" (He seemed to think
it would have been better if the child's life had been preserved.
Coroners have quaint ideas!) "Why didn't you apply to the relieving
officer?"
"'Cos I didn't want no relief," replied Jim sullenly. "I promised my
mother it should never go on the parish, and it didn't."
The incident occurred, very luckily, during the dead season, and the
evening papers took the case up, and made rather a good thing out of it.
Jim became quite a hero, I remember. Kind-hearted people wrote, urging
that somebody--the ground landlord, or the Government, or some one of
that sort--ought to do something for him. And everybody abused the local
vestry. I really think some benefit to Jim might have come out of it all
if only the excitement had lasted a little longer. Unfortunately,
however, just at its height a spicy divorce case cropped up, and Jim was
crowded out and forgotten.
I told the boys this story of mine, after Jephson had done telling his,
and, when I had finished, we found it was nearly one o'clock. So, of
course, it was too late to do any more work to the novel that evening.
CHAPTER IV
We held our next business meeting on my houseboat. Brown was opposed at
first to my going down to this houseboat at all. He thought that none of
us should leave town while the novel was still on hand.
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