Mr. Wells never contradicts Joe; but every now and then (forgetting that Joe can see) he shakes a sceptic head, and, leaning towards you, whispers (forgetting that Joe can only hear when you shout at him) that you must be pleased to remember that “that’s what he thinks he done; and no doubt he thinks that it was so; and it may be it was, and I should never think of contradicting, not no man; but I has my own opinion in the matter. I don’t think it was so.  I think he’s half dreaming and half telling a tale.  That’s what I think.”

“But,” you inquire, “is it not true that Joe was once a pirate?”

“Oh, yes,” he cries at once, smiling proudly; “Oh, yes.  Joe was a pirate right enough.  What, haven’t you heard him tell how they boarded a Spanish ship, and cut the throats and broke the heads of the swarthy crew?  Oh, you ought to hear him tell that.  It’s as good as a play.”  And here he leans forward, and calls across to chuckling and gurgling Joe.  “Joe!  Tell the genneman how you boarded that Spanish ship, and cut the throats of them there swarthy Spaniards.”

* * * * *

At this Old Joe seems to be smitten with a sudden frenzy.  I have never seen anything like it.  After a preliminary canter in the laughing line he suddenly makes taut his body; his eyes bulge from his head; his face becomes crimson and his nose blue; then, with his mouth open, while he hisses like a steam-saw and roars like a bull and sends the most extraordinary imitation of throat-cutting spluttering wetly from his distended lips, he waves his right arm madly and frantically in the air, makes imaginary stabs in front of him, draws imaginary knives across his throat, and brings down the butt ends of imaginary carbines on the supposititious heads of the swarthy crew unkindly resurrected to be slain again.

It is plain that the poor old paralysed fellow is lost to the Present.  He is back in the Past—­or in one of his novelettes; and in front of him, begging for mercy, as he slits their throats, or cracks open their skulls, are, indeed, hundreds of real and living men.  His acting is superb.  It is only made comical by the hanging legs, the fixture of the body to the seat of the chair, and the furious spluttering of his frenzied mouth.

When he has quite finished, thoroughly exhausted, he leans back in his chair, sticks his pipe into his face, strikes a match with his shaking hands, and covers his laughing face in a wreath of tobacco-smoke.

“Arst him,” whispers Mr. Wells, “how many he killed?  Go on; you arst him.”

* * * * *

So you lean across to Old Joe, who shoots forward to meet your lips half-way with his left ear, and you calmly, and without dread or horror, ask the gurgling and chuckling veteran how many men he has killed.

As soon as he has caught your question he bursts out laughing, flings himself suddenly back, and exclaims, with a splutter:  “How many ha’ I killed?  How many?  I couldn’t say.  Too many on ’em.  Hundreds!  Hundreds!  Hundreds of ’em!” Back goes the pipe, and, wreathed in proud smiles, his shoulders twitching, his hands never still for a moment, he sits square back in his chair and looks at you proudly, as much as to say: