“I can prove it to any man with eyes,” shouted Dr. Ulswater, thumping his knee.
“Which I holds myself,” said Sadler, gloomily, “that any man, with eyes, can see as them signs of the Zodiac all comes from the jim-jams, and the first man that made 'em was the first man that had drunk not wisely but too often.”
“Ha!” said Dr. Ulswater. “Why! Now, that's an idea! It really is!”
“Fiddlesticks!” said Mrs. Ulswater. “What was the present, and what about it?”
Susannah said, “What's in the box?” and I,
“What are you doing with my trunk?”
Dr. Ulswater wanted to stop there and discuss the origins of the signs of the Zodiac, and the orderly narrative was getting into a bad condition, but Sadler took it up.
“Well, it was this way, ma'am,” he said. “I left the doctor at the Museum. Them mummies didn't look to me respectable, but maybe they are, only as you told me to look after the doctor, I didn't know as I'd ought to leave him in that there dissipated society. But I went off down the street, and by and by I see a man I knew, named Sanchez Beteta. He used to be a graceless young one, son of a poverty-stricken caballero who lived on Valencia Street in Portate. Beteta was walking stately and soft, and he had on patent-leather shoes that was pointed like pins, and he had a cane that was an airy vision, and a buttonhole bouquet, and fixings, and side whiskers, and clothes that was beautiful to make a bad egg remember its young dreams, and he come along like his garments was angels' wings. I says to myself: 'I want to be like that'; and I pokes him in the chest sudden and solid, and I says, sort of ingratiating:
“'Where'd you steal them clothes?' I says in West Coast Spanish. He looked me over with a haughty eye. Then he says:
“'If you're a ghost,' he says, 'I wished you'd fade away. How and why do you exist, aged one?' and I says: