“Only it was cut off!  Ha, ha, ha!” Mr. Pinto cried, yelling a laugh, which I observed made the policeman stare very much.  “Yes.  It was cut off by the same blow which took off the scoundrel’s head—­ho, ho, ho!” And he made a circle with his hook-nailed finger round his own yellow neck, and grinned with a horrible triumph.  “I promise you that fellow was surprised when he found his head in the pannier.  Ha! ha!  Do you ever cease to hate those whom you hate?”—­fire flashed terrifically from his glass eye as he spoke—­“or to love dose whom you once loved?  Oh, never, never!” And here his natural eye was bedewed with tears.  “But here we are at the ‘Gray’s-Inn CoffeeHouse.’  James, what is the joint?”

That very respectful and efficient waiter brought in the bill of fare, and I, for my part, chose boiled leg of pork, and pease pudding, which my acquaintance said would do as well as anything else; though I remarked he only trifled with the pease pudding, and left all the pork on the plate.  In fact, he scarcely ate anything.  But he drank a prodigious quantity of wine; and I must say that my friend Mr. Hart’s port wine is so good that I myself took—­well, I should think, I took three glasses.  Yes, three, certainly.  He—­I mean Mr. P.—­the old rogue, was insatiable:  for we had to call for a second bottle in no time.  When that was gone, my companion wanted another.  A little red mounted up to his yellow cheeks as he drank the wine, and he winked at it in a strange manner.  “I remember,” said he, musing, “when port wine was scarcely drunk in this country—­though the Queen liked it, and so did Hurley; but Bolingbroke didn’t—­he drank Florence and Champagne.  Dr. Swift put water to his wine.  ‘Jonathan,’ I once said to him—­but bah! autres temps, autres moeurs.  Another magnum, James.”

This was all very well.  “My good sir,” I said, “it may suit you to order bottles of ’20 port, at a guinea a bottle; but that kind of price does not suit me.  I only happen to have thirty-four and sixpence in my pocket, of which I want a shilling for the waiter, and eighteen pence for my cab.  You rich foreigners and swells may spend what you like” (I had him there:  for my friend’s dress was as shabby as an old-clothes man’s); “but a man with a family, Mr. Whatd’you-call’im, cannot afford to spend seven or eight hundred a year on his dinner alone.”

“Bah!” he said.  “Nunkey pays for all, as you say.  I will what you call stant the dinner, if you are so poor!” and again he gave that disagreeable grin, and placed an odious crook-nailed and by no means clean finger to his nose.  But I was not so afraid of him now, for we were in a public place; and the three glasses of port wine had, you see, given me courage.