I was agreeably
surprised to find by no means wanting in the more humane feelings, "and
he wouldn't stand it if there wasn't the laugh to encourage him."

He maintained that the dog got that laugh to encourage him also.

However, he had not got it from David, whose mother and father and nurse
combined could not comfort him, though they swore that the dog was still
alive and kicking, which might all have been very well had not David
seen the sausages. It was to inquire whether anything could be done to
atone that in considerable trepidation I sent in my card to the clown,
and the result of our talk was that he invited me and David to have tea
with him on Thursday next at his lodgings.

"I sha'n't laugh," David said, nobly true to the memory of the little
dog, "I sha'n't laugh once," and he closed his jaws very tightly as we
drew near the house in Soho where Joey lodged. But he also gripped my
hand, like one who knew that it would be an ordeal not to laugh.

The house was rather like the ordinary kind, but there was a convenient
sausage-shop exactly opposite (trust Joey for that) and we saw a
policeman in the street looking the other way, as they always do look
just before you rub them. A woman wearing the same kind of clothes as
people in other houses wear, told us to go up to the second floor, and
she grinned at David, as if she had heard about him; so up we went,
David muttering through his clenched teeth, "I sha'n't laugh," and as
soon as we knocked a voice called out, "Here we are again!" at which a
shudder passed through David as if he feared that he had set himself an
impossible task. In we went, however, and though the voice had certainly
come from this room we found nobody there. I looked in bewilderment at
David, and he quickly put his hand over his mouth.

It was a funny room, of course, but not so funny as you might expect;
there were droll things in it, but they did nothing funny, you could
see that they were just waiting for Joey. There were padded chairs
with friendly looking rents down the middle of them, and a table and a
horse-hair sofa, and we sat down very cautiously on the sofa but nothing
happened to us.

The biggest piece of furniture was an enormous wicker trunk, with a very
lively coloured stocking dangling out at a hole in it, and a notice on
the top that Joey was the funniest man on earth. David tried to pull the
stocking out of the hole, but it was so long that it never came to an
end, a