Brown had heard this chestnut for the first time that afternoon, and was full of it.

It is always a mystery to me where Brown has been for the last hundred years.

He stops you in the street with, "Oh, I must tell you!--such a capital story!" And he thereupon proceeds to relate to you, with much spirit and gusto, one of Noah's best known jokes, or some story that Romulus must have originally told to Remus.

One of these days somebody will tell him the history of Adam and Eve, and he will think he has got hold of a new plot, and will work it up into a novel.
He gives forth these hoary antiquities as personal reminiscences of his own, or, at furthest, as episodes in the life of his second cousin.

There are certain strange and moving catastrophes that would seem either to have occurred to, or to have been witnessed by, nearly every one you meet.