But when we got to the station we had just missed a train, and had an hour to wait, so we went to the Railway Hotel. I sat down in a little room, and had some tea, while Harry went into the smoke-room to hear the talk, and see if he could find out about the place being haunted, and if it was likely to be haunted long.
In half an hour he came back looking very queer. “Mary Jane,” he said, “that swab ought to be prosecuted”—meaning the landlord of the inn we had been after.
Then he told me what he’d found out in the smoke-room, hearing a man talk, who, of course, didn’t know who Harry was. He was making quite a joke about what he called the landlord’s “artful dodge,” and he let it all out.
It seems the place we had been after had been going down for months, and the landlord had made up his mind to get out of it before he lost all his capital. So to get a good price he had been getting a lot of loafers and fellows about the village to come in and have drinks with him and fill up the place, and the day we came nobody paid for anything, and the farmers in the coffee-room were all his friends, and it was one man who kept taking all the bedrooms that the servant came in about when we were there.
Wasn’t it wicked? But it opened our eyes, and showed us that there are tricks in every trade, and that we should have to be very careful how we took a place by its appearance.
But, cautious as we were after that, we had one or two narrow escapes, and I may as well tell you something about them as a warning to young people going into business. Of course we laughed at the tricks tried to be played on us, because we escaped being taken in, but if we had invested our money and lost it all in a worthless concern, we shouldn’t have been able to laugh. Perhaps Harry would have had to get another ship, and I should have had to get another situation, and be a servant again. And a nice thing that would have been with my ba——
But I must not anticipate events. I know more about writing now than I did when I put my “Memoirs” together, and I’m going to see if I can’t write a book about our inn, and our village, and all that happened in them, without troubling the gentleman who was so kind to me over my first book. I wish he had seen to the outside as well as the inside, and prevented that nasty, impertinent, grinning policeman behaving so disgracefully in my kitchen on the cover.
I say we can afford to laugh now; and there are many things in life to laugh at when we are on the safe side that we might cry at if we weren’t. I know that I always laugh when people say about me not having changed my initials, but being Mary Jane Beckett instead of Mary Jane Buffham, and they quote the old proverb:
“Change your name and not the letter,
Change for the worse and not the better.”
I laugh, because I have changed for the better; and Harry’s as good as gold and as gentle as a baby—well, a good deal gentler, for I shouldn’t like Harry to pull my hair, and put his finger in my eye, and kick me like my ba——