Luscombe says, was going to
decline and die too. The new baby, which was to have killed her, has
put new life into her instead. They are touchingly proud of it, and
very happy altogether. I do like to see married couples happy.

Luscombe himself is rather an extraordinary man; short, vivacious and
solid; full of generous impulses, yet very well able to look after his
own interests. It was he who dared the neighbourhood, and caused his
wife to invite often to their house a crippled girl that had been raped
by a scoundrel and then given the cold-shoulder by everyone else.
Something of a sea-lawyer, he is one of the sharpest-brained--I don't
say deepest-thinking--men I have ever come across. Hardly educated at
all as a boy, he races through books (he read my Cary's _Dante_ in a
week), extracts the main gist of them, and is always learning some new
thing, from shorthand to cooking, though he has no need to do much but
behave himself for a pension. Almost harshly honest, he yet brings out
with pride a large edition of Pope that he 'nicked' from the
second-hand bookstall of a heathen Chinee at Singapore. That little
episode will not make a very big blot, I imagine, on the Book of
Judgment. If I remember aright, the British Navy was then occupied in
protecting land or concessions that the nation itself had 'nicked' from
the heathen.

Luscombe's opinion on books, men and things, unless it has been
borrowed from a newspaper, is always well worth hearing. His light of
nature, by which he judges, is exceptionally powerful.

While we were smoking in his front room--furnished with a curious
mixture of cheap English things and beautiful Eastern curios--a steward
from one of the great liners came in. He began talking about the
behaviour in a gale of a rich snobbish Jew and the behaviour of Jews
generally on shipboard, and was inclined to take up the high, superior,
patriotic attitude that Jews, not being Englishmen, were necessarily a
nuisance in a storm. "Well," said Luscombe, "all I know is, when a man
tells me he's never been afraid of anything anywhere, I tells him to
his face, 'You'm a damn'd liar!' One day, in a pub at Plymouth, there
was a man--a bluejacket too--boasting he'd never known what fear was,
and I up and asked him, 'Eh, chum? Did you say _Never_?'

"'Never!' he says. 'Never in me life!'

"'You'm a liar then,' says I.

"'We'll see,' says he--goodish-sized chap.

"'You'm a bloody liar,' says I, 'and what's mor