Morty--after an eclipse somewhat protracted--being at length
emancipated from the shadow of the brocade bed-curtains, having changed
his skin, shaved, and attired himself--by parental request--in his
Mess-uniform, came down to the five o’clock dinner--a feast comprising
every delicacy most beloved of the young man.
Morty was in great spirits. The solemn butler--who had presided over
the sideboard of an Archbishop--condescended to smile at his jokes, and
the three powdered footmen openly sniggered. All the female servants
were gathered on the upper landing listening and giggling and admiring.
Jowell, too, was in great form.
He had--like other bulky birds of the carrion-feeding kind--who
display excitement when there are preparations amongst humans for
hostilities--been clumsily flying from place to place, making Contracts
and Arrangements. He would be at the Horse Guards one moment--at the
Admiralty the next, at Plymouth, Southampton, or Portsmouth before
you could turn round. He had seen all the fine sights his boy had
missed.... The Queen’s Review of the Baltic Fleet, and the Embarkation
of the Guards, as of the first Drafts of Regiments of the Line--and
he described these stirring sights to his wife and son in the
characteristic Jowellian way.
“It brought tears to My Eyes--it did, upon my word!” he assured his
hearers, in reference to such and such a demonstration of patriotic
enthusiasm. And whether he spoke the truth or not, the water certainly
stood in those bulging orbs of his, as he bade the archiepiscopal
butler bring forth his most ancient white-sealed Port, wherein to
pledge his newly-recovered son.
“To my dear boy’s health! Good luck to him, and God bless him!” he
proposed, goggling fondly at the large young figure in the scarlet
Mess-Jacket, through the tawny-golden wine. The next glass was
swallowed to the toast of “The Queen, our Army and our Allies!” while
the third was “Here’s to the Flour, Forage, Freightage, and Transport
Trade. Large Profits and No returns!”
He chuckled so over this cryptic sentiment (which Cowell, Shoell,
Sewell and Co. would have perfectly understood and enthusiastically
applauded)--that he choked in his wine, and gasped and crowed so
awfully that his wife--upon her way to the door, which Morty, with his
recently-acquired gloss of good manners rather too obviously upon him,
held open--was fain to pause behind her husband’s chair and pat him
on the back. And then she kissed her son, whispering. “Not too much
wine, my dearest!” And with a wistful smile at her one joy, went away
to sit and knit at stockings for him, in a gorgeous gilded desert of
drawing-rooms, opening one out of the other.
Left alone, Morty chatted with his sire, and found him well-informed
and interesting. He knew so many things at first-hand. For instance,
how many picked squadrons went to the Cavalry Division that was
under orders for the East, and what vessels these warriors and their
steeds would sail in. For as the British Government possessed but
three available transports, Britannia may be said to have leaned with
confidence, at this juncture, upon the bosom of Jowell. Who--it not
being desirable that lofty officials should soil their fingers with
such vulgar transactions--not only acted as the Government’s middleman
or agent, in the hire and charter of such vessels of the Regular Screw
Steamship Company; the Eastern and Occidental Steamship Company; and
the Antipodean Company, as had been marked down for War-Service--and
reaped very considerable profit and enrichment from such mediation--but
for the conveyance of the heavier munitions of War; the Forage, the
Commissariat Stores, and the horses of the Cavalry and Artillery--had
been privileged to place his own private fleet of sailing-vessels and
steamers at the service of an appreciative country.
It is to be whispered here, that the knowledge of ships and maritime
matters indubitably possessed by Thompson Jowell had been gained by
that great man in his earlier years, while serving in the humble
capacity of private in a Regiment of Marines....
The private soared to become Quartermaster-Sergeant, and married the
penniless orphan daughter of a Naval Surgeon. Being of a bilious
temperament, and invariably deadly sick when upon sea-service, Thompson
Jowell made haste to retire, upon a nest-egg that he had accumulated
by the sweat of the brow of a true-born Englishman.... Which nest-egg,
being invested in the shop, stock, and goodwill of a ship’s chandler
and drysalter--later expanding into a rope walk (taken over for
a bad trade-debt), and in process of time engulfing the business
of a bankrupt forage merchant--was in time to hatch out the Great
Contractor, the glory of his age.
He was in a beaming, radiant mood upon this particular afternoon.
