He instanced some of these, but I didn't recollect having
met any of 'em. There were others he'd lost sight of. He named
these too--good old Bill This and Charley That and a Frank Somebody
who sang a wonderful tenor in his day and would bring tears to your
eyes the way he gave you _Annie Laurie_ when half drunk: but again I
couldn't recall that any of them had been passed down to me.
'You see, Mr. Collingwood,' he said, 'when one keeps a little house
down at Wimbledon, these things have a way of dropping out as time
goes on.' 'Just like the teeth,' said I. He thought over this for a
while, and then laughed--oh, he laughed quite a lot--and declared I
was a humorist. He hadn't heard anything so quick, not for a long
while. 'Mr. Collingwood,' he said, 'I'm a lonely man with it all.
I don't mind owning to you that I've taken up these here politics
partly for distraction. It used to be different when me and Maria
could stick it out over a game of bezique. She used to make me dress
for dinner, always. We had a billiard-room, too: but that didn't
work so well.
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