“I’ll hoist you up,” said Bywater.
“No, no,” answered the man. “My old bones be past hoisting now. I should never get back alive, once I were propelled over into that graveyard.”
Bywater felt considerably discomfited. “What a weak rat you must be, old Jenkins! Why, it’s nothing!”
“I know it ain’t—for you college gents. ‘Twouldn’t have been much for me when I was your age. Skin and clothes weren’t of much account to me, then.”
“Oh, it’s that, is it?” returned Bywater, contemptuously. “Look here, old Jenkins! if your things come to grief, I’ll get my uncle to look you out some of his old ones. I’ll give you sixpence for baccy, I say!”
The old bedesman shook his head. “If you give me a waggin load of baccy, I couldn’t get over there. You might just as good put a babby in arms on the ground, and tell it to walk!”
“Here! get out of the way for an old muff!” was Bywater’s rejoinder; and in a second he had mounted the window-frame, and dropped into the burial-ground. “Now then, old Jenkins, I’ll go about and you call out when I come to the right spot.”
By these means, Bywater arrived at a solution of the question, where the broken phial was found; old Jenkins pointing out the spot, to the best of his ability. Bywater then vaulted back again, and alighted safe and sound in the cloisters. Old Jenkins asked for his sixpence.
“Why, you did not earn it!” said Bywater. “You wouldn’t get over!”
“A sixpence is always useful to me,” said the old man; “and some of you gents has ‘em in plenty. I ain’t paid much; and Joe, he don’t give me much. ‘Tain’t him; he’d give away his head, and always would—it’s her. Precious close she is with the money, though she earns a sight of it, I know, at that shop of her’n, and keeps Joe like a king. Wine, and all the rest of it, she’s got for him, since he was ill. ‘There’s a knife and fork for ye, whenever ye like to come,’ she says to me, in her tart way. But deuce a bit of money will she give. If it weren’t for one and another friend giving me an odd sixpence now and then, Master Bywater, I should never hardly get any baccy!”