The Innkeeper’s Joke

 H.G. Wells had been reading T——’s latest book and I asked him if it was good. He said that there was one joke in it which made it worth the 7s. 6d. It was the counsel of a friend to a feeble man who declined to allow his wife to go and get a child elsewhere—‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his wife for his friends.’ It was my joke, which I had told to T—— some years before.

John Fothergill, An Innkeeper’s Diary (London: Chatto and Windus, 1934), p. 48.