"Why, when the patient happens to die, we lay him out in a room over night by himself, lock the door, throw open the sash, and in the morning he is entirely off."
"Indeed!" said the other in amazement; "what becomes of him?"
"Why, that we cannot exactly tell, not being acquainted with supernatural causes. All that we know of the matter is, that there's a strong smell of brimstone in the room the next morning."
Foote, returning from dinner with a lord of the admiralty, was met by a friend, who asked him what sort of a day he had had. "Very indifferent indeed; bad company and a worse dinner."
"I wonder at that," said the other, "as I thought the admiral a good jolly fellow."
"Why, as to that, he may be a good sea lord, but take it from me, he is a very bad landlord."
Dibble Davis, one of Foote's butts-in-ordinary, dining with him one day at North-end, observed that "well as he loved porter, he could never drink it without a head."
"That must be a mistake, Dibble," returned his host, "as you have done so to my knowledge alone these twenty years."
Being at the levee of Lord Townsend, when that nobleman was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, he thought he saw a person in his Excellency's suite whom he had known to have lived many years a life of expediency in London. To convince himself of the fact, he asked his Excellency who it was.
"That is Mr. T----, one of my gentlemen at large," was the answer. "Do you know him?"
"Oh, yes! perfectly well," said Foote, "and what your Excellency tells me is doubly extraordinary: first, that he is a gentleman; and next, that he is at large."
Being at dinner in a mixed company soon after the bankruptcy of one friend and the death of another, the conversation naturally turned on the mutability of the world. "Can you account for this?" said S----, a master builder, who happened to sit next to Foote. "Why, not very clearly," said the other; "except we could suppose the world was built by contract."
During one of Foote's trips to Dublin, he was much solicited by a silly young man of fashion to assist him in a miscellany of poems and essays which he was about to publish; but when he asked to see the manuscript, the other told him "that at present he had only conceived the different subjects, but had put none of them to paper."