“All of which is very true,” remarked Jephson; “but you must remember it is not only the literary man who traffics in misfortune.  The doctor, the lawyer, the preacher, the newspaper proprietor, the weather prophet, will hardly, I should say, welcome the millennium.  I shall never forget an anecdote my uncle used to relate, dealing with the period when he was chaplain of the Lincolnshire county jail.  One morning there was to be a hanging; and the usual little crowd of witnesses, consisting of the sheriff, the governor, three or four reporters, a magistrate, and a couple of warders, was assembled in the prison.  The condemned man, a brutal ruffian who had been found guilty of murdering a young girl under exceptionally revolting circumstances, was being pinioned by the hangman and his assistant; and my uncle was employing the last few moments at his disposal in trying to break down the sullen indifference the fellow had throughout manifested towards both his crime and his fate.

“My uncle failing to make any impression upon him, the governor ventured to add a few words of exhortation, upon which the man turned fiercely on the whole of them.

“‘Go to hell,’ he cried, ’with your snivelling jaw.  Who are you, to preach at me? You’re glad enough I’m here—­all of you.  Why, I’m the only one of you as ain’t going to make a bit over this job.  Where would you all be, I should like to know, you canting swine, if it wasn’t for me and my sort?  Why, it’s the likes of me as keeps the likes of you,’ with which he walked straight to the gallows and told the hangman to ‘hurry up’ and not keep the gentlemen waiting.”

“There was some ‘grit’ in that man,” said MacShaughnassy.

“Yes,” added Jephson, “and wholesome wit also.”

MacShaughnassy puffed a mouthful of smoke over a spider which was just about to kill a fly.  This caused the spider to fall into the river, from where a supper-hunting swallow quickly rescued him.

“You remind me,” he said, “of a scene I once witnessed in the office of The Daily—­well, in the office of a certain daily newspaper.  It was the dead season, and things were somewhat slow.  An endeavour had been made to launch a discussion on the question ‘Are Babies a Blessing?’ The youngest reporter on the staff, writing over the simple but touching signature of ‘Mother of Six,’ had led off with a scathing, though somewhat irrelevant, attack upon husbands, as a class; the Sporting Editor, signing himself ‘Working Man,’ and garnishing his contribution with painfully elaborated orthographical lapses, arranged to give an air of verisimilitude to the correspondence, while, at the same time, not to offend the susceptibilities of the democracy (from whom the paper derived its chief support), had replied, vindicating the British father, and giving what purported to be stirring midnight experiences of his own.  The Gallery Man, calling himself, with a burst of imagination, ’Gentleman and Christian,’ wrote indignantly that he considered the agitation of the subject to be both impious and indelicate, and added he was surprised that a paper holding the exalted, and deservedly popular, position of The —–­ should have opened its columns to the brainless vapourings of ‘Mother of Six’ and ‘Working Man.’