members butting folks with their heads. They found some street porter with a wide chest and a stupid countenance; they offered him, and compelled him if necessary, to accept a pot of porter, in return for which he was to allow them to butt him with their heads four times in the chest; and on this they betted. One day a man, a big, stalwart Welshman named Gogangerdd, expired at the third butt. This looked serious. An inquest was held, and the jury returned the following verdict: "Died of enlargement of the heart, caused by excessive drinking." Gogangerdd had certainly drunk the contents of the pot of porter.
There was the Fun Club. Fun is like cant, and like humour,—a word which is untranslatable. Fun is to farce what pepper is to salt. To get into a house and break a valuable mirror, slash the family portraits, poison the dog, put the cat in the aviary, is called "having a bit of fun." To give bad news which is untrue, whereby people put on mourning by mistake, is fun. It was fun to cut a square hole in the Holbein at Hampton Court. A member of the Fun Club would have deemed it a grand achievement to have broken the arm of the Venus of Milo. Under James II. a young millionaire nobleman who had during the night set fire to a thatched cottage,—a feat which made all London shriek with laughter,—was proclaimed the King of Fun. The poor devils in the cottage were saved in their night-clothes. The members of the Fun Club, all men of the highest rank, used to run about London during the hours when the citizens were asleep, pulling shutters off their hinges, cutting the pipes of pumps, filling up cisterns, digging up cultivated plots of ground, putting out lamps, sawing through the beams which supported houses, and breaking window-panes, especially in the poor quarters of the town. It was the rich who acted thus towards
