Wise children always choose a mother who was a shocking flirt inher maiden days, and so had several offers before she acceptedtheir fortunate papa. The reason they do this is because everyoffer refused by their mother means another pantomime to them.You see you can't trust to your father's taking you to thepantomime, but you can trust to every one of the poor frenziedgentlemen for whom that lady has wept a delicious little tear onher lovely little cambric handkerchief. It is pretty (butdreadfully affecting) to see them on Boxing Night gatheringtogether the babies of their old loves. Some knock at but onedoor and bring a hansom, but others go from street to street inprivate 'buses, and even wear false noses to conceal thesufferings you inflict upon them as you grew more and more likeyour sweet cruel mamma.

So I took David to the pantomime, and I hope you follow myreasoning, for I don't. He went with the fairest anticipations,pausing on the threshold to peer through the hole in the littlehouse called "Pay Here," which he thought was Red Riding Hood'sresidence, and asked politely whether he might see her, but theysaid she had gone to the wood, and it was quite true, for thereshe was in the wood gathering a stick for her grandmother's fire.She sang a beautiful song about the Boys and their dashing ways,which flattered David considerably, but she forgot to take awaythe stick after all. Other parts of the play were not so nice,but David thought it all lovely, he really did.

Yet he left the place in tears. All the way home he sobbed inthe darkest corner of the growler, and if I tried to comfort himhe struck me.

The clown had done it, that man of whom he expected things sofair. He had asked in a loud voice of the middling funnygentleman (then in the middle of a song) whether he thought Joeywould be long in coming, and when at last Joey did come hescreamed out, "How do you do, Joey!" and went into convulsions ofmirth.

Joey and his father were shadowing a pork-butcher's shop,pocketing the sausages for which their family has such a fatalweakness, and so when the butcher engaged Joey as his assistantthere was soon not a sausage left. However, this did not matter,for there was a box rather like an ice-cream machine, and you putchunks of pork in at one end and turned a handle and they cameout as sausages at the other end. Joey quite enjoyed doing this,and you could see that the sausages were excellent by the way helicked his fingers after touching them, but soon there were nomore pieces of pork, and just then a dear little Irishterrier-dog came trotting down the street, so what did Joey dobut pop it into the machine and it came out at the other end assausages.

It was this callous act that turned all David's mirth to woe, anddrove us weeping to our growler.

Heaven knows I have no wish to defend this cruel deed, but asJoey told me afterward, it is very difficult to say what theywill think funny and what barbarous. I was forced to admit tohim that David had perceived only the joyous in the pokering ofthe policeman's legs, and had called out heartily "Do it again!"every time Joey knocked the pantaloon down with one kick andhelped him up with another.

"It hurts the poor chap," I was told by Joey, whom I wasagreeably surprised to find by no means wanting in the morehumane feelings, "and he wouldn't stand it if there wasn't thelaugh to encourage him."

He maintained that the dog got that laugh to encourage him also.

However, he had not got it from David, whose mother and fatherand nurse combined could not comfort him, though they swore thatthe dog was still alive and kicking, which might all have beenvery well had not David seen the sausages. It was to inquirewhether anything could be done to atone that in considerabletrepidation I sent in my card to the clown, and the result of ourtalk was that he invited me and David to have tea with him onThursday next at his lodgings.

"I sha'n't laugh," David said, nobly true to the memory of thelittle dog, "I sha'n't laugh once," and he closed his jaws verytightly as we drew near the house in Soho where Joey lodged. Buthe also gripped my hand, like one who knew that it would be anordeal not to laugh.

The house was rather like the ordinary kind, but there was aconvenient sausage-shop exactly opposite (trust Joey for that)and we saw a policeman in the street looking the other way, asthey always do look just before you rub them. A woman wearingthe same kind of clothes as people in other houses wear, told usto go up to the second floor, and she grinned at David, as if shehad heard about him; so up we went, David muttering through hisclenched teeth, "I sha'n't laugh," and as soon as we knocked avoice called out, "Here we are again!" at which a shudder passedthrough David as if he feared that he had set himself animpossible task. In we went, however, and though the voice hadcertainly come from this room we found nobody there. I looked inbewilderment at David, and he quickly put his hand over hismouth.

