A LETTER TO THE BACK-BLOCKS.
Dear Ginger,—So you have bought a very promising little gold-mine from a rollicking Irish nobleman called Patrick Terence O’Ryan, who is retiring on Mayo to take up the paternal estates. H-m!—have you? And you think you yourself will be retiring home presently on the proceeds of the said mine? H-m! again. There is a certain familiarity in your description of the gentleman. Tell me, has this Hibernian philanthropist a slight squint, a broken nose and a tendency to lisp in moments of excitement?
I think I see you nod.
Ginger, I once bought a mine from that man. His name was Algernon Maddox Cholmondely then, and he was homeward bound to assume the ancestral acres in Flint. He escorted me down the hole and displayed visible gold sparkling all along the reef. A week after he had gone I found that he had put it there with a shot-gun—an old "salter’s" trick, but new to me at the time. You are not likely to be seeing Patrick Algernon Terence Maddox O’Ryan-Cholmondely again, but, if you should, remember me to him, please—with the business end of a pick-axe. Always delighted to keep in touch with old friends.
Ginger, you never can tell. This is not an original remark. One of our brainy boys—George Bernard, unless I err—thought of it before I did; went away into the wilderness, wrapped his grey-matter in wet Jaeger bandages, subsisted on a diet of premasticated grape-nuts and produced this aphorism. And there’s a world of truth in it, my son. You certainly never can.
One fine morning last August (yes, there was one), I stepped out of my diggings in an obscure Cornish fishing-village to find a gentleman busily engaged strangling a lady on the cliff side. He had her by the throat and was gradually forcing her over the edge. Once in Bristol I interposed in a slogging contest between husband and wife and was very properly chastised for my interference, not only by the happy pair but by the entire street, who had valuable bets laid on the event. That, you say, should have been a lesson to me. But you know me, Ginger, impetuous, chivalrous, brave; I simply couldn’t stand there and watch a defenceless woman—moreover a good-looking woman—foully done to death like that. I flung myself upon the villain—that is to say I spoke to him about it.
"Oh, dash it, old bean," I said, "draw it mild!"
Somebody shouted something behind me, but I didn’t catch its purport for the sufficient reason that at that moment the long-suffering cliff gave way and we all went overboard, all three of us, he, she and it—me.
Fortunately the drop wasn’t terrific—not more than four feet or so—and the tide happened to be in at the time, which was very decent of it. My first thought as I came to the surface—or, at any rate, one of my first thoughts—was "What of the woman?" I struck out for the poor creature. At the same moment she struck out for me, and, what is more, she got me too, clean between the eyes—a straight left-hander.