icans,
Peroovians, Venzeshoolians, Spaniards, at 'em I should go. I see
bonds in all sorts of colours, Spaniards in black and white,
Peruvians--orange, Mexicans--red as the British army. Well, it's just my
whim. If I like red, I go at red. I ain't a bit of reason. What's more,
I never speculate."

"Why, that's safest, brother Tony," said the farmer.

"And safe's my game--always was, always will be! Do you think"--Anthony
sucked his grog to the sugar-dregs, till the spoon settled on his
nose--"do you think I should hold the position I do hold, be trusted as
I am trusted? Ah! you don't know much about that. Should I have money
placed in my hands, do you think--and it's thousands at a time,
gold, and notes, and cheques--if I was a risky chap? I'm known to be
thoroughly respectable. Five and forty years I've been in Boyne's Bank,
and thank ye, ma'am, grog don't do no harm down here. And I will take
another glass. 'When the heart of a man!'--but I'm no singer."

Mrs. Sumfit simpered, "Hem; it's the heart of a woman, too: and she have
one, and it's dying to hear of her darlin' blessed in town, and of who
cuts her hair, and where she gets her gownds, and whose pills--"

The farmer interrupted her irritably.

"Divide a couple o' hundred thousand and more by forty-five and a half,"
he said. "Do wait, mother; all in good time. Forty-five and a-half,
brother Tony; that was your sum--ah!--you mentioned it some time
back--half of what? Is that half a fraction, as they call it? I haven't
forgot fractions, and logareems, and practice, and so on to algebrae,
where it always seems to me to blow hard, for, whizz goes my head in a
jiffy, as soon as I've mounted the ladder to look into that country.
How 'bout that forty-five and a half, brother Tony, if you don't mind
condescending to explain?"

"Forty-five and a half?" muttered Anthony, mystified.

"Oh, never mind, you know, if you don't like to say, brother Tony." The
farmer touched him up with his pipe-stem.

"Five and a half," Anthony speculated. "That's a fraction you got hold
of, brother William John,--I remember the parson calling out those names
at your wedding: 'I, William John, take thee, Susan;' yes, that's a
fraction, but what's the good of it?"

"What I mean is, it ain't forty-five and half of forty-five. Half of
one, eh? That's identical with a fraction. One--a stroke--and two under
it."

"You've got it correct," Anthony assented.

"How many thousand divide it b