“A Happy Retort”

I am told that a certain friend of mine, as an undergraduate at Cambridge, was of an extreme nimbleness, an agility which he could not well control. One day that grave and reverend personage, the Master of his college, happening to meet him, remonstrated with him thus: ‘Mr. Dash, I am sorry to say I never look out of my window but I see you jumping over those railings.’ Mr. Dash was equal to the emergency, for he respectfully replied, ‘And it is a curious fact, sir, that I never leap over those railings without seeing you looking out of that window.’

— Frederick Locker-Lampson, Patchwork, 1879