"You may well say so, sir!" The jeweller took a seat and adjusted his spectacles as I sanded the Major's signature and pushed the document across the table. "A man," Mr. Jenkinson continued, dipping his pen wide of the ink-pot, "on the point of exchanging time for eternity--" "That thought is peculiarly unpleasant to me just now," the Major interrupted. "May I beg you not to enlarge upon it?" "But I _must_, sir!" cried out Mr. Jenkinson, as though the words were wrested from him by an inward agony; and tearing open his coat, he plucked a packet of folded papers from his breast-pocket and slapped it down upon the table. "You have called me in, gentlemen, to witness a will. I ask you in return to witness mine--which must be at least ten times as urgent." "Another will!" I glanced at the Major, who stared wildly about him, but could only mutter: "Jenkinson! William Jenkinson!" "To-morrow, sir," pursued the jeweller, his voice rising almost to a scream, "you may have forgotten the transient fears which drove you to this highly proper precaution. For you the sun will shine, the larks sing, your blood will course with its accustomed liveliness, and your breast expand to the health-giving breeze. I don't blame you for it--oh, dear, no! not in the least. But you will admit it's a totally different thing to repose beneath the churchyard sod on a mere point of honour, with an assassin's bullet in your heart--not to mention that he threatened to tear it out and fling it to the crows!" "The deuce!" shouted the Major, "your heart, did you say?" "I did, sir." "You are quite sure! Your heart?--you are certain it was your heart? Not your liver? Think, man!" "He did not so much as allude to that organ, sir, though I have no doubt he was capable of it." While we gazed upon one another, lost in a maze of extravagant surmise, a riotous rush of feet took the staircase by storm, and the door crashed open before two hilarious Irishmen, of whom the spokesman wore the reddest thatch of hair it has ever been my lot to cast eyes on. The other, so far as I can remember, confined his utterances to frequent, vociferous, and wholly inarticulate cries of the chase. The Major presented them to us as Captain Tom O'Halloran and Mr. Finucane. "And we've had the divvle's own luck, Major, dear," announced Tom O'Halloran. "The blayguard's from home. Ah, now! don't be dispirited, 'tis an early walk he's after takin'; at laste, that's what the slip of a gurrl towld us who answered the door; and mighty surprised she seemed to open it to a pair of customers at such an hour. For what d'ye suppose he calls himself when he's at home? A jooler, sorr; a dirthy jooler." "A jeweller!" I cried aloud.