, is called “cutting a bit of fun.”  To give bad news which is untrue, whereby people put on mourning by mistake, is fun.  It was fun to cut a square hole in the Holbein at Hampton Court.  Fun would have been proud to have broken the arm of the Venus of Milo.  Under James II. a young millionaire lord who had during the night set fire to a thatched cottage—­a feat which made all London burst with laughter—­was proclaimed the King of Fun.  The poor devils in the cottage were saved in their night clothes.  The members of the Fun Club, all of the highest aristocracy, used to run about London during the hours when the citizens were asleep, pulling the hinges from the shutters, cutting off the pipes of pumps, filling up cisterns, digging up cultivated plots of ground, putting out lamps, sawing through the beams which supported houses, breaking the window panes, especially in the poor quarters of the town.  It was the rich who acted thus towards the poor.  For this reason no complaint was possible.  That was the best of the joke.  Those manners have not altogether disappeared.  In many places in England and in English possessions—­at Guernsey, for instance—­your house is now and then somewhat damaged during the night, or a fence is broken, or the knocker twisted off your door.  If it were poor people who did these things, they would be sent to jail; but they are done by pleasant young gentlemen.

The most fashionable of the clubs was presided over by an emperor, who wore a crescent on his forehead, and was called the Grand Mohawk.  The Mohawk surpassed the Fun.  Do evil for evil’s sake was the programme.  The Mohawk Club had one great object—­to injure.  To fulfil this duty all means were held good.  In becoming a Mohawk the members took an oath to be hurtful.  To injure at any price, no matter when, no matter whom, no matter where, was