he quoted, with many theatrical gestures.
"You seem to know a wonderful lot of poetry, sir," said Sam, with the inward reservation that this generous stranger was certainly something of a harmless lunatic.
"I could speak verse to you for hours, friend—beautiful stuff from all the greatest poets, living and dead. Will it interest you at all if I recite a page or two from Homer's Iliad or from Byron's Childe Harold?"
Both Sam and Bill would have preferred a page or two from a sporting paper, but the rich spirit, so unfamiliar to their palates, had made them amiably disposed towards the eccentric tourist, and quite ready to humour his whims.
"Give it mouth, guv'nor," said Bill, settling himself down in the dried bracken again.
"Fire away, sir," said Sam.
And "fire away" the stranger did, spouting yards of rigmarole which the two plain-clothes men tried in vain to follow. To them, it was duller even than the prosiest magisterial speeches they had ever heard in Court. It made them sleepy; they could scarcely refrain from yawning in his face.
Bill kept closing his eyes, and each time he remembered himself it took a still greater effort to open them again. Sam, too, grew drowsier and drowsier. The sound of the reciter's voice appeared to become muffled and distant; was he wound up for the day—would he never stop?
"That'll do, guv'nor," Bill protested at last. "Had—'bout 'nuff of it. Can't keep awake—if you go on—much—longer."
"'Ear, 'ear, Bill," murmured Sam, forgetting to be polite. "Them's my—sentiments—'xactly."