“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.

“Five and a half,” Anthony speculated.  “That’s a fraction you got hold of, brother William John,—­I remember the parson calling out those names at your wedding:  ‘I, William John, take thee, Susan;’ yes, that’s a fraction, but what’s the good of it?”

“What I mean is, it ain’t forty-five and half of forty-five.  Half of one, eh?  That’s identical with a fraction.  One—­a stroke—­and two under it.”

“You’ve got it correct,” Anthony assented.

“How many thousand divide it by?”

“Divide what by, brother William John?  I’m beat.”

“Ah! out comes the keys:  lockup everything; it’s time!” the farmer laughed, rather proud of his brother-in-law’s perfect wakefulness after two stiff tumblers.  He saw that Anthony was determined with all due friendly feeling to let no one know the sum in his possession.

“If it’s four o’clock, it is time to lock up,” said Anthony, “and bang to go the doors, and there’s the money for thieves to dream of—­they can’t get a-nigh it, let them dream as they like.  What’s the hour, ma’am?”

“Not three, it ain’t,” returned Mrs. Sumfit; “and do be good creatures, and begin about my Dahly, and where she got that Bumptious gownd, and the bonnet with blue flowers lyin’ by on the table:  now, do!”