“You don’t mean to tell us to our faces that you wear it?”
“I wear it always,” freely answered Van Rheyn.
Jessup took it off his neck, and the boys passed it about from one to another. They did not ridicule the cross—I think the emblem on it prevented that—but they ridiculed Van Rheyn.
“A friend of mine went over to the tar-and-feather islands,” said Millichip, executing an aggravating war-dance round about Charley. “He found the natives sporting no end of charms and amulets—nearly all the attire they did sport—rings in the nose and chains in the ears. What relation are those natives to you, Miss Charlotte?”
“Don’t injure it, please,” pleaded Van Rheyn.
“We’ve an ancient nurse at home who carries the tip of a calf’s tongue in her pocket for luck,” shrieked Thorne. “And I’ve heard—I have heard, Bristles—that any fellow who arms himself with a pen’orth of blue-stone from the druggist’s, couldn’t have the yellow jaundice if he tried. What might you wear this for, pray?”
“My Aunt Annette gave it me as a present when she was dying,” answered poor helpless Charley, who had never the smallest notion of taking chaff otherwise than seriously, or of giving chaff back again.
He had dressed himself to his trousers and shirt, and stood with his hand stretched out, waiting for his cross.
“In the Worcester Journal, one day last June, I read an advertisement as big as a house, offering a child’s caul for sale,” cried Snepp. “Any gentleman or lady buying that caul and taking it to sea, could never be drowned. Bristles thinks as long as he wears this, he won’t come to be hanged.”
“How’s your grandmother, Miss Charlotte?”