A sportsman and an officer lays a wager that he can make a trigger-happy Irishman go barefoot in public.
It is a familiar scene: the legendary gunslinger in the saloon, the young upstart ragging on him, and a table of fellow-gamblers urging the reckless boy to think better of it. In this case however, it all took place in a coffee-house in Georgian London, and the upstart was a middle-order batsman for the MCC.
A doctor is wondering how to apologise for being drunk on the job, when he receives a letter from his patient.
George Fordyce (1736-1802), an eminent Scottish physician on the staff at St Thomas’s Hospital in London, did not often make house calls — not, at any rate, twice at the same address. But Samuel Rogers, a friend of Byron, recalled one occasion when luck was very much on his side.