Page:The Warden.djvu/47

Rh Oh, Mr. Harding, if you had but taken the archdeacon's advice in that disputed case, when Joe Mutters was this ungrateful demagogue's rival candidate!

"Afraid of a parson," growled Moody, with a look of ineffable scorn; "I tell ye what I'd be afraid of—I'd be afraid of not getting nothing from 'em but just what I could take by might and right—that's the most I'd be afraid on of any parson of 'em all."

"But," said Skulpit, apologetically, "Mr. Harding's not so bad—he did give us twopence a day, didn't he now?"

"Twopence a day!" exclaimed Spriggs with scorn, opening awfully the red cavern of his lost eye.

"Twopence a day!" muttered Moody with a curse; "sink his twopence!"

"Twopence a day!" exclaimed Handy; "and I'm to go, hat in hand, and thank a chap for twopence a day, when he owes me a hundred pounds a year: no, thank ye; that may do for you, but it won't for me. Come, I say Skulpit, are you a going to put your mark to this here paper, or are you not?"

Skulpit looked round in wretched indecision to his two friends. "What d'ye think, Bill Gazy?" said he.

But Billy Gazy couldn't think: he made a noise like the bleating of an old sheep, which was intended to express the agony of his doubt, and again muttered that 'he didn't know.'

"Take hold, you old cripple," said Handy, thrusting the pen into poor Billy's hand: "there, so—ugh! you old fool, you've been and smeared it all—there—that'll do for you,—that's as good as the best name as ever was written:" and a big blotch of ink was presumed to represent Billy Gazy's acquiescence.

"Now Jonathan," said Handy, turning to Crumple.

"A hundred a year's a nice thing, for sartain," again argued Crumple. "Well, neighbour Skulpit, how's it to be?"