The Frenchman did not hear or did not understand the first part of the speech, but he caught the words “Charing Cross,” and bounced up and out on to the step.  The conductor collared him as he was getting off, and jerked him back savagely.

“Carn’t yer keep still a minute,” he cried indignantly; “blessed if you don’t want lookin’ after like a bloomin’ kid.”

“I vont to be put down at Sharing Cross,” answered the Frenchman, humbly.

“You vont to be put down at Sharing Cross,” repeated the other bitterly, as he led him back to his seat.  “I shall put yer down in the middle of the road if I ’ave much more of yer.  You stop there till I come and sling yer out.  I ain’t likely to let yer go much past yer Sharing Cross, I shall be too jolly glad to get rid o’ yer.”

The poor Frenchman subsided, and we jolted on.  At “The Angel” we, of course, stopped.  “Charing Cross,” shouted the conductor, and up sprang the Frenchman.

“Oh, my Gawd,” said the conductor, taking him by the shoulders and forcing him down into the corner seat, “wot am I to do?  Carn’t somebody sit on ’im?”

He held him firmly down until the ’bus started, and then released him.  At the top of Chancery Lane the same scene took place, and the poor little Frenchman became exasperated.

“He keep saying Sharing Cross, Sharing Cross,” he exclaimed, turning to the other passengers; “and it is no Sharing Cross.  He is fool.”

“Carn’t yer understand,” retorted the conductor, equally indignant; “of course I say Sharing Cross—­I mean Charing Cross, but that don’t mean that it is Charing Cross.  That means—­” and then perceiving from the blank look on the Frenchman’s face the utter impossibility of ever making the matter clear to him, he turned to us with an appealing gesture, and asked: 

“Does any gentleman know the French for ‘bloomin’ idiot’?”

A day or two afterwards, I happened to enter his omnibus again.

“Well,” I asked him, “did you get your French friend to Charing Cross all right?”

“No, sir,” he replied, “you’ll ’ardly believe it, but I ’ad a bit of a row with a policeman just before I got to the corner, and it put ’im clean out o’ my ’ead.  Blessed if I didn’t run ’im on to Victoria.”

CHAPTER XI

Said Brown one evening, “There is but one vice, and that is selfishness.”

Jephson was standing before the fire lighting his pipe.  He puffed the tobacco into a glow, threw the match into the embers, and then said: 

“And the seed of all virtue also.”

“Sit down and get on with your work,” said MacShaughnassy from the sofa where he lay at full length with his heels on a chair; “we’re discussing the novel.  Paradoxes not admitted during business hours.”

Jephson, however, was in an argumentative mood.