Weelum immediately resumed his slumbers, but I didn’t, and after tossing around for half-an-hour or so, I grabbed him by the hand—he was sleeping opposite me—and cried, “Weelum, Weelum, wake up.”
He accommodatingly did, and then I very seriously said to him: “Weelum, do you know that when I said it was 4.10 it wasn’t. It was 4.15.”
“Oh, go to blazes, you old heathen yon. What did you want to wake me up for to tell me that?”
“Weelum, say, Weelum,”—but he would not listen to what I had to say.
Finally I managed to make him hear me, and I explained that I had been brought up by good God-fearing parents, who had admonished me never to go to sleep with a lie on my lips, and that my conscience wouldn’t let me sleep until I had confessed my sin.
His unmistakable directions as to my immediate destination, which wasn’t Quebec, were forcibly given, and to the sweet music of his impassioned declamation as to the innumerable varieties of a blithering idiot that I was, I peacefully fell asleep, while his continued sarcastic remarks were rendered inaudible by the roar of the wheels.
Floored James Oborne.
On another occasion, we were out in James Oborne’s private car through the Muskoka country. James, as you know, besides being general superintendent of the C.P.R. was a total abstainer, and as pernickety as they make them on the liquor question. As James and I were sitting together one morning in the rear end of the car, Weelum’s name came up incidentally, and I remarked quite off-hand-like:
“Weelum is a grand man, a nature’s nobleman, but—but—”
“But, what?” demanded James.