If Joe had been the exponent of his feelings, as he left the room, he would probably have employed his favorite phrase, and confessed himself “humiliated.” He certainly did feel acutely the indignity that had been passed upon him. To live on a precarious diet and no pay was bad enough, but it was unendurable that his master should cease to consult with and confide in him. Amongst the shipwrecked sufferers on a raft, gradations of rank soon cease to be remembered, and of all equalizers there is none like misery! Now, Mr. O'Shea and his man Joe had, so to say, passed years of life upon a raft. They had been storm-tossed and cast away for many a day. Indeed, to push the analogy further, they had more than once drawn lots who should be first devoured; that is to say, they had tossed up whose watch was to go first to the pawnbroker. Now, was it fair or reasonable, if his master discovered a sail in the distance, or a headland on the horizon, that he should conceal the consoling fact, and leave his fellow-sufferer to mourn on in misery? Joe was deeply wounded; he was insulted and outraged. From the pain of his personal wrongs he was suddenly aroused by the telegraph clerk's demand for thirty francs. “Thirty francs for four words?” “You might send twenty for the same sum,” was the bland reply. “Faix, and so we will,” said Joe. “Give me a pen and a sheet of paper.” His first inspirations were so full of vengeance that he actually meditated a distinct refusal of whatever it was had been offered to his master, and his only doubt was how to convey the insolent negative in its most outrageous form. His second and wiser thoughts suggested a little diplomacy; and though both the consideration and the mode of effectuating it cost no small labor, we shall spare the reader's patience, and give him the result arrived at after nearly an hour's exertion, the message transmitted by Joe running thus:-- “Send the fullest particulars about the pay and the name of the place we 're going to. “O'Shea.” “I don't think there will be many secrets after I see the answer to that; and see it I will, if I tear it open!” said Joe, sturdily, as he held his way back to the inn. A rather warm discussion ensued on the subject of his long absence, O'Shea remarking that for all the use Joe proved himself he might as well be without a servant, and Joe rejoining that, for the matter of pay and treatment, _he_ might be pretty nearly as well off if he had no master; these polite passages being interchanged while the O'Shea was busily performing with two hair-brushes, and Joe equally industriously lacing his master's waistcoat, with an artistic skill that the valet of a corpulent gentleman alone attains to, as Joe said a hundred times. “I wonder why I endure you,” said O'Shea, as he jauntily settled his hat on one side of his head, and carefully arranged the hair on the other. “And you 'll wondher more, when I 'm gone, why I did n't go before,” was Joe's surly rejoinder.