Smiles garlanded his large visage, even his rummaging, sniffing nose
was cocked at a less aggressive angle, say forty-five instead of sixty
degrees.... As the wine warmed him--though he could drink enough of his
old tawny port to float a jolly-boat, without overheating or muddling
the hard, sharp little brain enclosed in his pear-shaped skull--the
strings of his tongue were loosed, and he spoke to his son and heir as
to a second self, unreservedly.
He had attended at the newly-created Transport Office at the Admiralty,
and had secured fresh Contracts--and he had been to the Victualling
Office--(also a sub-department of the first-named Institution) and
there he had received such gracious usage at the hands of the presiding
genius, Mr. Commissary-General Blunder, that it had brought the tears
into his eyes again.
Pray take a glimpse of Mr. Commissary-General Blunder, whose name was
later to be spelt by prejudiced Press correspondents and critics of
the Commission of ’56 with an initial to be found much later in the
alphabet.
* * * * *
Comparatively obscure, previously to this period, you found him
suddenly become all-powerful in half-a-dozen Departments. He was
indubitably an official of great experience, having been present at
the later Peninsular battles of the Duke’s time, in the character
of a Director of Wagon Trains--unhappily abolished during the days
of the Prince Regent, and not yet replaced by any organized means
of Land Transport. Now you saw him as a little dry, meager man of
seventy, his baldness covered with a black, scratch-wig, his sharp
black eyes looking out over angular cheek-bones, scrawled with strange
characters as though in official red-ink. Topped with the cocked-hat
of a Brigadier-General, his little round pot-stomach buttoned up in
the epauletted gold-laced swallowtail of Full Dress, he was barely a
stately or imposing figure. But later, he was to reveal himself as a
powerful Necromancer, who with so many strokes of a pen would create a
squadron of paper horses, clap these unsubstantial beasts between the
legs of as many solid, British troopers, and make the Nation pay for
them in good hard money. Or, with a wave of the same inky wand he would
command forage and rations, shirts and great-coats and blankets to be
compounded and formed out of impalpable air; so that real horses and
real men might feed upon these shadows and be clothed with them.
Newly endued with the power to pay away vast sums of Government money,
it is little wonder that Mr. Commissary-General Blunder seemed to
Jowell a being almost divine. By dint of perching him upon the piled-up
bodies of his forty Commissariat staff-clerks, the Contractor saw
him--and conveyed to his son the impression that he too saw him--as a
giant rather than a dwarf.... Hearken to Thompson Jowell, enlarging in
his idol’s praise....
“Comes into the Office--hangs up his hat himself--cracks a joke with
the head of his staff of clerks--a Man Like That--who has authority,
in case of need, to communicate direct with Foreign Governments--and
can dip his hand in the Treasury as if it was his own breeches’
pocket.... ‘The weather’s warum, Colonel Jinkins,’ says he, in
his sing-song Northern drawl--by the New Order they have military
ranks according to grade, and, by Gosh! you should see ’em in their
uniforms!--‘but by the latest adveece from the East we’re to have it
warumer still!’ Says Jinkins: ‘Glad to hear it, Sir, and so is Mr.
Thompson Jowell, unless I’m mistaken?’ Says I: ‘My name being John
Bull--it can’t be too hot for me!’ ‘Glaed to find you in such speerits,
Mr. Jowell,’ says His Honor, taking a pinch of snuff and speaking as
dry as chips and shavings--‘for when I saw you I was afraid you were
going to aesk me for some of the Government’s money.... What?... You
are?... Waell!--since we caen’t stave you off, sign your name to this
Contract Demand Dischaerge Receipt, and I’ll make you out an Order
on the Treasury.’ Wuff! goes the sand over the wet ink--none of your
new-fangled blotting-paper at the Crown Offices. ‘There you are, Mr.
Jowell!... Thirty-Five Thousand Pounds!’ And between me, and my boy,
and the bedpost,” said Thompson Jowell, nodding over his wine at his
son and heir, “that’s a mere flea-bite to what I am a-going to get out
of this here Eastern Expedition--long before the end!”
“Gaw!” ejaculated the Ensign, who had inherited the paternal reverence
for money. He added, with a tongue somewhat thickened by the frequency
with which, in defiance of his mother’s warning, he had applied to the
decanters. “You jolly old Croe--what the dooce was the tremendously
wealthy feller’s name who was ordered to be burnt alive?--don’t I wish
I was in your jolly old shoes, that’s all!”
