Daubeny would have devoted one
of his half hours to the composition of a dozen tragic words which
also would have been neat and appropriate. I can hear him say them
now, warning young members around him to abstain from embittered
words against each other, and I feel sure that the funereal grace
of such an occasion would have become him even better than the
generosity of his congratulations."
"It is rather grim matter for joking, Phineas."
"Grim enough; but the grimness and the jokes are always running
through my mind together. I used to spend hours in thinking what my
dear friends would say about it when they found that I had been hung
in mistake;--how Sir Gregory Grogram would like it, and whether men
would think about it as they went home from The Universe at night.
I had various questions to ask and answer for myself,--whether they
would pull up my poor body, for instance, from what unhallowed ground
is used for gallows corpses, and give it decent burial, placing 'M.P.
for Tankerville' after my name on some more or less explicit tablet.
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