'Proof,' snarled Murdoch; 'don't 'ee call to mind two years agone when we had a kind o' strike like, and didn't she go about speakin' up for us like a good un?'
A murmur of assent mingled with the gurgling of liquor down half-a-dozen throats.
'There's one I hope she'll never take to,' Potters was beginning, but Bolt interrupted him with—
'Whichever has her will have a fine wife. Let's drink good luck to the new masters, lads.'
'Or, so to say, to oursel', for their's'll be ours,' said Sigley.
'Their bad luck'll be ours; but their good luck's their own,' said Bill Murdoch sententiously.
This startling economic theory meeting with no support, the original toast was drunk with a feeble attempt at honours.
The 'new masters' whose health had thus been unenthusiastically drunk found it hard to realise the peculiar position in which they found themselves.