Jerome K. Jerome was born in Walsall, Staffordshire, England on May 2, 1859. He is a well-known English author, who has written such novels as Three Men in a Boat, Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, Novel Notes, and Three Men on the Bummel. He is famous for his art of story-telling, his vivid style and his humour expressed in laugh-provoking situations often based on misunderstanding. With sparkling humour he criticized the weak sides of human nature.

The extract under analysis gives us a story of three friends roaming about Sonning. George suggests going to the river and making an Irish stew out of remains of food they have. While cooking they see their dog with a dead water-rat. Harris wants to put it into the stew. However, it seems to have no sense for George. The story ends with their having supper. The stew seems to be a great success.

The main characters of the story are Harris, George, and the nameless narrator (and their dog Montmorency). They are all different: Harris always wants to try something new, but George is a conservative one. The narrator seems to be a man who does not care and goes with the stream of life events. Still, we can say that they are good friend, because they do such silly things together. Montmorency is an important part of the story, too, because it is him who brings the subject of the dispute to dinner, either as a friendly move or as a sarcastic remark.

While reading the story, one can feel the beautiful atmosphere of joy, friendliness and humour. With his grammatically simple, but at the same time so accurate and poetic language, the author makes us feel being with George and the others, and warmly sympathize with them.

The story is a first-person narration. It is written in such a descriptive language - we can find a lot of epithets, similes, metaphors and poetic words, especially in that part which describes "sweet Sonning" ("more like a stage village", "awkward stairs", "winding passages", "smothered in roses"). The author also uses a litotes in the part describing peeling potatoes. He compares the peeled potatoes with peanuts to emphasize Harris and the narrator being so unexperienced in such an action.

In the story the author actively uses different types of humour: one of situation and one of words. We can find the humour of words in the following extract: "So we scraped them [potatoes]... Then we struck. We said we should require the rest of the evening for scraping ourselves." In the first case 'to scrape' means 'to peel carefully', while in the second case it denotes cleaning their bodies and clothes. The humour of situation can be traced through the whole story, because everything that happens here makes the reader laugh or at least smile.

Reading the story, one may think that friendship is one of the best things in the world. You can try anything with your friends, because they will always support you, and together you will be able to deal with all kind of things, even with making an Irish stew.