"In the private bar of the Robin Hood—for it boasts a public and private bar, though it stops short of making parade of a saloon bar—I encountered a cobbler drinking a tumblerful of spirits. He was becoming a cobblerful of tumblerfuls...."
"I'm sure I know that man," Judith says, in brackets. "It was the one that said he was 'mine very truly, Robert Steptoe.' Never mind!—go on...."
"But he was not too drunk to tell me that if I kept my eyes open I should see a blooming board at the end of the street. There wasn't any too much reading on it now, the boys having aimed at it successfully ever since he came to Rose Cottage—'ouse on the right—but he took it a board was always a board, reading or no. I could see for myself, by looking. It warn't trespassers; he knew that.... Do not be impatient. I am coming to the gist of my communication.... Shortly after leaving the bar of the Robin Hood, I heard some boys singing a monotonous chant. A name was frequently repeated in it; it sounded like:
'Lizarann Coupland's
Father begs for 'apence
Just round the corner
Down by the gasworks....'
And so on over and over again. I inquired of one small boy whose father it was that begged for halfpence, but he turned the conversation, and suggested that I should give him a farden kike. However, another one repeated the name gratis; and though he was too young to be quite intelligible I was satisfied that the name was Eliza Ann Copeland or Coupland."
"Why couldn't you tell us that straight off, Lord Felixthorpe?" says Judith. To which the narrator replies with a sweet smile, "My inherent prolixity, no doubt." She says absently to the wrist-watch, "No doubt!" and then, looking up at the speaker, illogically asks, "What was the rest of the story? Go on."
Her brother protests: "Come, Judith, be reasonable! You're just like the people that author-chap has been telling us about downstairs ... people who complain that his books are too long, and then ask for more. He says he's badgered for sequels, and untold gold wouldn't induce him to bring an old character into a new book."