Mr. Wriford looked at Figure of Wriford, and for the first time since the event on the Embankment cast his mind back along their companionship. It seemed immensely long ago; and at the thought of it, there overcame Mr. Wriford a full and a sudden sense of his misery that somehow unmanned him the more by virtue of this, the first sympathetic soul he had met since he had fled--since, as somehow it seemed to him, very long before his flight. He said, with a break in his voice and his voice very weak: "I don't know how long we've been. We've been a long time." The pear-shaped gentleman inclined his head with a jerk to the opposite side and took a long gaze at Mr. Wriford from that position. He then said: "How many of you?" Mr. Wriford, a little surprise in his tone: "Why, just we two." "Hup!" said the pear-shaped gentleman, said it with the violence of one caught unawares and considerably startled, and then, recovering himself, directed upon Mr. Wriford the same jolly smile with which he had first greeted him, and again upraising the sausage, trolled forth very deeply: "O all ye loonies of the Lord, bless ye the Lord; praise Him and magnify Him for ever." The pear-shaped gentleman then jumped to his feet with an agility very conspicuous in one of his girth, and of considerable purpose, in that he had no sooner obtained his balance on his feet than Mr. Wriford lost his balance upon his feet, swayed towards the arms outstretched to him, was assisted to the hedgeside, and there collapsed with a groan of very great fatigue. The pear-shaped gentleman on his knees, busying himself with a long bottle and a tin can taken from the grass, with a clasp knife, the cold sausage, and the portion of bread: "I will have that groan into a shout of praise before I am an hour nearer the grave or I am no man. Furthermore," continued the pear-shaped gentleman, filling the can very generously and assisting it very gently to Mr. Wriford's lips, "furthermore, I will have no man groan other than myself, who groaneth often and with full cause. Your groan and your countenance betokeneth much misery, and I will not be bested by any man either in misery or in any other thing. I will run you, jump you, wrestle you, drink you, eat you, whistle you, sing you, dance you--I will take you or any man at any challenge; and this I will do with you or any man for--win or lose--three fingers of whisky, the which, _hup!_ is at once my curse and my sole delight. Selah!"