“Thank’ee, but I prefer to come here,” said the shoemaker, ostentatiously sipping his lemonade. “I like to listen to your tales of the sea. In a quiet way I get a lot of amusement out of ’em.”
“Do you disbelieve my word?” demanded Mr. Ketchmaid, hotly.
“Why, o’ course I do,” replied the shoemaker; “we all do. You’d see how silly they are yourself if you only stopped to think. You and your sharks!—no shark would want to eat you unless it was blind.”
Mr. Ketchmaid allowed this gross reflection on his personal appearance to pass unnoticed, and for the first time of many evenings sat listening in torment as the shoemaker began the narration of a series of events which he claimed had happened to a seafaring nephew. Many of these bore a striking resemblance to Mr. Ketchmaid’s own experiences, the only difference being that the nephew had no eye at all for the probabilities.
In this fell work Mr. Clark was ably assisted by the offended Mr. Summers. Side by side they sat and quaffed lemonade, and burlesqued the landlord’s autobiography, the only consolation afforded to Mr. Ketchmaid consisting in the reflection that they were losing a harmless pleasure in good liquor. Once, and once only, they succumbed to the superior attractions of alcohol, and Mr. Ketchmaid, returning from a visit to his brewer at the large seaport of Burnsea, heard from the ostler the details of a carouse with which he had been utterly unable to cope.
The couple returned to lemonade the following night, and remained faithful to that beverage until an event transpired which rendered further self-denial a mere foolishness.
It was about a week later, Mr. Ketchmaid had just resumed his seat after serving a customer, when the attention of all present was attracted by an odd and regular tapping on the brick-paved passage outside. It stopped at the tap-room, and a murmur of voices escaped at the open door. Then the door was closed, and a loud, penetrating voice called on the name of Sol Ketchmaid.
“Good Heavens!” said the amazed landlord, half-rising from his seat and falling back again, “I ought to know that voice.”
“Sol Ketchmaid,” bellowed the voice again; “where are you, shipmate?”
“Hennery Wiggett!” gasped the landlord, as a small man with ragged whiskers appeared at the wicket, “it can’t be!”