“You are in ’em, Morty, my own boy!” said the father, goggling at
the younger Jowell tenderly. “Don’t think that what I do is done
for myself--for I am a bloody humble man!” His little slanting
forehead--so like the lid of a Noah’s Ark hooked tightly down over the
jumbled beasts inside--the Lamb and the Dove being uppermost at that
psychological moment--was full of anxious lines and corrugations. He
mopped his overflowing eyes with his table-napkin, and his voice shook
and wobbled with emotion as he went on:
“What I do is done for you--what I get is got for you! Remember that!”
said Thompson Jowell, leaning forward over his dessert-plate until his
vast expanse of shirt-front bulged--why are the shirt-fronts of great
financiers invariably badly got up?--and two or three diamond studs
unshipped their moorings, and the son caught a glimpse of the hairy
bosom the hardy parent scorned to shield with a flannel vest. “Win
distinction in the Field--out there!” Jowell waved a gross fat hand
in the direction of the London Docks. “You can do it--it’s in your
blood!--if you told me that it wasn’t I shouldn’t believe you!--and I
shall see you General Sir Mortimer Jowell, K.C.B., before I die, please
Heaven!”
“Gaw, Governor! how you pile it on,” responded the young man, who was
not at all inclined to underestimate his own capacity for heroism.
“You ambitious old Codger,” he elegantly pursued, “Military Knight
Commanderships of the Bath don’t grow on every gooseberry-bush....
Why,” said Morty, opening his round brown eyes and shaking his
bullet head at his parent, “even a first-class tip-top hero like our
C.O.”--the young man referred to the gallant Colonel of the Cut Red
Feathers--“hasn’t got that yet! And perhaps he don’t deserve it?...
Oh, no!... Certainly not!” said Morty in a tone of sarcasm. “Not by no
manner of means!...”
“And why hasn’t he got it? Not because he ain’t brave enough, or enough
of a tip-top swell,” Jowell wagged his bristly head of upright gray
hair sagely at his heir-apparent, and punctuated his periods by sips
of the tawny port, “but because he hasn’t Money enough to back him.
And whose fault is that but his own? Look at his position--think of
his chances and opportunities!--and tell me whether he mightn’t be
as rich as a Jew if he made use of ’em? Don’t you go to tell me he
couldn’t--because I know best!”
“And so do I!--and hang me, if it don’t do him honor! I mean,” said
Mortimer in a tone of disdain that mingled verjuice with the bumper
Jowell was in the act of emptying, “his refusin’ to cabbage from the
men’s rations, and firing, and clothing, and uniforms.... Everybody
knows it’s done, and Government winks at it,” pursued the Ensign,
getting very red about the gills, but looking straight out of the
eyes that were so oddly clear and honest for a son of Jowell’s, into
the muddier, more prominent orbs that goggled back at him. “But I’m
confounded glad _he_ sets that fine old face of his against it! and in
his place I’m dam’ if I shouldn’t do the same myself!”
Jowell hastily set down his glass, and fell back in his armchair
with a hot and clammy dew breaking out upon his large, and just now
queerly-mottled countenance. He puffed and blew like a stout, shaven
walrus for some moments before he could speak. Then he said--and the
short, thick hand that held a choice cigar he had just taken from a
chased casket of precious metal emblazoned with the large and ornate
coat-of-arms that had been bought at Heralds’ College, shook as he said
it:
“But if he had a son, he’d alter his notions about Cabbaging. Not to
tell you a lie, my boy!--and my name’s Jack Candid--and has been all
my life long--I’m a Cabbager myself! Lord!--if I hadn’t made use o’
my opportunities for Cabbaging--you’d be a private in the ranks, or
serving out flour and treacle in an apron behind a chandler’s counter,
and your mother’d be at the washtub--or charing for a livelihood at
eighteenpence a day....”
His thick voice shook and his surface grew more unwholesomely mottled,
and his popping eyes whirled in their circular orbits. That this
beloved son--in whose interests so many nefarious and tricky schemes
had already been concocted and carried out--for whose ultimate
aggrandizement Thompson Jowell had planned a crowning masterstroke of
villainy that--the man’s conscience not being dead in him--jolted him
up on end o’ nights with his heart thumping and every hair upon his
body prickly with fright--should thus have turned and rent him, pierced
him to the quick through his pachydermatous hide.
As for Morty--the adage that evil communications corrupt good manners
may be reversed in his case with some appropriateness. This big,
chuckle-headed young man was sloughing his skin in more senses than
one. Since he had mingled daily and hourly in the society of men of
honor and high-breeding, the Honorable and Reverend Alfred no longer
appeared to him as a model to copy or even a person to tolerate. New
ideals had risen up before the eyes of Jowell’s son.
