“Oh, it’s good enough. An auctioneer must be up ’bove his crowd, you know. Fun for ye now, boys, I tell ye. I was always great on it, and I guess I’m good for it now. Where’s that firkin?”
The firkin was brought, turned upside down, and Joe mounted it. He had forgotten a part of his speech, but it made no difference in his enjoyment of his fancied brilliant success. He gesticulated, jumped up and down, endeavored to work up into buying mood his audience with frequent threats like this, “Goin’, goin’, genlummum!” The bottom of a butter firkin can stand what is reasonable, but what self–respecting firkin will submit to everything? Joe’s would not. In the midst of several infuriated shrieks. “Goin’, goin’, genlummum,” his audience looking on with a silent but manifest sneer, several heard a suspicious “cr—cr—ack!” Joe in his intense admiration of the performer did not hear it. He gave another jump, the word “gone” issuing from his throat, when the firkin emphasized this threat by suddenly withdrawing its bottom, and “gone” it was for the auctioneer! Down he came, partly in the firkin and partly outside of it, falling in a very mixed condition. The club roared. Any merriment was now sincere. The president forgot all his dignity and joined in the laugh. The secretary was always ready for any fun. As for Joe, he was mad. He declared that he had been insulted. “Fool!” he shouted at Walter. “What you larfin’ at?” Leering at the company in his rage and mortification, he rushed out of doors.
“Guess he’ll cool off there,” observed the president. “We will have the next exercise.”
This was the “Opening of the Drawer.” Any one was at liberty to drop into an imaginary drawer any question about the papers. He could ask it orally, or write it on a slip of paper. The club would then attempt to answer the question.
After a session of two hours, this company of literati broke up. It resolved itself into a station–crew again. Distinguished orators and able writers changed into hungry surfmen around a supper table where huge cups of coffee sent up little clouds of fragrant steam. There was a further change into patrolmen in thick Scotch caps, and Guernsey jackets and heavy, stamping boots, into watchers for the night coming and going. At last the unemployed members of the Literary Club were all soundly snoring under thick army blankets, the little kitchen was deserted, save by the keeper, and the stove made but a faint little murmur by the side of that great black ocean thundering on the rocks and roaring all through the cold, black night.
CHAPTER XVI.
AN UGLY NIGHT.
The Advent days had now come, when the winds blow keen across the frozen ground, and nature seems to be in a violent grief over sins it had hoped to bury in frosty graves forever, but which will not quietly lie there. “Beyond Advent though is Christmas,” thought Walter, “and I shall spend it at Uncle Boardman’s. Father and mother will be there.”