“Dear Mr. Buzza, If you care to remember what was spoken the other evening, you will to-night help a most unhappy woman.  You will go to the captain’s cabin of the Wreck which we visited together, and find there a small portmanteau.  It may be carried in the hand, and holds the few necessaries I have hidden for my flight, but please carry it carefully.  If you will be waiting with this by the sign-post at the Five-Lanes’ corner, at 11.30 to-night, no words of mine will repay you.  Should you refuse, I am a wretched woman; but in any case I know I may trust you to say no word of this.

“Look out for the closed carriage and pair.  A word to the
bearer will tell me that I may hope, or that you care nothing
for me. 

          
                                                G. G.-S.

“P.S.—­Be very careful not to shake the portmanteau.”

“What be I to say, plaise, sir?”

Sam, who had read the letter for a third time syllable by syllable, looked around helplessly.

“Ef you plaise, what be I to say?”

Sam very heartily wished both boy and letter to the devil.  He groaned aloud, and was about to answer, when he paused suddenly.

In the room above Mr. Moggridge was singing a jaunty stave.

The sound goaded Sam to madness; he ground his teeth and made up his mind.

“Say ‘yes,’” he answered, shortly.

The word was no sooner spoken than he wished it recalled.  But the urchin had taken to his heels.  With an angry sigh Sam let circumstance decide for him, and returned to the reading-room.

No doubt the consciousness that pique had just betrayed his judgment made him the more inclined to quarrel with the poet.  But assuredly the sight that met his eyes caused his blood to boil; for Mr. Moggridge was calmly in possession of the chair and newspaper which Sam had but a moment since resigned.

“Excuse me, but that is my chair and my paper.”

“Eh?” The poet looked up sweetly.  “Surely, the Club chair and the Club paper—­”

“I have but this moment left them.”

“By a singular coincidence, I have but this moment taken possession of them.”

“Give them up, sir.”

“I shall do nothing of the kind, sir.”

At this point Sam was seized with the unlucky inspiration of quoting from Mr. Moggridge’s published works: 

    “Forbid the flood to wet thy feet,
        Or bind its wrath in chains;
     But never seek to quench the heat
        That fires a poet’s veins!”

This stanza, delivered with nice attention to its author’s drawing-room manner, was too much.

“Sir, you are no gentleman!”

“You seem,” retorted Sam, “to be an authority on manners as well as on Customs.  I won’t repeat your charge; but I’ll be dashed if you’re a poet!”