Page:Marriott Watson--Galloping Dick.djvu/223

 Bishop, Ryder,” he would say; “I would have filled the place sonorously. I’ll warrant I have a good voice, as you may witness, and there be people that have come miles to listen to my discourses to the condemned. I have a stinging smack in my sentences. I have made old Jerry himself heave with fear. ’Tis all in the accumulation, as it were. I pile my emotions in a pyramid. Each phrase hath an edge: it bites. I have seen the eyes goggling out of the whole condemned pew at my fulminations. And to think,” he went on with a change of note, “that I am but Prisoner-Ordinary to a noise of gallows-birds! I that might have had beaux and wits and fine ladies trembling afore me. ’Tis the papistical leanings of His Majesty that are at fault.” And with a sigh he would bury his nose in the tankard.

But all the same I made way with him, as he acknowledged. “I will admit, Ryder,” said he at another time and in his most sentimental mood, “howbeit I wear the cloth, and am, beyond doubt, of a much superior state, that I am sincerely honoured by your friendship.