oration, where there was a replica of Nelson's
Victory and a set of P. & O. cabins which made one seasick by mere
association of ideas. I don't know why I went or why Wilde went; but
we did; and the question what the devil we were doing in that galley
tickled us both. It was my sole experience of Oscar's wonderful gift
as a raconteur. I remember particularly an amazingly elaborate story
which you have no doubt heard from him: an example of the cumulation
of a single effect, as in Mark Twain's story of the man who was
persuaded to put lightning conductor after lightning conductor at
every possible point on his roof until a thunderstorm came and all the
lightning in the heavens went for his house and wiped it out.

"Oscar's much more carefully and elegantly worked out story was of a
young man who invented a theatre stall which economized space by
ingenious contrivances which were all described. A friend of his
invited twenty millionaires to meet him at dinner so that he might
interest them in the invention. The young man convinced them
completely by his demonstration of the saving in a theatre holding, in
ordinary seats, six hundred people, leaving them eager and ready to
make his fortune. Unfortunately he went on to calculate the annual
saving in all the theatres of the world; then in all the churches of
the world; then in all the legislatures; estimating finally the
incidental and moral and religious effects of the invention until at
the end of an hour he had estimated a profit of several thousand
millions: the climax of course being that the millionaires folded
their tents and silently stole away, leaving the ruined inventor a
marked man for life.

"Wilde and I got on extraordinarily well on this occasion. I had not
to talk myself, but to listen to a man telling me stories better than
I could have told them. We did not refer to Art, about which,
excluding literature from the definition, he knew only what could be
picked up by reading about it. He was in a tweed suit and low hat like
myself, and had been detected and had detected me in the act of
clandestinely spending a happy day at Rosherville Gardens instead of
pontificating in his frock coat and so forth. And he had an audience
on whom not one of his subtlest effects was lost. And so for once our
meeting was a success; and I understood why Morris, when he was dying
slowly, enjoyed a visit from Wilde more than from anybody else, as I
understand why you say in your