The Adoration of the Mage by Rudyard Kipling

This is a slim, thin little story, but it serves to explain a great / many things. I picked it up in a four-wheeler in the company of an / eminent novelist, a pink-eyed young gentleman who lived on his income, / and a gentleman who knew more than he ought; and I preserved it, / thinking it would serve to interest you. It may be an old story, but / the G. W. K. T. H. O., whom, for the sake of brevity, we will call Captain / Kydd, declared that his best friend had heard it himself. Consequently, / I doubted its newness more than ever. For when a man raises his voice / and vows that the incident occurred opposite his own Club window, all / the listening world know that they are about to hear what is vulgarly / called a cracker. This rule holds good in London as well as in Lahore. / When we left the house of the highly distinguished politician who had / been entertaining us, we stepped into a London Particular, which has / nothing whatever to do with the story, but was interesting from the / little fact that we could not see our hands before our faces. The / black, brutal fog had turned each gas-jet into a pin-prick of light, / visible only at six inches range. There were no houses, there were no / pavements. There were no points of the compass. There were only the / eminent novelist, the young gentleman with the pink eyes, Captain Kydd / and myself, holding each other's shoulders in the gloom of Tophet. Then / the eminent novelist delivered himself of an epigram.[22]

"Let's go home," said he.