O not think that all this time I had lost sight of my new friends, the fair-haired Dick Shafthead and the genial Teddy Lumme. On the contrary, we had had more than one merry night together, and exchanged not a few confidences. Very soon after I was settled, Dick had come round to my rooms and criticised everything, from Halfred to the curtains. His tastes were a trifle too austere to altogether appreciate these latter rather sumptuous hangings.
“They'll do for waistcoats if you ever go on the music-hall stage,” he observed, sardonically. “That's why you got 'em, perhaps?”
“The very reason, my friend,” I replied. “I cannot afford to get both new waistcoats and new curtains; just as I am compelled to employ the same person to get me out of jail and criticise my furniture.”
Dick laughed.
“You are too witty, mossyour.” (He came as near the pronunciation of my title as that.) “You should write some of these things down before you forget 'em.”
“For the French,” I retorted, “that precaution is unnecessary.”
For Halfred, I am sorry to say, he did not at first show that appreciation I had expected.
“Your 'bus-man,” was the epithet he applied behind his back; though I am bound to say his good-breeding made him so polite that Halfred, on his side, conceived the highest opinion of my friend.
“A real gentleman, Mr. Shafthead is, sir,” he confided to me. “What I calls a hunmistakable toff. He hasn't got no side on, and he speaks to one man like as he would to another. In fact, sir, he reminds me of Lord Haugustus I once seed at the Hadelphi; a nobleman what said, 'I treats hevery fellow-Briton as a gentleman so long as Britannia rules the waves and 'e behaves 'isself accordingly.'”