‘Your friend Colledge don’t sing ill,’ he exclaimed with the complacent grin he usually put on before delivering himself. ‘Do you feel equal to a small bet?’
‘What’s the wager to be about?’
‘I bet you,’ said he, closing one eye, ‘twenty shillings to a crown that Mr. Colledge and Miss Temple will have plighted their troth before we strike the longitude of the Cape of Good Hope.’
‘Why not latitude?’ said I.
‘Why, my dear sir, don’t you see that the longitude gives me a broader margin?’ And the fellow was actually beginning to explain the difference between latitude and longitude, when I cut him short.
‘I’ll not bet,’ said I; ‘I have no wish to win your money on a certainty. They won’t be engaged, and so you’d better keep your sovereign.’
He whistled low, and with a melancholy attempt at a comical cast of countenance, exclaimed: ‘Ah, I see how it goes. It is the wish, my friend, that’s father to the thought. But Lor’ preserve us; my dear Mr. Dugdale, do you suppose that a young lady after her pattern would ever condescend to cast her eye upon anything even the sixtieth part of one single degree beneath the level of the son of a baron and heir to the title and property?’
‘Do you recollect,’ said I, ‘how your name-sake Dr. Samuel Johnson told his friends that being teased by a neighbour at table to give his opinion on Horace or Virgil, I forget which, he immediately fixed his attention on thoughts of Punch and Judy? Suffer me now to imitate that great man and to think of Punch and Judy.’
‘Here comes Punch, I do believe,’ said he with a good-natured laugh.
As he spoke, up rose the figure of Colonel Bannister from the quarter-deck. His face was red with temper, his eyes sparkled, and his white whiskers stood out like spikes of light from a flame. We happened to be the first persons he came across as he climbed the ladder.