PETER AND JUDY.
"Tell ye me 'istry, is it? Vell, I don't mind if I do; but them as hears my story mout give me somethink to drink first, for I ham werry dry. I lost my woice speaking on the Histablished Church bill tother night in Parlymint, and I've been 'oarse hever since."
"Well, take a drop, Peter," said Kicking Billy, a one-eyed and one-legged, and rascally looking fellow, who sat with his crutches between his knees, toasting his shin at the fire, and he handed a bottle to Slap-Up Peter, who took it without saying a word, and lifting it to his mouth, took a deep, deep draught without winking.
"Look at that fellow that they call Kicking Billy—the one-legged fellow, I mean," said the detective to me. "He's a returned burglar, that fellow, and has served fourteen years. This place is full of thieves. They are nearly all thieves, and this is a thieves feast," he whispered in my ear.
"My name is Peter Wilson, and I've been in the show business for sixteen years, come Christmas, man and boy. I'm thirty-eight years of age now, and they called me Slap-Up Peter when I fust began jumpin', as a hacrobat in the penny gaffs. Cos wy, I had a way of turnin' myself over a chair and coming back-handed on a somerset that used to take well, but now so many does it that the haudience don't mind it a bit. I jumped for four years, and wos counted pretty good in my line until I dislocated my wrist a doin' of the Pyramids of Hegypt, and then I vos laid hup and couldn't jump for six months and hover; so I thought I'd leave the bus'ness and happear in another character. I got married to—"
"More fool you," said Kicking Billy, sententiously, taking a drink.
"Well, hit didn't cost you nothing, no more than it did for the government to support you in Botany Bay for fourteen years. So you needn't hinterrupt me again."
"Go hon, Peter, and never mind him, its only 'is chaff."
"Well, as I wos saying," continued Slap-Up Peter, "I got married, and maybe it was rayther foolish, for when we were spliced, Judy and I—she wos an Irish gal and a good worker—we went into our cash account and found that we had only one pun six shillings and height pence, not a blessed brown more. I said to Judy—she wor a good gal—