"You will kill me of laughing, Tommie, one of these days," says he. "If it were not that your claret is as good as any for thirty miles round London, I would never come near you. How a man can keep such a good table and yet such a poor understanding is a thing I have never fathomed. But I protest you will certainly kill me if you do not amend your mind a little." "Harry," says the justice sternly. "I can never understand how it is that a grandson of the Earl of Denbigh, and a person of undeniable family and descent, should have such ungenteel manners." "Damn the Earl of Denbigh," says Harry, banging his fist on the table, "and you too, Tommie. You can no more keep that fly out of the ointment, than a pig can his snout out of the muck." "What, sir," says I eagerly, "are you also cursed with a grandfather?" "Aye, to be sure I am," says he. "Though I'll thank no man that names him. If it were not for my grandfather I could go to the devil in my own way." "Why, my dear sir," says I, "never were there two such brothers in misfortune. Your case is the very counterpart of mine." CHAPTER XII I DISCOVER A GREAT AUTHOR WHERE I LEAST EXPECT TO FIND ONE While all this was going forward very eloquent glances were repeatedly exchanged between the justice and the head-constable. They were both equally at a loss to know what to do in the matter. Their plain duty was to have me removed in custody. But this they could not very well do, seeing on what terms of intimacy I had already been placed. There must be a grave mistake somewhere. What it was they were too greatly puzzled to say, but the end of it all was that my fellow-prisoners were removed into the stables against the next morning, when they could be more conveniently taken to prison, whilst I for the nonce was allowed to remain seated at the table in the society of my whimsical friend. Sir Thomas's composure had been so rudely shaken that for a long time he could hardly venture on another word. He sat watching us with a kind of stupefied horror, whilst we made short work of several bottles of his most excellent claret. "The true Falernian," says my companion, smacking his lips. "I would that Roman fellow were here in the room of Tommie, who sits like a dead dog in a dry ditch. I have remarked it before, and I remark it again, that I can never understand how it is that a man who can keep such a full-bodied, generous wine in his cellar should yet keep such a lean, ill-liberal heart in his body. It is an internal paradox on which I break my brains anew. You would think that one would cry out upon the other, and that they could live together no better than a keg of gunpowder and a live coal. And how in the first place they ever came to be associated passes me. Ring the bell, Tommie, and tell 'em to bring us up another bottle a-piece." While Sir Thomas did so with the mechanical meekness of one well accustomed to obey, says I: