“Happy and jolly,” roars Joe, struggling with his frightful stammer.  “It ‘tain’t no good bein’ nuffin kelse.  Why, I’ve been dead and pretty near buried.  In Charing-crost ’orspital; yerse!  I heard ’em say, ’He’s a gonner,’ and I couldn’t give ’em the lie.  I come to, wrapped up like a mummy, and hollered so as they pretty near ’opped out of their skins!  Ho, I’ve had a terrible life!  Run over by a horse and van.  Knocked all to pieces.  Been to the bottom of the sea!  Many a time.  But here I am, happy and jolly.  What’s the odds?” He goes off into such a fit of laughter that the chair is shaken and he himself nearly suffocated by a cough like an earthquake.

He looks extremely like one of those lay figures employed by ventriloquists.  He is a thin, flat, pasteboard-looking old fellow; his trousers hang over the edge of his chair apparently empty of legs, and his shirt and open waistcoat (he never wears a coat) are pressed flat against the high back of the chair, apparently empty of trunk.  His body and his features are for ever on the jerk.  His shoulders twitch.  He is for ever laughing and gurgling.  He is for ever struggling to say something important, ending in a great spluttering stammer and a roar of tremendous laughter.

For all he is eighty-two years of age, his hair is yet thick, and the blackness of it is of too stubborn an order ever to go more than iron-grey.  He has glassy eyes, puffed and bagged with flesh; heavy black eyebrows half-way up his sloping forehead; a heavy black moustache under his strong nose; a tongue several sizes too large for his mouth; and under the mouth a chin which recedes so sharply that it becomes neck before you are really aware that it is chin.  He reminds us a little, as he sits there laughing and chuckling, of early caricatures of Sir Redvers Buller.

Opposite Old Joe sits Mr. Wells, a little old white-haired gentleman, very spruce and tidy, with neatly clipped moustache and neatly pointed beard, and peering little cloudy eyes which are sightless.

* * * * *

The two old gentlemen, as they are called, live together in a tiny two-roomed house in a narrow flagged court which is generally strung with washing.  The low-roofed kitchen is their sitting-room, and its smoky-panelled walls are decorated only with church almanacs and a few faded photographs.

The room is beautifully clean, and so is the bedroom above, where the two pensioners sleep in neat little beds.  Out of the money allowed them by a neighbouring church—­some nine shillings a week between the two—­they pay a woman five shillings a week “to do for them.”  As for themselves, they smoke their pipes in front of the fire, and laugh to find themselves, after much rough work on the high seas, so happy and jolly at the end of their days.