"No," retorted the banjo, with a rumbling laugh, like wind in the
bung-hole of an empty cask; "for I ain't got none. The family ends with
me; which is a pity, for I'm a full-stop to be proud on."

He was an enormous, tun-bellied person--a mere mound of expressionless
flesh, whose size alone was an investment that paid a perpetual dividend
of laughter. When, as with the rest of his company, his face was
blackened, it looked like a specimen coal on a pedestal in a museum.

There was Christmas company in the Good Intent, and the sanded tap-room,
with its trestle tables and sprigs of holly stuck under sooty beams
reeked with smoke and the steam of hot gin and water.

"How much could you put down of a night, Jack?" said a little grinning
man by the door.

"Why," said the banjo, "enough to lay the dustiest ghost as ever walked."

"Could you, now?" said the little man.

"Ah!" said the banjo, chuckling. "There's nothing like settin' one sperit
to lay another; and there I could give you proof number two of heredity."

"What! Don't you go for to say you ever see'd a ghost!"

"Haven't I? What are you whisperin' about, you blushful chap there by the
winder?"

"I was only remarking sir, 'twere snawin' like the devil."

"_Is_ it? Then the devil has been misjudged these eighteen hundred and
ninety odd years."

"But _did_ you ever see a ghost?" said the little grinning man, pursuing
his subject.

"No, I didn't, sir," mimicked the banjo, "saving in coffee grounds. But
my grandfather in _his_ cups see'd one; which brings us to number three
in the matter of heredity."

"Give us the story, Jack," said the "bones," whose agued shins were
extemporizing a rattle on their own account before the fire.

"Well, I don't mind," said the fat man. "It's seasonable; and I'm
seasonable, like the blessed plum-pudden, I am; and the more burnt brandy
you set about me, the richer and headier I'll go down."

"You'd be a jolly old pudden to digest," said the piccolo.

"You blow your aggrawation into your pipe and sealing-wax the stops,"
said his friend.

He drew critically at his "churchwarden" a moment or so, leaned forward,
emptied his glass into his capacious receptacles, and, giving his
stomach a shift, as if to accommodate it to its new burden, proceeded as
follows:--

"Music and malt is my nat'ral inheritance. My grandfather blew his
'dog's-nose,' and drank his clarinet like a artist and my father--"

"What did you say your grand