“I am sure I don’t know why anybody anywhere should be jealous of anybody else anyhow,” said Diogenes.  “I never was and I never expect to be.  Jealousy is a quality that is utterly foreign to the nature of an honest man.  Take my own case, for instance.  When I was what they call alive, how did I live?”

“I don’t know,” said Doctor Johnson, turning his head as he spoke so that Boswell could not fail to hear.  “I wasn’t there.”

Boswell nodded approvingly, chuckled slightly, and put the Doctor’s remark down for publication in The Gossip.

“You’re doubtless right, there,” retorted Diogenes.  “What you don’t know would fill a circulating library.  Well—­I lived in a tub.  Now, if I believed in envy, I suppose you think I’d be envious of people who live in brownstone fronts with back yards and mortgages, eh?”

“I’d rather live under a mortgage than in a tub,” said Bonaparte, contemptuously.

“I know you would,” said Diogenes.  “Mortgages never bothered you—­but I wouldn’t.  In the first place, my tub was warm.  I never saw a house with a brownstone front that was, except in summer, and then the owner cursed it because it was so.  My tub had no plumbing in it to get out of order.  It hadn’t any flights of stairs in it that had to be climbed after dinner, or late at night when I came home from the club.  It had no front door with a wandering key-hole calculated to elude the key ninety-nine times out of every hundred efforts to bring the two together and reconcile their differences, in order that their owner may get into his own house late at night.  It wasn’t chained down to any particular neighborhood, as are most brownstone fronts.  If the neighborhood ran down, I could move my tub off into a better neighborhood, and it never lost value through the deterioration of its location.  I never had to pay taxes on it, and no burglar was ever so hard up that he thought of breaking into my habitation to rob me.  So why should I be jealous of the brownstone-house dwellers?  I am a philosopher, gentlemen.  I tell you, philosophy is the thief of jealousy, and I had the good-luck to find it out early in life.”

“There is much in what you say,” said Confucius.  “But there’s another side to the matter.  If a man is an aristocrat by nature, as I was, his neighborhood never could run down.  Wherever he lived would be the swell section, so that really your last argument isn’t worth a stewed icicle.”

“Stewed icicles are pretty good, though,” said Baron Munchausen, with an ecstatic smack of his lips.  “I’ve eaten them many a time in the polar regions.”

“I have no doubt of it,” put in Doctor Johnson.  “You’ve eaten fried pyramids in Africa, too, haven’t you?”

“Only once,” said the Baron, calmly.  “And I can’t say I enjoyed them.  They are rather heavy for the digestion.”

“That’s so,” said Ptolemy.  “I’ve had experience with pyramids myself.”