"It
'tain't no good bein' nuffin kelse. Why, I've been dead and pretty near
buried. In Charing-crost 'orspital; yerse! I heard 'em say, 'He's a
gonner,' and I couldn't give 'em the lie. I come to, wrapped up like a
mummy, and hollered so as they pretty near 'opped out of their skins!
Ho, I've had a terrible life! Run over by a horse and van. Knocked all
to pieces. Been to the bottom of the sea! Many a time. But here I am,
happy and jolly. What's the odds?" He goes off into such a fit of
laughter that the chair is shaken and he himself nearly suffocated by a
cough like an earthquake.
He looks extremely like one of those lay figures employed by
ventriloquists. He is a thin, flat, pasteboard-looking old fellow; his
trousers hang over the edge of his chair apparently empty of legs, and
his shirt and open waistcoat (he never wears a coat) are pressed flat
against the high back of the chair, apparently empty of trunk. His body
and his features are for ever on the jerk. His shoulders twitch. He is
for ever laughing and gurgling. He is for ever struggling to say
something important, ending in a great spluttering stammer and a roar of
tremendous laughter.
For all he is eighty-two years of age, his hair is yet thick, and the
blackness of it is of too stubborn an order ever to go more than
iron-grey.
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