“It’s all right,” I said; “I’m getting down in a minute myself;” and sure enough, in less than that time, I pulled up in front of the Central, where I gave the reins to a man, who delightedly exclaimed—
“Oh, McGovan’s got him!”
My prisoner gave me a look—long and steady—which spoke more than a thousand words, and then I helped him down with the words—
“Come away, Johnston; we’ve had a very successful drive, haven’t we, though it has been disagreeably wet?”
He replied in the affirmative, but the language in which it was couched was not clerical. That lift on the road cost him just five years’ penal servitude. I shall allude to him again.
THE ORGAN-GRINDER’S MONEY-BAG.
When the organ-grinder appeared in a distracted state at the Office, his face was quite familiar to me through seeing him on the streets and at race-courses and other gatherings with his organ. He was a big-bodied, swarthy man, with a full black beard, and, of course, till that moment I had taken him for an Italian. To hear the Irish brogue come pouring in a torrent out of his mouth, therefore, was a little startling. His very grief, and earnestness, and evident unconsciousness of anything ludicrous added comicality to the discovery, and it was with the greatest difficulty that I restrained a smile while he incoherently made known his loss.
“The savings of tin years tuck from me in a lump,” he groaned, with a shower of lamentations; “and however the thafe did it, or found out where my money was, or that I had any to stale, I can’t for the life of me tell; for even my friend Tom Joson here thought I hadn’t a penny, and didn’t know where it was kept.”
The friend thus alluded to bobbed to me, and I recognised him also as a street musician. He was a lame man, and used a crutch and stick to move about, and his instrument was a tin whistle. Sometimes, I think, he used two of these whistles tied together, and he affected to be much more lame and helpless than he really was. His favourite “pitch” was to squat cross-legged at the edge of the pavement on the Mound with his crutch and stick ostentatiously displayed before him, and a tin mug placed on the kerb ready for contributions, and there he droned out his tunes, generally of a plaintive character, for hours together, with wonderful taste and skill. He got drunk at times, and became troublesome, and had to go to jail to cool down.
That was the man who now bobbed to me, and shook his head dolefully over his friend’s misfortune.