Then, after a moment’s silence, he continued:
“What a room this is! Splendid thing to be rich and feel that all your money belongs to you. Not any swindling tricks for me, money or no money. Besides, the money that comes that way don’t stay. Haven’t I seen the major and the rest flush of it, a hundred times? Then it was sure to go and they were hard up again. They’ll bring up, one of these days, where the dogs can’t get at them. Wonder what that big book is on the table? Ha—that’s a queer Bible. Saw one before on a steamboat. Saw another in a hotel. Best hotel I ever stopped at. Curious sort of book. It’s what they preach about. Guess I’ll look into it one of these days. Let me see, wasn’t there something like that book away back there, years ago? So there was. Then my father couldn’t have been of Major Montague’s kind. Wonder if my folks were Bible folks. Dr. Manning’s are. Is that what makes ’em rich? There’s a good many things I don’t know, and that’s one of ’em.”
A good many things, indeed, and Bar had got into the right sort of hands to learn some of them.
Hours later, when at last sleep came to him, a dream came with it, and it seemed to him as if he were a very little boy indeed, and a very sweet-faced lady, whose way of smiling made him think of Mrs. Manning, held him on her knee while a tall, dark, pale-looking gentleman read to her from just such a big book as that on the table in his chamber.
Dreams are very curious things, as everybody knows, only it’s the fashion to laugh at them, and so, perhaps, Barnaby ought to have laughed at his when he awoke.
He didn’t, however, do any such thing, but he would have liked to know somebody well enough to tell it, and there was no such person, for him, in the wide world.
Bar was right, however, about Major Montague.
The preparations for the trip of the two boys to the seashore were such as could easily be made in half an hour, and they were off together on the early train, well supplied with all sorts of fishing-tackle, and brimful of high spirits and expectation.
Even Bar, however, had scarcely guessed how closely his movements had been followed the day before.
Scarcely had he been gone two hours, and while the doctor was busy with his morning list of “callers,” among the latter came a gentleman whom the good physician thought he would have recognized, from Bar’s description, even if he had not introduced himself as Major Montague.