It was a funny room, of course, but not so funny as you mightexpect; there were droll things in it, but they did nothingfunny, you could see that they were just waiting for Joey. Therewere padded chairs with friendly looking rents down the middle ofthem, and a table and a horse-hair sofa, and we sat down verycautiously on the sofa but nothing happened to us.

The biggest piece of furniture was an enormous wicker trunk, witha very lively coloured stocking dangling out at a hole in it, anda notice on the top that Joey was the funniest man on earth.David tried to pull the stocking out of the hole, but it was solong that it never came to an end, and when it measured six timesthe length of the room he had to cover his mouth again.

"I'm not laughing," he said to me, quite fiercely. He evenmanaged not to laugh (though he did gulp) when we discovered onthe mantelpiece a photograph of Joey in ordinary clothes, thegarments he wore before he became a clown. You can't think howabsurd he looked in them. But David didn't laugh.

Suddenly Joey was standing beside us, it could not have been moresudden though he had come from beneath the table, and he waswearing his pantomime clothes (which he told us afterward werethe only clothes he had) and his red and white face was so funnythat David made gurgling sounds, which were his laugh trying toforce a passage.

I introduced David, who offered his hand stiffly, but Joey,instead of taking it, put out his tongue and waggled it, and thiswas so droll that David had again to save himself by clapping hishand over his mouth. Joey thought he had toothache, so Iexplained what it really meant, and then Joey said, "Oh, I shallsoon make him laugh," whereupon the following conversation tookplace between them:

"No, you sha'n't," said David doggedly.

"Yes, I shall."

"No, you sha'n't not."

"Yes, I shall so."

"Sha'n't, sha'n't, sha'n't."

"Shall, shall, shall."

"You shut up."

"You're another."

By this time Joey was in a frightful way (because he saw he wasgetting the worst of it), and he boasted that he had David'slaugh in his pocket, and David challenged him to produce it, andJoey searched his pockets and brought out the most unexpectedarticles, including a duck and a bunch of carrots; and you couldsee by his manner that the simple soul thought these were thingswhich all boys carried loose in their pockets.

I daresay David would have had to laugh in the end, had there notbeen a half-gnawed sausage in one of the pockets, and the sightof it reminded him so cruelly of the poor dog's fate that hehowled, and Joey's heart was touched at last, and he also wept,but he wiped his eyes with the duck.

It was at this touching moment that the pantaloon hobbled in,also dressed as we had seen him last, and carrying,unfortunately, a trayful of sausages, which at once increased thegeneral gloom, for he announced, in his squeaky voice, that theywere the very sausages that had lately been the dog.

Then Joey seemed to have a great idea, and his excitement was soimpressive that we stood gazing at him. First, he counted thesausages, and said that they were two short, and he found themissing two up the pantaloon's sleeve. Then he ran out of theroom and came back with the sausage-machine; and what do youthink he did? He put all the sausages into the end of themachine that they had issued from, and turned the handlebackward, and then out came the dog at the other end!

Can you picture the joy of David?

He clasped the dear little terrier in his arms; and then wenoticed that there was a sausage adhering to its tail. Thepantaloon said we must have put in a sausage too many, but Joeysaid the machine had not worked quite smoothly and that he fearedthis sausage was the dog's bark, which distressed David, for hesaw how awkward it must be to a dog to have its bark outside, andwe were considering what should be done when the dog closed thediscussion by swallowing the sausage.

After that, David had the most hilarious hour of his life,entering into the childish pleasures of this family as heartilyas if he had been brought up on sausages, and knocking thepantaloon down repeatedly. You must not think that he did thisviciously; he did it to please the old gentleman, who begged himto do it, and always shook hands warmly and said "Thank you,"when he had done it. They are quite a simple people.

Joey called David and me "Sonny," and asked David, who addressedhim as "Mr. Clown," to call him Joey. He also told us that thepantaloon's name was old Joey, and the columbine's Josy, and theharlequin's Joeykin.

