the whale that swallowed Jonah. And I would. If the house did not contain it, it should stand in the garden and I would paint it once every three years with not less than three coats of good and substantial oil colour.
It was one of the greatest living anglers who unwittingly opened my eyes to the fact that these things are impostures. Wishing to impress me with a proper understanding of his supremacy and the length of time he had enjoyed it, he once told me that the trophies of Thames jack which he had collected during his residence at Oxford—at Oxford, mark you, when he was a mere boy—were so large that he could not afford to take them down with him. He wished me, I believe, to infer from this that the loss of his unique collection was of less moment to him, the skilful angler, than was the cost of its freight to Paddington to him, the undergraduate, with many calls upon his purse. But I gathered more from his abandonment of these trophies than he perhaps intended me to do. It is obvious that they were so big that they could not be taken out of his lodgings without injury to the house, and that the ground landlord obtained an injunction against their removal as being parcel of the freehold. To this inference a corollary attaches. As they could not be taken out they were never brought in. In other words, they were
