I obliged for nearly ten minutes. It was at best but a feeble rendering of M. de C.’s magnificent prose, through which the soul of the poet, the eye of the mariner, and the heart of the patriot bore magnificent accord. His account of his descent from the side of the “infamous vessel consecrated to blood” in the “vast and gathering dusk of the trembling ocean” could only be matched by his description of the dishonoured hammock sinking unnoticed through the depths, while, above, the bugler played music “of an indefinable brutality”
“By the way, what did the bugler play after Glass’s funeral?” I asked.
“Him? Oh! ’e played ‘The Strict Q.T.’ It’s a very old song. We ’ad it in Fratton nearly fifteen years back,” said Mr. Pyecroft sleepily.
I stirred the sugar dregs in my glass. Suddenly entered armed men, wet and discourteous, Tom Wessels smiling nervously in the background.
“Where is that—minutely particularised person—Glass?” said the sergeant of the picket.
“’Ere!” The marine rose to the strictest of attentions. “An’ it’s no good smelling of my breath, because I’m strictly an’ ruinously sober.”
“Oh! An’ what may you have been doin’ with yourself?”
“Listenin’ to tracts. You can look! I’ve had the evenin’ of my little life. Lead on to the Cornucopia’s midmost dunjing cell. There’s a crowd of brass-’atted blighters there which will say I’ve been absent without leaf. Never mind. I forgive them before’and. The evenin’ of my life, an’ please don’t forget it.” Then in a tone of most ingratiating apology to me: “I soaked it all in be’ind my shut eyes. ‘I’m”—he jerked a contemptuous thumb towards Mr. Pyecroft—“’e’s a flatfoot, a indigo-blue matlow. ’E never saw the fun from first to last. A mournful beggar—most depressin’.” Private Glass departed, leaning heavily on the escort’s arm.
Mr. Pyecroft wrinkled his brows in thought—the profound and far-reaching meditation that follows five glasses of hot whisky-and-water.
“Well, I don’t see anything comical—greatly—except here an’ there. Specially about those redooced charges in the guns. Do you see anything funny in it?”