“Hang your impudence, Marshall!” the gentleman would say. “Do you think I keep a furniture shop?”
“No offence, sir,” Jim would say. “Only remember, when you do want to part with it, I’m in the market.” That was how he would begin. Presently he would call on the gentleman again, and say he knew of a magnificent sideboard, two hundred years old, in an old farmhouse, that could be got cheap. And he would go on about it until, perhaps, he would work the gentleman up to buy the other sideboard and let him have the one he had a customer for, and he would make a nice thing out of the two bargains for himself.
He was very clever at it, because he knew the fancies of different people, and how to work on them. But the most impudent thing he ever did was with an old lady, who had a lovely pair of chestnut horses. A gentleman who was staying at our hotel one day saw them go by, and he said, “By Jove, that’s a fine pair of horses!—that’s just the pair I want.”
Jim Marshall was standing by at the time, and he said, “I’ll try and get ’em for you.” And he shouted, and waved his stick, and yelled at the coachman, who thought something was wrong, and pulled up.
Jim hobbled off till he came to the carriage, then raised his hat to the old lady, and said, “I beg your pardon, ma’am, but if you want to sell your horses, I’ve a customer for them.”
“What!” shrieked the old lady. And she shouted to the coachman to drive on, and pulled the window up with a bang.
Jim came back, not looking a bit ashamed of himself; and he said, “I’ve broken the ice. Now, sir, how much am I to go to for them horses?”
“The idea!” I said, for I had seen and heard everything; “as if old Mrs. —— would be likely to part with them! I do believe Jim you’d go up to a clergyman in church, and ask him what he’d take for his surplice!”
Jim smiled at that. It flattered his vanity, because nothing pleased him so much as being made out a smart fellow before London gentlemen.
“I’ll have them horses, Mrs. Beckett,” he said, “if the gentleman’ll go to a price.”