Rhoda could bear it no more.

“Now let me hear of my sister, uncle,” she said.

“I’ll tell you what,” Anthony responded, “she hasn’t got such a pretty sort of a sweet blackbirdy voice as you’ve got.”

The girl blushed scarlet.

“Oh, she can mount them colours, too,” said Anthony.

His way of speaking of Dahlia indicated that he and she had enough of one another; but of the peculiar object of his extraordinary visit not even the farmer had received a hint.  Mrs. Sumfit ventured to think aloud that his grog was not stiff enough, but he took a gulp under her eyes, and smacked his lips after it in a most convincing manner.

“Ah! that stuff wouldn’t do for me in London, half-holiday or no half-holiday,” said Anthony.

“Why not?” the farmer asked.

“I should be speculating—­deep—­couldn’t hold myself in:  Mexicans, Peroovians, Venzeshoolians, Spaniards, at ’em I should go.  I see bonds in all sorts of colours, Spaniards in black and white, Peruvians—­orange, Mexicans—­red as the British army.  Well, it’s just my whim.  If I like red, I go at red.  I ain’t a bit of reason.  What’s more, I never speculate.”

“Why, that’s safest, brother Tony,” said the farmer.

“And safe’s my game—­always was, always will be!  Do you think”—­Anthony sucked his grog to the sugar-dregs, till the spoon settled on his nose—­ “do you think I should hold the position I do hold, be trusted as I am trusted?  Ah! you don’t know much about that.  Should I have money placed in my hands, do you think—­and it’s thousands at a time, gold, and notes, and cheques—­if I was a risky chap?  I’m known to be thoroughly respectable.  Five and forty years I’ve been in Boyne’s Bank, and thank ye, ma’am, grog don’t do no harm down here.  And I will take another glass.  ’When the heart of a man!’—­but I’m no singer.”

Mrs. Sumfit simpered, “Hem; it’s the heart of a woman, too:  and she have one, and it’s dying to hear of her darlin’ blessed in town, and of who cuts her hair, and where she gets her gownds, and whose pills—­”

The farmer interrupted her irritably.

“Divide a couple o’ hundred thousand and more by forty-five and a half,” he said.  “Do wait, mother; all in good time.  Forty-five and a-half, brother Tony; that was your sum—­ah!—­you mentioned it some time back—­ half of what?  Is that half a fraction, as they call it?  I haven’t forgot fractions, and logareems, and practice, and so on to algebrae, where it always seems to me to blow hard, for, whizz goes my head in a jiffy, as soon as I’ve mounted the ladder to look into that country.  How ’bout that forty-five and a half, brother Tony, if you don’t mind condescending to explain?”

“Forty-five and a half?” muttered Anthony, mystified.

“Oh, never mind, you know, if you don’t like to say, brother Tony.”  The farmer touched him up with his pipe-stem.