“I’m all right,” he replied. “I merely dropped in to borrow the Glasgow Herald for a few minutes. I heard to-day that a ship of ours was reported as spoken, but I can’t find it in any paper that has come to us.”
“You can have the Herald with pleasure,” said I. “You didn’t go to the concert last night?”
“No,” said he. “You see it was the night of our choir practice, and I had to attend it to keep the others up to their work.”
The next night I asked the sub-editor how his friend Mr. Thompson was, and if he had experienced much difficulty in keeping him from making an onslaught upon the snakes.
He shook his head solemnly, as if his experiences of the previous night were too terrible to be expressed in ordinary colloquialisms.
“Sonny,” said he, “pray that you may never see all that I saw last night.”
“Or all that Thompson saw,” said I. “Was he very bad?”
“As bad as they make them,” he replied. “I sat on his head for hours at a stretch.”
“When he was off his head you were on it?”
“Ay; but every now and again he would, by an almost superhuman effort, toss me half way up to the ceiling. Man, it was an awful night! It’s heartless of me not being with the poor woman now; but I said I’d do a couple of hours’ work before going.”