You just arst me another!"
Well, I know not how true is the story told by Old Joe of his own
wickedness.
But, however this may be--and it is not the province of Old Joe's
humble historian to speculate--let us be content with the picture of
these two old pensioners from the high seas, living together in the
evening of their days in a narrow court in a London slum, the one
paralysed and the other blind; the one a most brilliant and imaginative
story-teller, the other a most cautious, modest, tentative, and genial
critic. And let us sit between their two chairs for a moment and listen
to the moving story of Old Joe, believing it with all the simplicity, if
not with all the stupefied, admiration of the little slum children who
gaze at the pirate when his chair is moved out into the court that he
may warm his old bones in the sun.
[In brackets, let me say that I have come upon Old Joe literally posing
in the court as a most ferocious pirate before an audience of toddling
infants not more than four years of age.]
Eighty-two years ago Old Joe, surnamed Ridley, was born in the
neighbourhood of the Barbican. He remembers how murderers and highwaymen
used to come and hide in the court where he was born, "because, don't
you see, the police daren't come where we was living." He went to a
school in Charterhouse-square.
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