I have had the same driver tell it to me two or three times in the same afternoon.

It has come to me in all the multitude of tongues that Babel bequeathed to earth, and flavored with whiskey, brandy, beer, cologne, sozodont, tobacco, garlic, onions, grasshoppers--everything that has a fragrance to it through all the long list of things that are gorged or guzzled by the sons of men.

I never have smelt any anecdote as often as I have smelt that one; never have smelt any anecdote that smelt so variegated as that one.

And you never could learn to know it by its smell, because every time you thought you had learned the smell of it, it would turn up with a different smell.

Bayard Taylor has written about this hoary anecdote, Richardson has published it; so have Jones, Smith, Johnson, Ross Browne, and every other correspondence-inditing being that ever set his foot upon the great overland road anywhere between Julesburg and San Francisco; and I have heard that it is in the Talmud.