The last was an invitation to me to order something. He drew me my beer from an engine whose handle was worn from his oozy grip.
“Who is the other chap?” I asked him. “Do you mind telling me?”
“Why not?” he said, and crossed his legs and leaned one elbow on the counter, like a pottle-bodied Leicester Square Shakespeare.
“Leastways,” he continued, “I will and I won’t, and I can and I can’t, seeing as how he was christened, if he were, a matter of what—why it must be twenty year ago.”
“Who was christened?” I asked.
“The other one,” he answered. “Let me think now.”
He crossed and tapped together ruminative the fat forefinger of each hand, as if he were numbering up a score of notches in his memory.
“I misremember the exact date,” he said suddenly: “but the old lady she stands as clear as a Pepper’s Ghost in my mind. Mother Carey they called her; and she lived in White Square down there; and every morning, reg’lar as the postman, she’d come in here at eleven o’clock for her gill of gin and peppermint, like a very particler old duchess. She’d been on the stage in her time, I understood, and wasn’t to be put off with anything lower than the genuine London Old Tom. God bless me! How she comes back!”
He basked a little, in a glow of memory, before he continued luminously:
“I recollect the very day she bought it of me—just as plain I do as if it was print.”