That, he said, was the whole story of how he went fishing and caught a mackerel, and what came of it. But it was not quite all, for he went on to tell us that he still visited Bristol regularly to receive big and ever bigger orders from that same old customer of his, whose business had gone on increasing ever since; and invariably after finishing their business his friend remarks in a casual sort of way: "By the way, old man, do you remember that mackerel you caught at Weymouth which you had for tea, and were charged two shillings for?" "Then he laughs just as heartily as if it had only happened yesterday, and I leave him in a good humour, and say to myself: 'Now, I'll hear no more about that blessed mackerel till I go round to Bristol again in three months' time.'" "How long ago did you say it was since you caught the mackerel?" I inquired. "About forty years." "Then," I said, "it was a very lucky fish for you--worth more perhaps than if a big diamond had been found in its belly. The man had got his joke--the one joke of his life perhaps--and was determined to stick to it, and that kept him faithful to you in spite of his wife's wish to distribute their orders among a lot of travellers." He replied that I was perhaps right and that it had turned out a lucky fish for him. But his old customer, though his business was big, was not so important to him now when he had big customers in most of the large towns in England, and he thought it rather ridiculous to keep up that joke so many years. XXX STRANGERS YET The man who composed that familiar delightful rhyme about blue eyes and black, and how you are to beware of the hidden knife in the one case and of a different sort of danger which may threaten you in the other, must have lived a good long time ago, or else be a very old man. Oh, so old, thousands of years, thousands of years, if all were told. And he, when he exhibited such impartiality, must have had other-coloured eyes himself. Most probably the sheep and goat eye, one which no person in his senses--except an anthropologist--can classify as either dark or light. It is that marmalade yellow, excessively rare in this country, but not very uncommon in persons of Spanish race. For who at this day, this age, after the mixing together of the hostile races has been going on these twenty centuries or longer, can believe that any inherited or instinctive animosity can still survive? If we do find such a feeling here and there, would it not be more reasonable to regard it as an individual antipathy, or as a prejudice, imbibed early in life from parents or others, which endures in spite of reason, long after its origin had been forgotten? Nevertheless, one does meet with cases from time to time which do throw a slight shadow of doubt on the mind, and of several I have met I will here relate one.