There are two kinds of jokes, those jokes that are funny because they are true, and those jokes that would be funny anyhow. Think it out and you will find that that is a great truth. Now the joke I have here for the delectation of the broken-hearted is of the first sort. It is funny because it is true. It is about a man whom I really saw and really knew and touched, and on occasions treated ill. He was. The sunlight played upon his form. Perhaps he may still flounder under the light of the sun, and not yet have gone down into that kingdom whose kings are less happy than the poorest hind upon the upper fields.

It was at College that I knew him and I retained my acquaintance with him—Oh, I retained it in a loving and cherishing manner—until he was grown to young manhood. I[Pg 112] would keep it still did Fate permit me so to do, for he was a treasure. I have never met anything so complete for the purposes of laughter, though I am told there are many such in the society which bred his oafish form.

He was a noble in his own country, which was somewhere in the pine-forests of the Germanies, and his views of social rank were far, far too simple for the silent subtlety of the English Rich. In his poor turnip of a mind he ordered all men thus:

First, reigning sovereigns and their families.

Secondly, mediatized people.

Third, Princes.

Fourth, Dukes.

Fifth, Nobles.

Then came a little gap, and after that little gap The Others.

Most of us in our College were The Others. But he, as I have said, was a noble in his distant land.

He had not long been among the young Englishmen when he discovered that a difficult tangle[Pg 113] of titles ran hither and thither among them like random briars through an undergrowth. There were Honourables, and there were Lords, and Heaven knows what, and there were two Sirs, and altogether it puzzled him.

He couldn't understand why a man should be called Mr. Jinks, and his brother Lord Blefauscu, and then if a man could be called Lord Blefauscu while his father Lord Brobdignag was alive, how was it that quite a Fresher should be called Sir Howkey—no—he was Sir John Howkey: and when the Devil did one put in the Christian name and when didn't one, and why should one, and what was the order of precedence among all these?

I think that last point puzzled him more than the rest, for in his own far distant land in the pine-woods, where peasants uglier than sin grovelled over the potato crop and called him "Baron," there were no such devilish contraptions, but black was black and white was white. Here in this hypocritical England, to which his father had sent him as an exile,[Pg 114] everything was so wrapped up in deceiving masks! There was the Captain of the Eleven, or the President of the Boat Club. By the time he had mastered that there might be great men not only without the actual title (he had long ago despaired of that), but without so much as cousinship to one, he would stumble upon a fellow with nothing whatsoever to distinguish him, not even the High Jump, and yet "in" with the highest. It tortured him I can tell you! After he had sat upon several Fourth Year men (he himself a Fresher), from an error as to their rank, after he had been duly thrown into the water, blackened as to his face with blacking, sentenced to death in a court-martial and duly shot with a blank cartridge (an unpleasant thing by the way looking down a barrel); after he had had his boots, of which there were seven pair, packed with earth, and in each one a large geranium planted; after all these things had happened to him in his pursuit of an Anglo-German understanding, he approached a lanky, pot-bellied youth whom he[Pg 115] had discovered with certitude to be the cousin of a Duke, and begged him secretly to befriend him in a certain matter, which was this:

The Baron out of the Germanies proposed to give a dinner to no less than thirty people and he begged the pot-bellied youth in all secrecy to collect for him an assembly worthy of his rank and to give him privately not only their names but their actual precedence according to which he would arrange them at the table upon his right and upon his left.

But what did the pot-bellied youth do? Why he went out and finding all his friends one after the other he said:

"You know Sausage?"

"Yes," said they, for all the University knew Sausage.

"Well, he is going to give a dinner," said the pot-bellied one, who was also slow of speech, "and you have to come, but I'm going to say you are the Duke of Rochester" (or whatever title he might have chosen). And so speaking, and so giving the date and place he[Pg 116] would go on to the next. Then, when he had collected not thirty but sixty of all his friends and acquaintances, he sought out the noble Teuton again and told him that he could not possibly ask only thirty men without lifelong jealousies and hatreds, so sixty were coming, and the Teu............