When the General Nuisance grinned, homicidal tendencies soiled minds of the most virgin whiteness.
The Captain took his pipe out and tapped it on his boot. It was a command that even the revolutionary spirit of the General Nuisance dared not disregard. It had the authority of an Act of Parliament.
“Well, brethren,” said the General Nuisance, “they are bringing Carteret and Elphinstone, that’s all.”
“And the Trenthams, too?” said I.
“And the Trenthams, too,” said he.
“It’s a good job we’re a good team,” said the Humourist.
It is true that the Secretary sat behind the Captain’s chair, but in the course of three minutes he contrived to emit such a quantity of language of a free and painful character, that to relieve the tension the Humourist kindly propounded this conundrum. Why is Bobby Abel batting like Lawson’s small talk? Because to look at ’em you’d wonder how they could. This, I regret to say, is quite in the Humourist’s early manner, ere art had chastened nature. It lacks the polished pathos of those slow-drawn agonies at which the world grew pale. But as the Humourist strutted in his title because he took himself quite seriously, do not let us forget that this offspring of his wit was born in an hour of mental stress.
CHAPTER II
Coming Events
AT six next morning my man found me in pyjamas, flourishing a bat up and down a chalk line on the bedroom carpet.
“Are you quite sure it’s perfectly straight, William?”