“No, no,” said Freeman, “a hanecdote—that’s what I’m fondest of—suthin’ short an’ sweet, as the little boy said to the stick o’ liquorice.”
“Tell us,” said Stubley, “how it was you come to be saved the night the Saucy Jane went down.”
“Ah! lads,” said Lockley, with a look and a tone of gravity, “there’s no fun in that story. It was too terrible and only by a miracle, or rather—as poor Fred Martin said at the time—by God’s mercy, I was saved.”
“Was Fred there at the time!” asked Duffy.
“Ay, an’ very near lost he was too. I thought he would never get over it.”
“Poor chap!” said Freeman; “he don’t seem to be likely to git over this arm. It’s been a long time bad now.”
“Oh, he’ll get over that,” returned Lockley; “in fact, it’s a’most quite well now, I’m told, an’ he’s pretty strong again—though the fever did pull him down a bit. It’s not that, it’s money, that’s keepin’ him from goin’ afloat again.”
“How’s that?” asked Puffy.
“This is how it was. He got a letter which axed him to call on a lawyer in Lun’on, who told him an old friend of his father had made a lot o’ tin out in Austeralia, an’ he died, an’ left some hundreds o’ pounds—I don’t know how many—to his mother.”
“Humph! that’s just like him, the hypercrit,” growled Joe Stubley; “no sooner comes a breeze o’ good luck than off he goes, too big and mighty for his old business. He was always preachin’ that money was the root of all evil, an’ now he’s found it out for a fact.”