I did not doubt it.
“You think the juniors protest too much?” said I.
The reporter laughed shrewdly.
“You remember Punch’s picture of the man lying drunk on the pavement, and the compassionate lady in the crowd who asked if the poor fellow was ill, at which a man says, ‘Ill? ‘im ill? I only wish I’d alf his complaint’?”
I admitted that I had a vivid recollection of the picture; but I added that I could not see what it had to say to the subject we were discussing.
Again the reporter smiled.
“If you had seen the chap’s face to-day when I talked of the sovereign you would know what I meant; his face said quite plainly, ‘I wish I had half of that insult.’”
That view was quite intelligible to me some time after, when a reporter, whose failings were notorious, came to me with the old story. He had been offered half-a-crown by a man in a good social position who had been fined at the police court that day for being drunk and assaulting a constable, and who was anxious that no record of the transaction should appear in the newspaper.
“Great heavens!” said I, “he had the face to offer you half-a-crown?”
“He had,” said the reporter, indignantly. “Half-a-crown! The low hound! He knew that if I included his case in to-morrow’s police news he would lose his situation, and yet he had the face to offer me half-a-crown. What hounds there are in the world! Two pounds would have been little enough.”