Each man who has told it me has invariably slept in the room next door to that of the victim, and has been awakened by the man's yell as the plaster came down upon him.

That is how he (the story-teller) came to know all about it.
Brown wanted us to believe that this prehistoric animal he had been telling us about had belonged to his brother-in-law, and was hurt when Jephson murmured, _sotto voce_, that that made the twenty-eighth man he had met whose brother-in-law had owned that dog--to say nothing of the hundred and seventeen who had owned it themselves.
We tried to get to work afterwards, but Brown had unsettled us for the evening.

It is a wicked thing to start dog stories among a party of average sinful men.

Let one man tell a dog story, and every other man in the room feels he wants to tell a bigger one.
There is a story going--I cannot vouch for its truth, it was told me by a judge--of a man who lay dying.

The pastor of the parish, a good and pious man, came to sit with him, and, thinking to cheer him up, told him an anecdote about a dog.