there was any chance of presentin’ you with a silver cradle, I’d save it up and subscribe.”  After that there was nothing more to say.  It hurt the poor soul terrible, and she went upstairs again and cried as she went.  Billy sat on and soaked, and the Mayor, across the counter, sat and watched his condition, quiet-like, till the time came for refusing any more liquor and turning him out.  When that happened the old sinner would gather up his change and make off for another public.  And the end was that he’d be up before the Mayor on Monday morning, charged with drunkenness.  No use to fine him; he wouldn’t pay, but went to gaol instead.  “Ten years was I in prison,” he’d say, addressing the bench, “along with his Worship there.  I don’t know what ’twould appear to him who came back and got the Welcome Home; but I didn’t, and ten days don’t frighten me.”

Landlord Cummins would listen to this, looking as unnatural as a blue china cat in a thunderstorm.  He fairly hated these appearances of Billy, and they spoiled his term of office, I do believe.  But all the same he turned out a very passable Mayor.  The townsfolk respected him so highly, I’ve heard my mother say, that they made him Ex-Mayor the year following.

Now you’ll be wanting to know what made these two men hate each other, for friends they had been, as two men ought to be who had been taken prisoners together and spent ten years in captivity to the French, and come home aboard the same ship like brothers.  The bigger the love the bigger the hate, and no difficulty to guess there was a woman in the case.  So there was; but the way she came between them was curious, for all that.

First of all, you must know, that up to the year ’three Abe Cummins and Bill Bosistow hadn’t known what it is to quarrel or miss meeting each other every day.  They went to school together, and then to the fishing, and afterwards they sailed together with the free-traders over to Mount’s Bay, and good seamen the both, though not a bit alike in looks and ways.  Abe, the elder by a year, was a bit slow and heavy on his pins; given to reading, too, though he seemed to take it up for peace and quietness more than for any show he made of his learning.  Bill was smarter altogether and better looking; a bit boastful, after the manner of young chaps.  He could read too, but never did much at it, though I’ve heard that on Saturday nights he was fond of ranting verses—­stuff about drink and such like—­out of a book of Robert Burns’s poetry he’d borrowed off Abe.

You’d hardly have thought two young fellows so different in every way could have hit it off as they did.  But these were like two figures in a puzzle-block; their very differences seemed to make them fit.  There never was such a pair since David and Jonathan, and I believe ’twas partly this that kept them from running after girls.  So far as I can see, the most of the lads begin at seventeen; but these two held off sweethearting right along until Christmas of the year ’three when they came home from Porthleven to spend a fortnight at Ardevora, and they both fell in love with Selina Johns.