But the very next morning a man riding back from Croydon called, and stuck his head under the veranda eaves with a bush greeting, and she told him all about it.
He straightened up, and tickled the back of his head with his little finger, and gaped at her for a minute.
“Why,” he said, “that wasn’t no excise officer. I know him well—I was drinking with him at the Royal last night afore we went to bed, an’ had a nip with him this morning afore we started. Why! that’s Bobby Howell, Burns and Bridges’ traveller, an’ a good sort when he wakes up, an’ willin’ with the money when he does good biz, especially when there’s a chanst of a drink on a long road on a dark night.”
“That Harry Chatswood again! The infernal villain,” she cried, with a jerk of her arm. “But I’ll be even with him, the dirrty blaggard. An’ to think—I always knew Old Jack was a white man an’—to think! There’s fourteen shillin’s gone that Old Jack would have paid me, an’ the traveller was good for three shillin’s f’r the nips, an’—but Old Jack will pay me next time, and I’ll be even with Harry Chatswood, the dirrty mail carter. I’ll take it out of him in parcels—I’ll be even with him.”
She never saw Old Jack again with fourteen shillings, but she got even with Harry Chatswood, and—But I’ll tell you about that some other time. Time for a last smoke before we turn in.
MATESHIP IN SHAKESPEARE’S ROME
How we do misquote sayings, or misunderstand them when quoted rightly! For instance, we “wait for something to turn up, like Micawber,” careless or ignorant of the fact that Micawber worked harder than all the rest put together for the leading characters’ sakes; he was the chief or only instrument in straightening out of the sadly mixed state of things—and he held his tongue till the time came. Moreover—and “Put a pin in that spot, young man,” as Dr “Yark” used to say—when there came a turn in the tide of the affairs of Micawber, he took it at the flood, and it led on to fortune. He became a hardworking settler, a pioneer—a respected early citizen and magistrate in this bright young Commonwealth of ours, my masters!
And, by the way, and strictly between you and me, I have a shrewd suspicion that Uriah Heep wasn’t the only cad in David Copperfield.
Brutus, the originator of the saying, took the tide at the flood, and it led him and his friends on to death, or—well, perhaps, under the circumstances, it was all the same to Brutus and his old mate, Cassius.