"By-the-way, what's come of Alf Jones?" I asked, as we resumed our seats.
"Gone to (sheol)," replied his successor tersely. Alf, it appeared, had left the station six or eight weeks before, bound for no one knew where. Jack's opinion was that in so doing he had made a slippery-hitch. I spoke of Alf's singing; and Jack told me how the fellows at the station had persuaded him to give them a couple or three songs before he left.
"Was n't he something wonderful?" I remarked.
"Well, no," Jack replied, deferentially but positively; "nothing like what you 'd hear in a fo'c'sl."
In fact, according to Jack's account, he used to be reputed a middling singer himself. And he straightway rendered a mawkishly sentimental song, and a couple of extremely unchaste ones, in a voice which made the tea-embrowned pannikins on the table rattle in sympathy.
I remembered Alf's minstrelsy, and the contrast was painful. Jack noticed a depression creeping over me, and, with the intuition of true hospitality, exerted his conversational powers for my entertainment. His discourse ran exclusively on a topic which, sad to say, furnishes, in all grades of masculine society, the motif of nearly every joke worth telling. In this line, Jack was a discriminating anthologist, and, moreover, a judicious adapter—all his gestes being related in the first-person-singular. His autobiographical record was a staggerer; but I happened to recognise amongst his affaires de cœur several very old acquaintances, and made allowance accordingly. If he had been a truthful man, the floor of the hut would have opened that night and swallowed him alive; but his vainglorious emulation of St. Paul's chief-of-sinners hyperbole covered as with a mantle his multitude of bonâ-fide transgressions, and preserved him for better things.
Yes; better things. For, mind you, beyond this rollicking blackguard there stood a second Jack, a soft-hearted, self-sacrificing other-phase, chivalrous to quixotism, yet provokingly reticent touching any act or sentiment which reflected real credit on himself. Not that every blackguard is a Bayard, any more than every wife-beater is a coward; but almost all moral and immoral qualities are in reality independent of each other. And Jack, for one thing, was eminently religious—as indeed were those greater geniuses and equally hard cases, Dick Steele and Henry Fielding. Says the First Lord (neither of the Admiralty nor the Treasury), 'The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together; our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our virtues.'
"I always make a bit of a prayer before turnin'-in," remarked Jack, in appendix to a story which Chaucer or Boccaccio would have rejected with horror; then the poor fellow laid his pipe on the table, and, kneeling by his bedside, repeated in a firm, reverent voice an almost unrecognisable version of the Lord's Prayer, and an unconscious parody on Ken's Evening Hymn:—'Glory to Thee, my God, this night.'
"See, it's this way with me," he continued, rising from his knees and relighting his pipe—"las' time I seen my pore mother—widow-woman,
