‘But, Johnny, I’m so hungry myself,’ pleaded Morris.

‘You can have what I leave,’ said Vance.  ’You’re just beginning to pay your score, my daisy; I owe you one-pound-ten; don’t you rouse the British lion!’ There was something indescribably menacing in the face and voice of the Great Vance as he uttered these words, at which the soul of Morris withered.  ‘There!’ resumed the feaster, ’give us a glass of the fizz to start with.  Gravy soup!  And I thought I didn’t like gravy soup!  Do you know how I got here?’ he asked, with another explosion of wrath.

‘No, Johnny; how could I?’ said the obsequious Morris.

‘I walked on my ten toes!’ cried John; ’tramped the whole way from Browndean; and begged!  I would like to see you beg.  It’s not so easy as you might suppose.  I played it on being a shipwrecked mariner from Blyth; I don’t know where Blyth is, do you? but I thought it sounded natural.  I begged from a little beast of a schoolboy, and he forked out a bit of twine, and asked me to make a clove hitch; I did, too, I know I did, but he said it wasn’t, he said it was a granny’s knot, and I was a what-d’ye-call-’em, and he would give me in charge.  Then I begged from a naval officer—­he never bothered me with knots, but he only gave me a tract; there’s a nice account of the British navy!—­and then from a widow woman that sold lollipops, and I got a hunch of bread from her.  Another party I fell in with said you could generally always get bread; and the thing to do was to break a plateglass window and get into gaol; seemed rather a brilliant scheme.  Pass the beef.’

‘Why didn’t you stay at Browndean?’ Morris ventured to enquire.

‘Skittles!’ said John.  ’On what?  The Pink Un and a measly religious paper?  I had to leave Browndean; I had to, I tell you.  I got tick at a public, and set up to be the Great Vance; so would you, if you were leading such a beastly existence!  And a card stood me a lot of ale and stuff, and we got swipey, talking about music-halls and the piles of tin I got for singing; and then they got me on to sing “Around her splendid form I weaved the magic circle,” and then he said I couldn’t be Vance, and I stuck to it like grim death I was.  It was rot of me to sing, of course, but I thought I could brazen it out with a set of yokels.  It settled my hash at the public,’ said John, with a sigh.  ’And then the last thing was the carpenter—­’

‘Our landlord?’ enquired Morris.

‘That’s the party,’ said John.  ’He came nosing about the place, and then wanted to know where the water-butt was, and the bedclothes.  I told him to go to the devil; so would you too, when there was no possible thing to say!  And then he said I had pawned them, and did I know it was felony?  Then I made a pretty neat stroke.  I remembered he was deaf, and talked a whole lot of rot, very politely, just so low he couldn’t hear a word.  “I don’t hear you,” says he.  “I know you don’t, my buck, and I don’t mean