'DEAR AMELIA,—Thank you very much; you were quite right.
TOM.'
And in the other I said—
Jenny, I've had pretty well enough of you; you can go to the devil your own way. So no more at present from your sincere well-wisher TOM.
'P.S.—I'm going for a soldier.'
And I left everything: my master that I was bound to, and my trade and my father. And I went straight off to London. And I should have been a soldier right enough but that I fell in with a fireman, and he persuaded me to go in for that business, which is just as exciting as a soldier's, and a great deal more dangerous, most times. And a fireman I was for six or eight years, but I never cared to walk out with another girl when I thought of Jenny. I didn't tell my folks where I'd gone, and for years I heard nothing from them.
And one night there was a fire in a street off the Borough—a high house it was,—and I went up the ladder to a window where there was a woman screaming, and directly I see her face I see it was Jenny.
I fetched her down the ladder right enough, and she clung round my neck (she didn't know me from Adam), and said: 'Oh, go back and fetch my husband.' And I knew it was Wheeler I'd got to go and find.
Then I went back and I looked for Wheeler.
There he was, lying on the bed, drunk.
Then the devil says to me, 'What call have you to go and find him, the drunken swine? Leave him be, and you can marry Jenny, and let bygones be bygones'; and I stood there half a minute, quite still, with the smoke getting thick round me. Then, the next thing I knew, there was a cracking under my feet and the boards giving way, and I sprang across to Wheeler all in a minute, as anxious to save him as if he'd been my own twin brother. There was no waking him, it was lift him or leave him, and somehow or other I got him out; but that minute I'd given to listening to Satan had very nearly chucked us both to our death, and we only just come off by the skin of our teeth. The crowd cheered like mad when I dragged him out.