ery interesting case, gentlemen, I don't think. Shall we say
five shillings apiece?" Sometimes a sense of the dignity of our calling
would induce us to stand out for ten.

And here also my sense of humour came to my aid; gave me perhaps an
undue advantage over my competitors. Twelve good men and true had been
asked to say how a Lascar sailor had met his death. It was perfectly
clear how he had met his death. A plumber, working on the roof of a
small two-storeyed house, had slipped and fallen on him. The plumber had
escaped with a few bruises; the unfortunate sailor had been picked
up dead. Some blame attached to the plumber. His mate, an excellent
witness, told us the whole story.

"I was fixing a gas-pipe on the first floor," said the man. "The
prisoner was on the roof."

"We won't call him 'the prisoner,'" interrupted the coroner, "at least,
not yet. Refer to him, if you please, as the 'last witness.'"

"The last witness," corrected himself the man. "He shouts down the
chimney to know if I was ready for him."

"'Ready and waiting,' I says.

"'Right,' he says; 'I'm coming in through the window.'

"'Wait a bit,' I says; 'I'll go down and move the ladder for you.

"'It's all right,' he says; 'I can reach it.'

"'No, you can't,' I says. 'It's the other side of the chimney.'

"'I can get round,' he says.

"Well, before I knew what had happened, I hears him go, smack! I rushes
to the window and looks out: I see him on the pavement, sitting up like.

"'Hullo, Jim,' I says. 'Have you hurt yourself?'

"'I think I'm all right,' he says, 'as far as I can tell. But I wish
you'd come down. This bloke I've fallen on looks a bit sick.'"

The others headed their flimsy "Sad Accident," a title truthful but not
alluring. I altered mine to "Plumber in a Hurry--Fatal Result." Saying
as little as possible about the unfortunate sailor, I called the
attention of plumbers generally to the coroner's very just remarks upon
the folly of undue haste; pointed out to them, as a body, the trouble
that would arise if somehow they could not cure themselves of this
tendency to rush through their work without a moment's loss of time.

It established for me a useful reputation. The sub-editor of one evening
paper condescended so far as to come out in his shirt-sleeves and shake
hands with me.

"That's the sort of thing we want," he told me; "a light touch, a bit of
humour."

I snatched fun from fires (I sincerely trust the insurance