The Observations of Henry

by Jerome K. Jerome

sovereign extra on to the bill,” I says. “That’ll more likely do the trick.”

And so it did, with the result that in another twenty minutes me and young Milberry and the bull-pup in its hamper were in a third-class carriage on our way to Birmingham. Then the difficulties of the chase began to occur to me. Suppose by luck I was right; suppose the pup was booked for the Birmingham Dog Show; and suppose by a bit more luck a gent with a hamper answering description had been noticed getting out of the 5.13 train; then where were we? We might have to interview every cabman in the town. As likely as not, by the time we did find the kid, it wouldn’t be worth the trouble of unpacking. Still, it wasn’t my cue to blab my thoughts. The father, poor fellow, was feeling, I take it, just about as bad as

he wanted to feel. My business was to put hope into him; so when he asked me for about the twentieth time if I thought as he would ever see his child alive again, I snapped him up shortish.

“Don’t you fret yourself about that,” I says. “You’ll see a good deal of that child before you’ve done with it. Babies ain’t the sort of things as gets lost easily. It’s only on the stage that folks ever have any particular use for other people’s children. I’ve known some bad characters in my time, but I’d have trusted the worst of ’em with a wagon-load of other people’s kids. Don’t you flatter yourself you’re going to lose it! Whoever’s got it, you take it from me, his idea is to do the honest thing, and never rest till he’s succeeded in returning it to the rightful owner.”

Well, my talking like that cheered him, and when we reached Birmingham he was easier. We tackled the station-master, and he tackled all the porters who could have been about the platform when the 5.13 came in. All of ’em agreed that no gent got out of that train carrying a hamper. The station-master was a family man himself, and when we explained the case to him he sympathised and telegraphed to Banbury. The booking-clerk at Banbury remembered only three gents booking by that particular train. One had been Mr. Jessop, the corn-chandler; the second was a stranger, who had booked to Wolverhampton; and the third had been young Milberry himself. The business began to look hopeless, when one of Smith’s newsboys, who was hanging around, struck in:

“I see an old lady,” says he, “hovering about outside the station, and a-hailing cabs, and she had a hamper with her as was as like that one there as two peas.”

I thought young Milberry would have fallen upon the boy’s neck and kissed him. With the boy to help us, we started among the cabmen. Old ladies with dog-baskets ain’t so difficult to trace. She had gone to a small second-rate hotel in the Aston Road. I heard all particulars from the chambermaid, and the old girl seems to have had as bad a time in her way as my gent had in his. They couldn’t get the hamper into the cab, it had to go on the top. The old lady was very worried, as it was raining at the time, and she made the cabman cover it with his apron. Getting it off the cab they dropped the whole

thing in the road; that woke the child up, and it began to cry.

“Good Lord, Ma’am! what is it?” asks the chambermaid, “a baby?”

“Yes, my dear, it’s my baby,” answers the old lady, who seems to have been a cheerful sort of old soul—leastways, she was cheerful up to then. “Poor dear, I hope they haven’t hurt him.”