“Ha! got no friends and nothin’ to do?” said Morley Jones.
“Jis so.”
“Well, if you have a mind to take service with me, come along an’ have a pot o’ beer.”
The man turned on his heel and walked off to a neighbouring public-house, leaving the small boy to follow or not as he pleased, and apparently quite indifferent as to what his decision might be.
Billy Towler—alias Walleye—looked after him with an air of uncertainty. He did not like the look of the man, and was about to decide against him, when the jingle of the half-crown in his pocket turned the scale in his favour. Running after him, he quietly said, “I’m your man,” and then began to whistle, at the same time making an abortive effort to keep step with his long-limbed employer, who said nothing in reply, but, entering a public-house, ordered two pots of beer. These, when produced, he and his little companion sat down to discuss in the most retired box in the place, and conversed in low tones.
“What was it brought you to Yarmouth, Walleye?” asked Mr Jones.
“Call me Billy,” said the boy, “I like it better.”
“Well, Billy—and, by the way, you may call me Morley—my name’s Jones, but, like yourself, I have a preference. Now, then, what brought you here?”
“H’m, that involves a story—a hanecdote, if I may so speak,” replied this precocious youngster with much gravity. “You see, some time arter I runn’d away from the work’us, I fell’d in with an old gen’lem’n with a bald head an’ a fat corpus. Do ’ee happen to know, Mr Morley, ’ow it is that bald heads an’ fat corpuses a’most always go together?”
Morley replied that he felt himself unable to answer that difficult question; but supposed that as good-humour was said to make people fat, perhaps it made them bald also.