Lord Lick-my-loof rose, feeling fooled—and annoyed with himself and everybody in “the cursed place.”
“Good morning, Glenwarlock,” he said. “You will live to repent this morning.”
“I hope not, my lord. I have lived nearly long enough. Good morning!”
His lordship went softly down the stair, hurried through the kitchen, and walked slowly home, thinking whether it might not be worth his while to buy up Glenwarlock’s few remaining debts.
CHAPTER LVIII.
A LITTLE LIFE WELL ROUNDED.
“Pirate or not, the old gentleman was a good judge of diamonds!” said Mr. Burns, laying down one of the largest. “Not an inferior one in all I have gone over! Your uncle was a knowing man, sir: diamonds are worth much more now than when he brought them home. These rough ones will, I trust, turn out well: we cannot be so sure of them.”
“How much suffering the earlier possession of them would have prevented!” said the laird. “And now they are ten times more welcome that we have the good of that first.”
“Sapphires and all of the finest quality!” continued Mr. Burns, in no mood for reflection. “I’ll tell you what you must do, Mr. Cosmo: you must get a few sheets of tissue paper, and wrap every stone up separately—a long job, but the better worth doing! There must be a thousand of them!”
“How can they hurt, being the hardest things in the world?” said Cosmo.
“Put them in any other company you please—wheel them to the equator in a barrowful of gravel, or line their box with sand-paper, and you may leave them naked as they were born! But, bless thy five wits! did you never hear the proverb, ‘Diamond cut diamond’? They’re all of a sort, you see! I’d as soon shut up a thousand game-cocks in the same cellar. If they don’t scratch each other, they may, or they might, or they could, or they would, or at any rate they should scratch each other. It was all very well so long as they lay in the wall of this your old diamond-mine. But now you’ll be for ever playing with them! No, no! wrap each one up by itself, I say.”