We were sorry to hear that old Joey gave him a good deal oftrouble. This was because his memory is so bad that he oftenforgets whether it is your head or your feet you should stand on,and he usually begins the day by standing on the end that happensto get out of bed first. Thus he requires constant watching, andthe worst of it is, you dare not draw attention to his mistake,he is so shrinkingly sensitive about it. No sooner had Joey toldus this than the poor old fellow began to turn upside down andstood on his head; but we pretended not to notice, and talkedabout the weather until he came to.

Josy and Joeykin, all skirts and spangles, were with us by thistime, for they had been invited to tea. They came in dancing,and danced off and on most of the time. Even in the middle ofwhat they were saying they would begin to flutter; it was not somuch that they meant to dance as that the slightest thing setthem going, such as sitting in a draught; and David found hecould blow them about the room like pieces of paper. You couldsee by the shortness of Josy's dress that she was very youngindeed, and at first this made him shy, as he always is whenintroduced formally to little girls, and he stood sucking histhumb, and so did she, but soon the stiffness wore off and theysat together on the sofa, holding each other's hands.

All this time the harlequin was rotating like a beautiful fish,and David requested him to jump through the wall, at which he issuch an adept, and first he said he would, and then he saidbetter not, for the last time he did it the people in the nexthouse had made such a fuss. David had to admit that it must berather startling to the people on the other side of the wall, buthe was sorry.

By this time tea was ready, and Josy, who poured out, rememberedto ask if you took milk with just one drop of tea in it, exactlyas her mother would have asked. There was nothing to eat, ofcourse, except sausages, but what a number of them there were!hundreds at least, strings of sausages, and every now and thenJoey jumped up and played skipping rope with them. David hadbeen taught not to look greedy, even though he felt greedy, andhe was shocked to see the way in which Joey and old Joey and evenJosy eyed the sausages they had given him. Soon Josy developednobler feelings, for she and Joeykin suddenly fell madly in lovewith each other across the table, but unaffected by this prettypicture, Joey continued to put whole sausages in his mouth at atime, and then rubbed himself a little lower down, while old Joeysecreted them about his person; and when David wasn't lookingthey both pounced on his sausages, and yet as they gobbled theywere constantly running to the top of the stair and screaming tothe servant to bring up more sausages.

You could see that Joey (if you caught him with his hand in yourplate) was a bit ashamed of himself, and he admitted to us thatsausages were a passion with him.

He said he had never once in his life had a sufficient number ofsausages. They had maddened him since he was the smallest boy.He told us how, even in those days, his mother had feared forhim, though fond of a sausage herself; how he had bought asausage with his first penny, and hoped to buy one with his last(if they could not be got in any other way), and that he alwaysslept with a string of them beneath his pillow.

While he was giving us these confidences, unfortunately, his eyescame to rest, at first accidentally, then wistfully, then with ahorrid gleam in them, on the little dog, which was fooling abouton the top of the sausage-machine, and his hands went out towardit convulsively, whereat David, in sudden fear, seized the dog inone arm and gallantly clenched his other fist, and then Joeybegged his pardon and burst into tears, each one of which heflung against the wall, where it exploded with a bang.

David refused to pardon him unless he promised on wood never tolook in that way at the dog again, but Joey said promises werenothing to him when he was short of sausages, and so his wisestcourse would be to present the dog to David. Oh, the joy ofDavid when he understood that the little dog he had saved was hisvery own! I can tell you he was now in a hurry to be off beforeJoey had time to change his mind.

"All I ask of you," Joey said with a break in his voice, "is tocall him after me, and always to give him a sausage, sonny, of aSaturday night."

There was a quiet dignity about Joey at the end, which showedthat he might have risen to high distinction but for his fatalpassion.

The last we saw of him was from the street. He was waving histongue at us in his attractive, foolish way, and Josy was poisedon Joeykin's hand like a butterfly that had alighted on a flower.We could not exactly see old Joey, but we saw his feet, and sofeared the worst. Of course they are not everything they shouldbe, but one can't help liking them.