PADDINGTON.

“By Jove!” I exclaim.

“What is it?” asks the Confused Captain, looking up from his MS.

“‘Padding,’” I reply—­“Only add a ‘ton’ to it, and that will give it just the weight I require.  Don’t you see?” I ask him, impetuously.  But he merely shakes his head, and lugs at his moustache.  I explain the idea, as if it were a charade.  I say, “The whole notion is ‘padding—­ton.’  See?”

The Ruminating Reader thinks it won’t do.  “Yes it will,” I urge—­“it will lighten it up.  Who wants statistics without anecdote?  Now for an anecdote; and I knock one off, sur le champ, about the engine-driver, the stoker, and several other persons, all on the look-out for promotion, informing me of their being Paddington men of considerable political influence at home.  The Cautious Captain accepts the anecdote, interpolates it, and after I have called for and imbibed another tumbler of ‘my own partik,’ and lighted another cigar, the Conscientious Captain resumes his entertainment.”

NO PIANO.

He reads on.  Another drink, just to rivet my attention.  Will he take something?  No?  Then I will.  His health, and song—­I mean ‘treatise,’ or whatever he calls it—­say ‘lecture.’  Wish we’d had a piano.  Never will travel without one again. Mem.—­Gong and piano.  I don’t pretend to be a thorough musician, but as a one-fingered player I’d give Sir CHARLES HALLE odds and beat him.  Now then—­let’s see where were we.  Another tumbler iced.  Good. Allez! Captain, go ahead!

[Illustration]

Somehow or another, after this—­that is, I can only time it by the fact of my having called for a fourth or fifth glass of iced drink, or it may have been my half-dozenth, for time does fly so,—­the Captain having, I suspect, drank the greater part of the previous one whenever I didn’t happen to be looking that way—­I begin to think I must have once more given my assent by nodding to a lot of stuff of which I could not nave heard more than three pages, as, when I arouse myself from my reverie, the tumbler is empty, the Captain has gone out, and so has my cigar.

AWAY!  AWAY!

“Action is the word!” said I, suddenly jumping up; and, having seized a spade, and provided myself with a large sack, which I carried across my shoulders, I set off for the diamond-fields.  Unrecognised by a soul, I went to work on my own account; and the brilliant things I saw—­far more brilliant than even the witticisms of WOLFFY, or the sarcasms of ARTHUR B!  Into my sack go thousands of diamonds!  The sack is full! Aladdin and the Lamp not in it with me!  “Hallo!” shouts a voice, gruffly.  I could see no one. “Vox et praeterea nil,” as we used to say at Eton.  Suddenly I felt myself collared.  I made a gallant attempt at resistance.  A spade is a spade I know, but what is a spade and one against twenty with pistols and daggers, headed by the redoubtable Filliblusterer THOMAS TIDDLER himself?  “Strip him!” said T.T., shortly.