“Give us the story, Jack,” said the “bones,” whose agued shins were extemporizing a rattle on their own account before the fire.

“Well, I don’t mind,” said the fat man.  “It’s seasonable; and I’m seasonable, like the blessed plum-pudden, I am; and the more burnt brandy you set about me, the richer and headier I’ll go down.”

“You’d be a jolly old pudden to digest,” said the piccolo.

“You blow your aggrawation into your pipe and sealing-wax the stops,” said his friend.

He drew critically at his “churchwarden” a moment or so, leaned forward, emptied his glass into his capacious receptacles, and, giving his stomach a shift, as if to accommodate it to its new burden, proceeded as follows:—­

“Music and malt is my nat’ral inheritance.  My grandfather blew his ‘dog’s-nose,’ and drank his clarinet like a artist and my father—­”

“What did you say your grandfather did?” asked the piccolo.

“He played the clarinet.”

“You said he blew his ‘dog’s-nose.’”

“Don’t be a ass, Fred!” said the banjo, aggrieved.  “How the blazes could a man blow his dog’s nose, unless he muzzled it with a handkercher, and then twisted its tail?  He played the clarinet, I say; and my father played the musical glasses, which was a form of harmony pertiklerly genial to him.  Amongst us we’ve piped out a good long century—­ah! we have, for all I look sich a babby bursting on sops and spoon meat.”

“What!” said the little man by the door.  “You don’t include them cockt hatses in your expeerunce?”

“My grandfather wore ’em, sir.  He wore a play-actin’ coat, too, and buckles to his shoes, when he’d got any; and he and a friend or two made a permanency of ‘waits’ (only they called ’em according to the season), and got their profit goin’ from house to house, principally in the country, and discoursin’ music at the low rate of whatever they could get for it.”

“Ain’t you comin’ to the ghost, Jack?” said the little man hungrily.

“All in course, sir.  Well, gentlemen, it was hard times pretty often with my grandfather and his friends, as you may suppose; and never so much as when they had to trudge it across country, with the nor’-easter buzzin’ in their teeth and the snow piled on their cockt hats like lemon sponge on entry dishes.  The rewards, I’ve heard him say—­for he lived to be ninety, nevertheless—­was poor compensation for the drifts, and the inflienza, and the broken chilblains; but now and again they’d get a fair skinful of liquor from a jolly squire, as ’d set ’em up like boggarts mended wi’ new broomsticks.”

“Ho-haw!” broke in a hurdle-maker in a corner; and then, regretting the publicity of his merriment, put his fingers bashfully to his stubble lips.

“Now,” said the banjo, “it’s of a pertikler night and a pertikler skinful that I’m a-going to tell you; and that night fell dark, and that skinful were took a hundred years ago this December, as I’m a Jack-pudden!”