“Lud! did you ever see such a wet September, Mr. Jellyband?” asked Mr. Hempseed.
He sat in one of the seats inside the hearth, did Mr. Hempseed, for he was an authority and an important personage not only at “The Fisherman’s Rest,” where Mr. Jellyband always made a special selection of him as a foil for political arguments, but throughout the neighbourhood, where his learning and notably his knowledge of the Scriptures was held in the most profound awe and respect. With one hand buried in the capacious pockets of his corduroys underneath his elaborately-worked, well-worn smock, the other holding his long clay pipe, Mr. Hempseed sat there looking dejectedly across the room at the rivulets of moisture which trickled down the window panes.
“No,” replied Mr. Jellyband, sententiously, “I dunno, Mr. ’Empseed, as I ever did. An’ I’ve been in these parts nigh on sixty years.”
“Aye! you wouldn’t rec’llect the first three years of them sixty, Mr. Jellyband,” quietly interposed Mr. Hempseed. “I dunno as I ever see’d an infant take much note of the weather, leastways not in these parts, an’ I’ve lived ’ere nigh on seventy-five years, Mr. Jellyband.”
The superiority of this wisdom was so incontestable that for the moment Mr. Jellyband was not ready with his usual flow of argument.
“It do seem more like April than September, don’t it?” continued Mr. Hempseed, dolefully, as a shower of raindrops fell with a sizzle upon the fire.
“Aye! that it do,” assented the worthy host, “but then what can you ’xpect, Mr. ’Empseed, I says, with sich a government as we’ve got?”
Mr. Hempseed shook his head with an infinity of wisdom, tempered by deeply-rooted mistrust of the British climate and the British Government.
“I don’t ’xpect nothing, Mr. Jellyband,” he said. “Pore folks like us is of no account up there in Lunnon, I knows that, and it’s not often as I do complain. But when it comes to sich wet weather in September, and all me fruit a-rottin’ and a-dyin’ like the ’Guptian mother’s first-born, and doin’ no more good than they did, pore dears, save to a lot of Jews, pedlars and sich, with their oranges and sich like foreign ungodly fruit, which nobody’d buy if English apples and pears was nicely swelled. As the Scriptures say—”
“That’s quite right, Mr. ’Empseed,” retorted Jellyband, “and as I says, what can you ’xpect? There’s all them Frenchy devils over the Channel yonder a-murderin’ their king and nobility, and Mr. Pitt and Mr. Fox and Mr. Burke a-fightin’ and a-wranglin’ between them, if we Englishmen should ’low them to go on in their ungodly way. ‘Let ’em murder!’ says Mr. Pitt. ‘Stop ’em!’ says Mr. Burke.”