"I believe everybody's bewitched to-day," she said, bursting into tears. "Oh, Dick, come back to me. Come back to me. Oh, why did I ever marry a man like you?" She cried bitterly for a few minutes. Then she asked me a lot of questions about the fight. One question she repeated many times: "Was there a grey horse in the second string?" But this I could not answer certainly. All the time that we were talking, she was crying and laughing by turns. Whenever a person entered (even if it were only the milkman) she turned white and shook, as though expecting the police. "It's the palpitation," she would explain. "That and the sizzums." Then she would go on laughing and crying by turns until some one else came in. Presently the landlady looked at me rather hard. "Here," she said, "you are not one of them. You've run away from home, you have. What are you doing here?" I said that I was on my way to London. "To London," she said. "What's a boy like you going to London for? How are you going?" I said that I was going to walk there, to see the Lord Mayor. "To--see--the--Lord Mayor," she repeated. "Is the boy daft, or what?" I blushed, and hung my head, for I did not like to be laughed at. "What are you going to see the Lord Mayor for?" she asked with a smile. I answered that he would send me home to my friends, as he was always generous to people in distress. She laughed very heartily when I had said this: but still, not unkindly. Then she asked me a lot of questions about my joining the smugglers, about my friends at home (particularly if they were well off), and about the money I had to carry me to London. When I had told her everything, she said,--"Well, why don't you write to your friends from here? Surely that's a more sensible plan than going to London--why, London's seventy miles. Write to your friends from here. They will get the letter in three or four days. They will be here within a week from now. That's a wiser thing to do than going to London. Why, you'd die in a ditch before you got half-way." "I shouldn't," I answered hotly. "Well, if you didn't you'd get taken up. It's all the same," she answered. "You stop here and write to your friends. I will see that the letter goes all right. I suppose," she continued, "I suppose your friends wouldn't let me be a loser by you? They'd pay for what you ate and that?" "Yes," I said, "of course they will." "What's your name?" she said sharply. I told her. "Oh," she said. "Jim--Jim Davis. Let's see that shirt of yours, to see if it's got your name on. I been taken in once or twice before. One has to look alive, keeping an inn." Luckily my name was upon my shirt and stockings, so that she accepted my story without further talk, especially as the contents of my package showed her that I told her the truth about the lugger.