Page:The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, a Book for an Idle Holiday - Jerome (1886).djvu/79

 you uttered. I have known him, on being asked the time, stop short in the middle of the road, slap his leg, and burst into a roar of laughter. One never dared say anything really funny to that man. A good joke would have killed him on the spot.

In the present instance, I vehemently repudiated the accusation of frivolity, and pressed Mrs Cutting for practical ideas. She then became thoughtful and hazarded "samplers;" saying that she never heard them spoken much of now, but that they used to be all the rage when she was a girl.

I declined samplers, and begged her to think again. She pondered a long while, with the tea-tray in her hands, and at last suggested the weather, which she was sure had been most trying of late.

And ever since that idiotic suggestion, I have been unable to get the weather out of my thoughts, or anything else in.

It certainly is most wretched weather. At all events, it is so, now, at the time I am writing, and, if it isn't particularly unpleasant when I come to be read, it soon will be.

It always is wretched weather, according to us. The weather is like the Government, always in the wrong. In summer time we say it is stifling; in winter that it is killing; in spring and autumn we find fault with it for being neither one thing nor the other, and wish it would make up its mind. If