"Shut up!" exclaimed Tinkleby. "Go on, Bos."
"He never came a wink too soon,
Nor brought too long a day;
But now"—
continued the reciter with a great amount of pathos,
—"I often wish the night
Had bawn my breath away!"
"So do I," mumbled Paterson. "Let's have another song."
"I remembah, I remembah,
The roses, red and white—"
"Go on, Bossy," ejaculated the irrepressible Dorris; "you don't remember it at all, you're simply making it up as you go along."
A general disturbance followed this last interruption—the audience laughed, the president vainly endeavoured to restore order, and Boswell-Jones sat down in a rage, and refused to continue his oration.
"A song, a song!" cried several voices. "Jack Fenleigh, you know something; come on, let's have it."
Jack had a good voice, and with Mead extracting fearful groans and growls out of the harmonium, he started off on the first verse of "The Mermaid," a song which he was destined in after years to sing under strangely different circumstances:—