By A Curious Coincidence, We Had Both Fixed Upon The Same Carriage.

I had taken the corner seats near the platform, and he had booked the two opposite corners.

Four other passengers sat huddled up in the middle. We kept the seats near the door, and gave the other two away. One should always practise generosity.

There was a very talkative man in our carriage. I never came across a man with such a fund of utterly uninteresting anecdotes. He had a friend with him - at all events, the man was his friend when they started - and he talked to this friend incessantly, from the moment the train left Victoria until it arrived at Dover. First of all he told him a long story about a dog. There was no point in the story whatever. It was simply a bald narrative of the dog's daily doings. The dog got up in the morning and barked at the door, and when they came down and opened the door there he was, and he stopped all day in the garden; and when his wife (not the dog's wife, the wife of the man who was telling the story) went out in the afternoon, he was asleep on the grass, and they brought him into the house, and he played with the children, and in the evening he slept in the coal- shed, and next morning there he was again. And so on, for about forty minutes.

A very dear chum or near relative of the dog's might doubtless have found the account enthralling; but what possible interest a stranger - a man who evidently didn't even know the dog - could be expected to take in the report, it was difficult to conceive.

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