“I ban’t no croaker, as you knaws. Happy, are ’e?—happy for wance? I suppose you’ll say now, as you’ve said plenty times a’ready, that you ’m to the tail of your troubles for gude an’ all—just in your auld, silly fashion?”
“Not me, auld chap, never no more—so long as you ’m alive! Ha, ha, ha—that’s wan for you! Theer! if ’t isn’t gude to laugh again!”
“I be main glad as I’ve got no news to make ’e do anything else, though ban’t often us can be prophets of gude nowadays. But if you’ve grawed a streak wiser of late, then theer’s hope, even for a scatterbrain like you, the Lard bein’ all-powerful. Not that jokes against such as me would please Him the better.”
“I’ve thought a lot in my time, Billy; an’ I haven’t done thinking yet. I’ve comed to reckon as I caan’t do very well wi’out the world, though the world would fare easy enough wi’out me.”
Billy nodded.
“That’s sense so far as it goes,” he admitted. “Obedience be hard to the young; to the auld it comes natural; to me allus was easy as dirt from my youth up. Obedience to betters in heaven an’ airth. But you—you with your born luck—never heard tell of nothin’ like it ’t all. What’s a fix to you? You goes in wan end an’ walks out t’ other, like a rabbit through a hedge. Theer you was—in such a tight pass as you might say neither God nor angels could get ’e free wi’out a Bible miracle, when, burnish it all! if the Jubilee Queen o’ England doan’t busy herself ’bout ’e!”
“’T is true as I’m walkin’ by your side. I’d give a year o’ my wages to knaw how I could shaw what I think about it.”
“You might thank her. ’T is all as humble folks can do most times when Queens or Squires or the A’mighty Hisself spares a thought to better us. Us can awnly say ’thank you.’”
There was a silence of some duration; then Billy again bid his companion moderate his pace.
“I’m forgetting all I’ve got to tell ’e, though I’ve news enough for a buke,” he said.