“Begorra, yer a hard man! I suppose ye must have it.”
My preparations being now completed, five o’clock on the Saturday evening found me on the platform of the Amiens Street terminus.
“Hillo, Dawkins!” exclaimed Mr. Dudley Fribscombe, a brother barrister, whose father (in the bacon trade) allowed him five hundred a year. “Going as special, eh? A hundred guineas—you’re coining, by Jove!”
“No,” I replied with assumed nonchalance, “just running down to Rathdangan Castle to spend a few days with the Didcotes.” I never felt better pleased in my life. This fellow was always sneering at the poverty of his briefless brothers, and as his people happened to reside near Rathdangan, but were of course unvisited, my red-hot shot told with withering effect.
“Oh! indeed,” he muttered. “What an awful swell! Going second?”
“First,” was my sententious reply.
“Let us travel together.”
“All right.”
Now, my intention was to have taken a second-class ticket, but the tone of Fribscombe altered my mind. What a crisis in my destiny as I walked to the booking office! What a pivot in my fate!
Had I travelled second—but I will not anticipate.