The Colonel, who, like many another commanding officer, preferred to be
a comparatively poor man, rather than use his prerogative of plunder,
seemed to Morty more enviable than the parent who had piled up enormous
riches by means he dimly realized to be dishonest and mean.... True,
Jowell was never weary of assuring his boy that he, Mortimer, would
never be ashamed of his old Governor. But Morty was, secretly, not at
all certain on this point.
“I’m not the man to boast, Morty, my boy,” the father went on as the
son wriggled in his chair with growing uneasiness. “Ben Bragg never
was my name or nature, but many another man in my place would have
Cabbaged without as good an object. You have been my object--ever
since you were born. To be a Millionaire--and I am one, I tell you
plainly! isn’t enough for me--being my boy’s father. I’ve made up my
mind to be as rich as Coutts and Gurney rolled together--and by the
Lord! I see my way clear. Draw close--fill up your glass, and listen.”
He pushed away the painted porcelain dessert-plate from before him so
clumsily that it fell from the shining, slippery mahogany to the floor
and was shattered; and went on, jabbing a thick stumpy finger at his
son, to emphasize notable points; and sometimes banging a gross fist
upon the table, so that choice hothouse fruit and crystallized dainties
piled up in costly dishes escaped from their receptacles, and the
lusters of the chandeliers trembled overhead.
* * * * *
“This here Eastern Expedition of the Army is the Big Thing I have
been a-waiting for. It has put in my way opportunities such as I have
only dreamed of up to now. If I didn’t grab ’em, other Contractors
would--and small blame to ’em. That’s why I sank money in that fleet o’
nine sail and steam vessels, every one of ’em hired out to Government
for Transport at up’ards o’ Two Hundred Pounds _per_ day.”
He puffed and blew and snorted in his walrus-fashion, and, between
wine, and the sense of his own importance, seemed to increase in bulk
as he went on; punctuating his sentences with jabs of the podgy finger,
and sometimes scratching in his stubby growth of hair with it, or
tweaking at a gross and purple ear.
“I’m paid for the use o’ the ships, and I’m paid for the stuff that
goes into ’em. Hay at Twenty Pounds per ton--thousands o’ tons--and
thousands o’ barrels of Flour. Maybe some of the trusses of hay are
packed round a core o’ cow-parsley, and road, or common-trimmings--them
that talk of old hats and empty jam-tins are liars, and I’ll prove it
in their teeth! Likely you’ll happen on a barrel o’ breadstuff here
and there that’s sour or blue-moldy in the middle.... Fraud I scorn,”
said Jowell, breathing noisily, “but Business is Business with me as
other men. The bad with the good--the rotten with the sound--that’s the
secret of successful dealing. Push the decanter over, will ye? David
Drychops is my name this evening! Thanks, my own dear boy!”
He filled a bumper and drank with greedy, spluttering noises, and went
on, sucking at his fleshy lips, that were moistened with the sweet red
wine:
“Lord! if you knew as much of the tricks of the trade as I do!--you’d
think your old Gov. a Angel without wings.... I tell you--and my
name’s Nick Know--millions o’ golden pounds’ll be paid, before this
here War is over, for Rot, and Rubbish--and nothing more. War Scares
are got up--that’s what they are--to give opportunity for Cabbaging
on the Grand Scale to Nobs and Bigwigs--War Office and Admiralty
Bigwigs--whose names--if I whispered ’em--’ud take away your breath.
And me and the other Contractors--men as they are lofty to, and
patronize--are in their secrets, and up to every move and dodge of the
game they couldn’t play without us--and their hands--white as they
keep ’em--and with gems engraved with family crests that are heirlooms
shining on ’em--are not a whit cleaner than what ours are--and there’s
the naked truth!”
Fate spurred him on--who had never even to himself, or that gray
confederate Cowell, spoken thus openly--to this unbosoming, else his
son might have died believing him a worthy kind of man. In his urgent
need for the love and respect and admiration of this hulking young
scion of the house of Jowell, he emptied himself, to the foiling of his
passionate desire.
