Already, I was beginning to think that Mr. K. B. Horsfal had erred in regard to his man and that it was Jake Meaghan who was twenty-four carat gold.
If any man ever did deserve two breakfast cups brimful of whisky, neat, before turning in, it was old, walrus-moustached, weather-battered, baby-eyed, sour-dough Jake, in the small, early hours of that Sabbath morning.
I slept that night like a dead thing, and the sun was high in the heavens before I opened my eyes and became conscious again of my surroundings.
I looked over at the clock. Fifteen minutes past ten! I threw my legs over the side of the bed, ashamed of my sluggardliness.
Then I remembered,—it was Sunday morning.
Oh! glorious remembering! Sunday,—-with nothing to do but attend to my own bodily comforts.
I pulled my legs back into the bed in order to start the day correctly. I lay and stretched myself, then, very leisurely,—always remembering that it was the Sabbath,—I put one foot out and then the other, until, at last, I stood on the floor, really and truly up and awake.
Jake had been around. I could see traces of him in the yard, though he was nowhere visible in the flesh.
After I had breakfasted and made my bed (I know little Maisie Brant, who used to make my bed away back over in the old home—little Maisie who had wept at my departure, would have laughed till she wept again, had she seen my woful endeavours to straighten out my sheets and smooth my pillow. But then, she was not there to see and laugh and—I was quite satisfied with my handiwork and satisfied that I would be able to sleep soundly in the bed when the night should come again)—I hunted the shelves for a book.
Stevenson, Poe, Scott, Hugo, Wells, Barrie, Dumas, Twain, Emerson, Byron, Longfellow, Burns,—which should it be?