“Want a cab! I don’t know. You see, there are so many of us.”
“‘Ow many? There’s plenty o’ room, Mr. Peter, both inside and h’out. There ain’t no charge. Put h’as many h’as yer like on the roof, so long as Cat’s Meat can drar yer. I’ve ‘ad a ole cut for yer legs on purpose.”
Harry laughed. “If Cat’s Meat can’t manage it, we’ll shove.”
They piled in uproariously. The suggestion was made that Cat’s Meat should be taken out and that Peter should be allowed to ride him. Mr. Grace wouldn’t hear of it. “None o’ that, young gen’lemen. Cruelty ter h’animiles. The keb ‘olds ‘im h’up.—Where to?”
The Gilded Turtle was mentioned.
For all that there were four on the roof and six inside, Cat’s Meat never made an easier journey—that was due to the singing mob of undergraduates who lent a hand. And Mr. Grace—he reflected that it wasn’t for naught that he had repainted his growler. He was the proudest cabby in London that night—he was going to be prouder.
At the Gilded Turtle he was seated next to Peter and treated as an honored guest. He had a misty impression that the waiters were stowed away beneath tables and that their places were taken by Peter’s friends. He believed and asserted to the day of his death that he made the speech of the evening—something reminiscent about “prick-cautions,” which meandered off into moral reflections about a person named Kiss-Me-Quick and flower-girls in general. He distinctly remembered that, more than once, he turned his pockets inside out, asking plaintively, “What lydy done this?” Then the gentleman whose ears moved like a dog’s sang a nonsense-song about Peter. They all joined in a rousing chorus, clinking glasses:
“He kissed the moon’s dead lips,
He googed the eye of the sun;
But when we’ve crawled to the end of life,