“Take the case of a brand-new Government Transport I am a-loading
with my own and other Contractors’ stuff at Portsmouth Dockyard,”
he babbled on recklessly. “By Gosh! if you could see the inside of
the barrels and crates and cases her holds are chock-full of--to the
tune of Five Hundred Thousand Pounds! Thousands o’ barrels o’ salt
beef and pickled pork that were laid down in brine before the Battle
o’ Waterloo. Ay!--and thousands o’ tins of preserved meat that ’ud
blow your head off with stink and stench--if they were ever to be
opened!--and cases--thousands o’ cases o’ dead worms that were born
of biscuit and lived on biscuit--and died when there was no more
biscuit to live on--and ankers of Prime Jamaica Rum made of burnt
sugar-and-water and Spirits of potato and beet--not to talk of the
crates full of Shoell’s Army Boots that _are_ boots--till you get down
to where they’re nothing but odd sizes, and spoiled uppers, and scraps
of old leather--and the Winter Clothing and comforts from Sewell’s
Factories--watch-coats and guernsey frocks; coatees and trousers;
woolen vests and drawers and socks atop, and Dunnage underneath--and
nothing but Dunnage! Like the Medical Stores that are the sweepings of
every Hospital in the United Kingdom. All packed under loose shot, and
empty shell, and supplies of munitions for the Ordnance--to prevent ’em
being too easily got at, d’ye twig?... Whoof! I’m short o’ breath!”
snorted Jowell, fanning his large red face with his crumpled napkin.
“Old Billy Blowhard, and no mistake about me!”
He had really talked himself into an apoplectic and congested
condition, and now was fain to break off speech and muster a second
wind, while his son, whose large ears were humming with these
revelations, regarded him with a circular stare of surprise. But even
as Morty’s mouth opened for speech, Thompson Jowell put up a coarse,
ringed hairy hand and stopped him; and plunged back into the subject
ere his son could get out a word.
“Don’t you say what you’re a-going to say!--and tell me that you
don’t mind Government and the Nation being Cabbaged from--but as an
officer holding the Queen’s Commission you’re damned if you like the
notion of the British Army being served up on toast. I tell you--and
my name’s Sure and Certain in the present instance--the British
Army--God bless it!--won’t be a ha’porth the worse for anything on
board the Transport I’ve told you of--even if anything on board of
her was likely to be wanted--which won’t be the case--mark me! For
this here Eastern Expedition will be back by the beginning of October
at the latest; and--I tell you with all my cards on the table--this
Two-Thousand-Six-Hundred-Ton steam-screw Transport I am a-talking of is
as crank as a child’s tin boat.... Built of unseasoned Baltic pine she
is--not a plank of honest English oak in her--the man who contracted
with the Admiralty to supply the timber is a friend of mine--d’ye twig?
She won’t weather out a Black Sea gale, by Gosh she won’t! If Old Moore
and Mother Shipton and Zadkiel’s Almanac told me she would I should
call ’em liars! A crank ship!--a damned crank ship!” said Thompson
Jowell, thrusting his great crimson face and starting eyes near his
son’s, and speaking in a husky whisper. “Nobody would be so wicked as
to count on her Going Down--people don’t do such things!--if they owned
to me that they did I wouldn’t believe ’em! But now the cat is out of
the bag--and tip us your fist, my boy!”
He squeezed his son’s large, unresponsive hand, and, reluctantly
releasing it, went on, in the flux of confidential talk that had
seized and overmastered him: “And remember that you have a Brilliant
Career before you--that’s what you have! Through you I mean the name
of Jowell to strike root deep in the Old Country and spread wide and
tower high. I ha’ lived small--here and at that little place of ours
in Sloughshire--and haven’t launched out in a Scotch Castle and a Deer
Forest and a Salmon River when I might--perhaps you’ve thought? What
I say is--Wait until you come back from this campaign, and then you
shall see a thing or two! Why have I bought up the village, field by
field, and cottage by cottage, and whole streets o’ freehold shops
and dwelling-houses in Market Drowsing Town? Because I mean you to be
returned Member of Parliament for the Borough--and you shall sit in the
Upper House among the other nobs as Baron Jowell by-and-by! There’s a
pretty estate of ten thousand acres of park and stubble, covert and
woodland, will be on the market presently--and a sixty acre o’ clay
upland freehold within a mile o’ Market Drowsing--with a homestead
and some good gore meadows--suitable to build a Stud Farm and Kennels
on--as I’ve a mortgage on and mean to have by-and-by. And, by Gosh,
my boy!--the County shall cap to you as Lord Lieutenant before you’re
forty,” said Jowell, stretching the coarse hairy hand across the table.
