"By being drowned."
"Your fate is perhaps a drier one. You are, I suppose, a seafaring man?"
"I am an old soldier, and have served in the Cornish Light Infantry, as boy and man, for one-and-twenty years, and have earned my shilling a day from the Queen, God bless her! so don't crack your stale joke on me," said Derrick grimly and emphatically, as he surveyed the new-comer, whose face, somehow, seemed not unfamiliar to him.
He was attired in clothes a world too wide for him; the collar of his coat rested on the nape of his neck, and its sleeve cuffs fell well nigh over his fingers; the legs of his trousers flapped loosely over his broken boots, and the tall shiny hat which he had deposited on the deal table, after carefully wiping it with a coloured handkerchief, had evidently seen better days upon another and perhaps honester head. His brow was low and narrow; the frontal bones projecting over keen eyes of a nondescript colour, and a mean turned-up nose. Mistrust, acuteness, suspicion and avarice, were the leading expressions of his face, which would have horrified a disciple of Lavater; yet, in the tone of his voice, and in his manner, there was an affectation of deferential suavity, as if he sought to win rather than to repel a confidence that few, unless very simple indeed, would accord to one with lips so thin and cruel, and whose ears, like those of a cat, were nearly on the line of his pericranium, which was covered by a few wisps of thin, grey, and dead-looking hair. Yet this ugly personage has been described to the reader before.
Perceiving that his jest had not been appreciated by the veteran, he resumed the conversation in a different style.
"Know these parts?" said he, drinking his gin-and-water, and fixing his eyes furtively on Derrick.
"Think I should," was the curt response.
"Ah"—
There was a pause; then the other said,—
"Many hereabout will be surprised to hear of old Derrick Braddon coming to earth again."