“You wouldn’t have been then.  Well for you that you didn’t catch his fever.”

“And write verses too?  Don’t make me laugh, sir, on such a day as this; I always comfort myself with—­’it’s no business of mine:’  but, somehow, I can’t do so just now.”  And Tom sat silent, more softened than he had been for years.

“Let’s talk of something else,” said Mark at last.  “You had the cholera very bad down there, I hear?”

“Oh, sharp, but short,” said Tom, who disliked any subject which brought Grace to his mind.

“Any on my lord’s estate with the queer name?”

“Not a case.  We stopped the devil out there, thanks to his lordship.”

“So did we here.  We were very near in for it, though, I fancy.—­At least, I chose to fancy so—­thought it a good opportunity to clean Whitbury once for all.”

“It’s just like you.  Well?”

“Well, I offered the Town-council to drain the whole town at my own expense, if they’d let me have the sewage.  And that only made things worse; for as soon as the beggars found out the sewage was worth anything, they were down on me, as if I wanted to do them—­I, Mark Armsworth!—­and would sooner let half the town rot with an epidemic, than have reason to fancy I’d made any money out of them.  So a pretty fight I had, for half-a-dozen meetings, till I called in my lord; and, sir, he came down by the next express, like a trump, all the way from town, and gave them such a piece of his mind—­was going to have the Board of Health down, and turn on the Government tap, commissioners and all, and cost ’em hundreds:  till the fellows shook in their shoes;—­and so I conquered, and here we are, as clean as a nut,—­and a fig for the cholera!—­except down in Water-lane, which I don’t know what to do with; for if tradesmen will run up houses on spec in a water-meadow, who can stop them?  There ought to be a law for it, say I; but I say a good many things in the twelve months that nobody minds.  But, my dear boy, if one man in a town has pluck and money, he may do it.  It’ll cost him a few:  I’ve had to pay the main part myself, after all:  but I suppose God will make it up to a man somehow.  That’s old Mark’s faith, at least.  Now I want to talk to you about yourself.  My lord comes into town to-day, and you must see him.”

“Why, then?  He can’t help me with the Bashi-bazouks, can he?”

“Bashi-fiddles!  I say, Tom, the more I think over it, the more it won’t do.  It’s throwing yourself away.  They say that Turkish contingent is getting on terribly ill.”

“More need of me to make them well.”

“Hang it—­I mean—­hasn’t justice done it, and so on.  The papers are full of it.”

“Well,” quoth Tom, “and why should it?”

“Why, man alive, if England spends all this money on the men, she ought to do her duty by them.”

“I don’t see that.  As Pecksniff says, ’if England expects every man to do his duty, she’s very sanguine, and will be much disappointed.’  They don’t intend to do their duty by her, any more than I do; so why should she do her duty by them?”