“It vasn't me at all,” protested the hawker. “It vas another Isaac Benjamin altogether.”
“What did he do?” asked Cockney Smith.
“He had a store in Brisbane,” said Young, “and insured the stock for about two thousand quid,{*} and made an awful fuss about his being so careful of fire. He bought about fifty of them round glass bottles full of a sort of stuff called fire exstinker—bottles that you can hang up on a nail with a bit of string, or put on shelves, or anywhere, and if a place catches on fire, they burst, and the exstinker liquid sends out a sort of gas which puts out a fire in no time. One'll do the trick.
* “Quid”: £1.
“Well, this chap—of course it isn't your fault, Ikey, that your name is the same as his—was dead set on getting that two thousand quid for his stock, which was only worth about five hundred. But he was such a downy cove—did you ever come acrost him, Ikey?”
“No, never,” emphatically replied the hawker, “and he vasn't no relation of mine either.”
“Well, as I was saying, he was always making a fearful fuss about a fire, and as he was a member of the Fire Brigade Board, he was always bringing forward ressylutions at the Committee meetings for a better water supply, and all that sort of thing, and he gave a five pound note to the driver of the fire engine because he was a temperance man of fifteen years' standing, and set a noble example to the Brigade. Did you hear about that, Ikey?”
“No, I didn't,” answered the hawker uneasily.
“Well, he did. He hated liquor in any shape or form, he said, and wouldn't sell any in his store on no account whatever, and wanted all the Fire Brigade men and other public servants to take the pledge. And the noosepapers said he was a great-hearted phillyanthropist.
“He had two boys in the store to help him—was it two, Ikey?”