“Here’s my hand again on it--and so you know!”
“Haw, haw, haw! You’re going to go it, Governor, ain’t you?--with a
vengeance!” said the son, with heartiness rather forced. He added,
repressing a hiccup, for his potations had half-fuddled him: “But
what’s this sixty-acre you’re talking about for a Stud Farm within a
mile of Market Drowsing?... Gaw!--you don’t mean to say you mean my
Cousin Sarah’s bit o’ land?”
“She’s not your cousin--if Burke took his Bible oath she was I wouldn’t
believe him!” said Thompson Jowell, his large cheeks purpling as he
bent his brows upon his son. “She’s a Poor Relation of mine--and what
is it to you how I get land? If you’re to be a Nobleman, Land is what
you want--and Land is what you must have. Trust your old Gov.!--my
name’s Stephen Staunch where you’re concerned, ain’t it? And now tell
me--when do you leave for the East, and what’s your barkey? Is she a
regular good ’un? _The British Queen_, dy’e say?... She’s a clipper
of a ship,” said Jowell, rummaging in a hairy nostril. “One o’ my
own--I bought her from the Newfoundland Emigration Labor Company for
a mere song, better than new! She sails on the 18th from Southampton,
with a draft of the Hundredth Lancers; six officers, and seventy
Rank-and-File, and the Admiralty Agent, the Honorable Mr. Skiffington.
My Hay in the fore-hold, troop-horses in the after-hold,” said Jowell,
smiling and winking knowingly. “Dunnage under the horses--barrels
of Cowell’s salt beef under the Dunnage--it ain’t my lookout if it
gets spoiled--and Cowell wouldn’t object, I rather fancy!... And now
we’ll adjourn to the drawing-room,” said Jowell, scraping back his
chair, and getting up on his short, thick legs, and gripping his son
affectionately by the elbows--his inferior stature not permitting him
to reach the Ensign’s broad shoulders. He ended, looking with moist,
smiling tenderness in the owlish, rather tipsy young face, as he shook
Morty to and fro. “And we’ll have a little music.... You shall tip
us ‘Vilikins And His Dinah’--if anybody told me Robson could sing it
better I wouldn’t believe ’em. And I’m damned if I haven’t half a mind
to give you ‘Marble Halls.’”
Morty obliged with “Vilikins”--the newest thing out in ditties of the
comic order, and Jowell was as good as his word with the operatic
selection to which he referred. “I Dreamt that I Dwelt in Marble Halls”
is a melody with many turns and flourishes, and Jowell executed them
conscientiously, not sparing one....
If Britannia, leaning with complete confidence at this juncture upon
that stout and sturdy stem of tough old British oak, had peeped in
and beheld the great Contractor--gathered with his family about the
grand piano in the most sumptuous of the telescopic drawing-rooms--and
beating time all wrong as he murdered the tune with simple,
whole-hearted enjoyment,--she might have withdrawn her helmeted head
in the conviction that here Was an honest man.
Though in Morty’s muddled mind some degree of dubiousness was created,
as to the exact description of “Marble Halls” merited by a man who was
cramming a crank-built transport of Baltic oak with rot and rubbish to
the tune of Five Hundred Thousand Pounds. He was secretly wondering
whether--in the estimation of his demigod, the Colonel of the Cut
Red Feathers, a cool stone cell in Newgate Jail might not meet the
case?--when Mrs. Jowell--at his own request--tried to sing ‘Home, Sweet
Home’--and broke down in the second bar. He was wondering still, when
three silver bedroom candlesticks arrived on a tray so massive, that
the footman who bore it staggered. He was wondering yet, as his parents
accompanied him up the broad, shallow staircase, and parted from him
on the threshold of his palatial, gorgeous bedroom, with blessings and
kisses and tears.
He could not have done with wondering. The scene closes upon him,
standing--in an Oriental dressing-robe of sumptuous fabric superimposed
above the long-tailed garment of the night, before his colossal,
gilt-plate-laden dressing-table--saying, as he regarded his own
foolish, tipsy young face in the great glittering mirror:
“Well, Blow Me Tight, if I don’t believe the Governor is the very
devil!” He added, as he crowned himself with a tasseled nightcap and
blundered into bed: “And he may be a regular tip-top business man--but
I’m hanged if I cotton to such games. No, sir! I’m dam’ if I do like
’em! I’m Blest if I do--so there!”