As the Sailor sat eating his sausage-and-a-half and after the manner of
a sybarite dipping in abundant gravy the perfectly delicious toast and
dripping, he felt he would never be able to repay the debt he already
owed to Ginger. That floating hell which had been his home for six
long years, that other hell the native haunt of Auntie where all his
early childhood had been passed, even that more contiguous hell in the
next street but two, the abode of Grandma, were this evening a thousand
miles away. Just as the mere presence of Klondyke had once given him
courage and self-respect which in his darkest hours since he had never
altogether lost, so now, after such a meal, the mere sight of Ginger
sitting at the other side of the fire, smoking Log Cabin, put him in
new heart, touched him, if not with a sense of joy, with a sense of
hope.
As became a man of parts Ginger was not content to sit for the rest of
the evening smoking Log Cabin and gazing into the fire. At a quarter
past seven, by the cuckoo clock on the chimneypiece, there came a knock
at the outer door of the room which opened on the street. This was to
herald the arrival of Ginger's own private newspaper, the _Evening
Mercury_, which had been brought by a tattered urchin of nine, of whom
the Sailor caught a passing glimpse, and as in a glass darkly beheld
his former self.
In the eyes of the Sailor hardly anything could have ministered so much
to Ginger's social position as that every evening of his life, Sundays
excepted, his own newspaper should be delivered at No. 1, Paradise
Alley. It was impossible for the Sailor to forget his early days in
spite of the fact that fortune had come to him now in a miraculous way.
His world was still divided into those who sold papers and those who
bought them. Ginger clearly belonged to the latter exclusive and
princely caste. He was of the class of Klondyke--of Klondyke who in
his shore-goings in the uttermost parts of the earth behaved in an
indescribably regal and plutocratic manner. Sometimes it had appeared
to the Sailor, such were the amazing uses to which Klondyke had put his
money, that the earth was his and all the lands and the waters thereof.
Ginger's ideas were not as princely as those of Klondyke; that was, in
regard to money itself. He did not throw money about in the way that
Klondyke did, nor had he Klondyke's air of genial magnificence which
vanquished all sorts and conditions of men and women. But in their own
way Ginger's ideas were quite as imperial.
As soon as Ginger opened his evening paper he remarked, with a short
whistle, "I see Wednesday has beat the Villa."
"No," said the incredulous Sailor.
It was an act of politeness on the part of the Sailor to be
incredulous. He might have accepted the fact without any display of
emotion. But he felt it was due to his feelings that he should make
some kind of comment, for they had been stirred considerably by the
victory of Wednesday over the Villa.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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