“Why, you see, commander,” says Phil, “I ain’t acquainted with anythink else, and I doubt if I ain’t a getting too old to take to novelties.”

“How old are you, Phil?” asks the trooper, pausing as he conveys his smoking saucer to his lips.

“I’m something with a eight in it,” says Phil. “It can’t be eighty. Nor yet eighteen. It’s betwixt ’em, somewheres.”

Mr George, slowly putting down his saucer without tasting its contents, is laughingly beginning, “Why, what the deuce, Phil—” when he stops, seeing that Phil is counting on his dirty fingers.

“I was just eight,” says Phil, “agreeable to the parish calculation, when I went with the tinker. I was sent on a errand, and I see him a sittin under a old buildin with a fire all to himself wery comfortable, and he says, ‘Would you like to come along a me, my man?’ I says ‘Yes,’ and him and me and the fire goes home to Clerkenwell together. That was April Fool Day. I was able to count up to ten; and when April Fool Day come round again, I says to myself, ‘Now, old chap, you’re one and a eight in it.’ In course of time, I come to ten and a eight in it; two tens and a eight in it. When it got so high, it got the upper hand of me; but this is how I always know there’s a eight in it.”

“Ah!” says Mr George, resuming his breakfast. “And where’s the tinker?”

“Drink put him in the hospital, guv’ner, and the hospital put him — in a glass-case, I have heerd,” Phil replies mysteriously.

“By that means you got promotion? Took the business, Phil?”

“Yes, commander, I took the business. Such as it was. It wasn’t much of a beat — round Saffron Hill, Hatton Garden, Clerkenwell, Smiffeld, and there — poor neighbourhood, where they uses up the kettles till they’re past mending. Most of the tramping tinkers used to come and lodge at our place; that was the best part of my master’s earnings. But they didn’t come to me. I warn’t like him. He could sing ’em a good song. I couldn’t! He could play ’em a tune on any sort of pot you please, so as it was iron or block tin. I never could do nothing with a pot, but mend it or bile it — never had a note of music in me. Besides, I was too ill-looking, and their wives complained of me.”

“They were mighty particular. You would pass muster in a crowd, Phil!” says the trooper with a pleasant smile.

“No, guv’ner,” returns Phil, shaking his head. “No, I shouldn’t. I was passable enough when I went with the tinker, though nothing to boast of then: but what with blowing the fire with my mouth when I was young, and spileing my complexion, and singeing my hair off, and swallering the smoke; and what with being nat’rally unfort’nate in the way of running against hot metal, and marking myself by sich means; and what with having turn-ups with the tinker as I got older, almost whenever he was too far gone in drink — which was almost always — my beauty was queer, wery queer, even at that time. As to since; what with a dozen years in a dark forge, where the men was given to larking; and what with being scorched in a accident at a gasworks; and what with being blowed out of winder, case-filling at the firework business; I am ugly enough to be made a show on!”

Resigning himself to which condition with a perfectly satisfied manner, Phil begs the favour of another cup of coffee. While drinking it, he says:

“It was after the case-filling blow-up, when I first see you, commander. You remember?”

“I remember, Phil. You were walking along in the sun.”

“Crawling, guv’ner, again a wall—”

“True, Phil — shouldering your way on—”