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"I'll be careful, sir," the man answered. Mr. Sabin handed to each of them a roll of notes. The cabdriver lingered upon the threshold. Mr. Sabin looked up. "Well?" "Could I speak a word to you in private, sir?" Mr. Sabin motioned Duson to leave the room. The baggage porter had already departed. "When I cleaned out my cab at night, sir, I found this.
"Careful, careful!" he cautioned, as certain expelling movements began from within, "Easy, Ham, you jam-fool, keep the door shut, y'll break me." "Now, Jerry, all heave sh'gether!" exclaimed a voice from the blackness of the interior. "Will ye wait a minute, Mr. Durrett, sir?" implored the cabdriver. "You'll be after ruining me cab entirely." Which he did, after a severe kick in the stomach.
Money could not possibly be spared for such ornamentation as ships and guns and bodies of trained men. We could not afford it! As I passed the corner of Agar Street a drunken cabdriver, driving two noisily intoxicated men in evening dress, brought his cab into collision with a gaunt, wolf-eyed man who had been scouring the gutter for scraps of food.
There were two or three pictures of the forest at Fontainebleau and several of streets in Paris: my first feeling was that they might have been painted by a drunken cabdriver. I was perfectly bewildered. The colour seemed to me extraordinarily crude. It passed through my mind that the whole thing was a stupendous, incomprehensible farce.
He lit a cigar and drifted with the current westward, out of the Strand and into Pall Mall. A dispute between a cabdriver and his fare induced him to pause for a moment under the colonnade, and, when the little cluster of people had moved on, he still stood leaning against one of the pillars, enjoying the mild air and the scent of his cigar.
He stretched out his hand to the little wad of notes which Duson had left upon the table, but the cabdriver backed away. "Beg pardon, sir," he said. "You've given me plenty. The letter's of no value to me. I came very near tearing it up, but for the peculiar colour pencil it's written with. Kinder took my fancy, sir." "The letter is of value," Mr. Sabin said.
Some years later my informant again found himself warmly accosted by the prepossessing young cabdriver. "Ah, caro signore," he exclaimed, "sono cinque anni che non lo vedo tre anni di militare, e due anni di disgrazia," &c. Of moral sense he showed not so much as a trace.
He said that he had been driven for two or three years in a certain city by a young Sicilian cabdriver of prepossessing manners and appearance, but then lost sight of him. On asking what had become of him, he was told that he was in prison for having shot at his father with intent to kill him happily without serious result.
But Captain Eri steered the Mary Ellen through them as easily as a New York cabdriver guides his vehicle through a jam on Broadway, picking out the smooth places and avoiding the rough ones until the last bar was crossed and the boat entered the sheltered waters of the bay. "By gum!" exclaimed the enthusiastic "able seaman." "That was great er sir!"
Thus, by slow degrees, the artful monk ingratiated himself with the Imperial family, just as years ago, when a mere cabdriver, in his pre-saintly days, he happened to ingratiate himself with Alexis, Bishop of Kazan, who became greatly struck with him, and later pushed him forward as a holy man, yet for his trouble afterwards found himself swept away, and his successor appointed by Rasputin's own hand.
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