A Drake by George!. Trevena John

I will wind up the box; but here is one more interesting relic I must show you. This Star beneath the glass case, although its rays are now sadly tarnished, adorned at one time the coat of His Majesty King George the First. Its history is fully set out upon the parchment beneath. The thing does look worth twopence, I admit, but then you must remember it was made in Germany, where they have always been fond of cheap decorations, which could be worn at Court, and then hung upon Christmas trees to amuse the children. According to this parchment, which supplies us with documentary evidence—the writing is somewhat blurred, as I was forced to use an uncommonly bad pen—this Star was worn by His Majesty upon his arrival in England. The maid of honour, whose duty it was to rub up the royal decorations, took the wrong bottle one day, and used her own matchless preparation for the skin instead of the usual cleaning mixture; and when all the pretty things turned black she passed them on to a Jew, and told the king she was very sorry, but she had accidentally dropped all his Hanoverian decorations down the sink. What he said with the usual month's notice I can't tell you, but probably he didn't care much, as he could buy stars and crosses and eagles by the gross from the toymakers of the Black Forest cheap for cash.

      "This particular Star was cleaned by a patent process and sold to a tailor, who stitched it on to a magnificent coat he had made for a young Duke who had just stepped into the title; and he, after a time, passed on coat and Star to his valet, who parted with them to a quack doctor, well known as the discoverer of a certain cure for cataract. He had already made about a score of people totally blind when he was called in to attend a lady of quality; and when this lady's sight was destroyed, her relatives invited the quack either to have his own eyes forcibly treated with his ointment, or to clear out of the country. He soon made up his mind, sold the coat and Star to a pedlar, and returned to Germany, where he entered the diplomatic service and blinded a lot more folk.

      "The pedlar made his way up to Scotland and, meeting a very shabby old fellow upon the road, sold him the coat and Star after the hardest bit of bargaining he had ever known in his life. This old chap turned out to be the first Duke in all Scotland, and he was driven to buy the finery as he had been commanded to appear at Court. When he got to London in his ramshackle old coach, he rubbed up the Star, put on the coat, inked the seams a bit, then went to the Palace, where he found the King playing dominoes with one of the English Dukes. 'Gott in Himmel!' cried his Majesty, 'His Grace has got my old Star. I know it's mine, for 'twas made in dear old Sharmany.' The Scot was trying to explain that the Star had been made to order by his village blacksmith, when the English Duke chimed in, 'And he's wearing one of my cast-off coats!' At this point the manuscript breaks off abruptly.

      "That's the true English history of this old Star, which I purchased for sixpence from a sailor in whose family it had been an heirloom for the last two hundred years."

      "Ain't that wonderful!" exclaimed a lady.

      "It do seem to make they old kings and Druid volk wonderful clear avore us," murmured the Yellow Leaf.

      The Captain led his guests into the garden, while George, after laboriously collecting a handful of dead flies, followed, ready to support his uncle if necessary, but still more anxious to support himself.

      "My cats are famous," said the Captain, approaching a building which had been once a stable, and was now divided into two compartments; one with a wired front for use in summer; the other closed and kept warm for winter quarters. "I have now succeeded in obtaining a highly scientific animal, combining the sleek beauty of the pure Persian with the aggressive agility of the British species. For the last twenty years I have supplied cats to the ships of the mercantile marine, and by so doing have saved much of the commerce of this country; for a single rat will destroy five shillings' worth of perishable cargo in one day; while a single cat of my variety will readily account for fifty rats, not to mention mice innumerable, during the same period. If you will reckon sixty cats, let us say, supplied by me annually, each cat accounting for fifty rats, again not reckoning mice innumerable, every day; if you will add a dozen cats supplied, again by me, to dockyards and custom houses swarming with vermin of every description, each rat doing damage to the extent of some shillings daily, with smaller vermin doing the same according to size and jaw power; if you will add sixty ships to twelve dockyards, and add, let us say, twenty cats supplied from my stock to foreign countries, reckoning in such cases in francs or dollars instead of shillings, and making due allowance for the different tonnage of vessels or dimensions of dockyards, if you will remember I have also supplied most of the cats at present commissioned to kill rats and mice upon the ships of the Royal Navy; and if you will include in your estimate the Grimalkins I have sold, or given, to millers, warehousemen, wholesale grocers, and provision merchants. … "

      "I reckon, Captain, that will come to about quarter of a million pounds a year, not taking into account shillings and pence," broke in Squinting Jack to free the Captain from his obvious difficulty.

      "That is a moderate estimate; still I will accept it. Quarter of a million pounds annually for twenty years, friends and neighbour! Have I not done my part in liquidating the national debt?"

      "Cats aren't what you might call nearly extinct animals same as they unicorns. Us ha' got more home than us knows what to do with," remarked a lady timidly.

      "Us drowns 'em mostly," observed a matron who looked capable of doing it.

      "Not cats like these—the latest triumph of scientific inbreeding," the Captain shouted.

      "Oh no, sir! Ours be bred all nohow," said the timid lady.

      "Don't the monkeys tease 'em, Captain?" asked the Gentle Shepherd.

      "The simians have sufficient intelligence to understand that my felidæ are famous for the claws. Beneath that tree," continued the Captain, "about three paces from the side of my nephew, you see the giant tortoise, which is the greatest antiquity that I possess—next, of course, to the Egyptian mummy. That tortoise, my friends, has lived in this world during the last five hundred years."

      "Ain't that wonderful!" gasped a lady.

      "I captured it upon the beach of one of the Galapagos Islands, where it had just succeeded in laying an egg."

      "Him lay eggs! Then all I can say is he'm the funniest old bird I ever did set eyes on," cried a lady who was famous for her poultry.

      "How did you manage to get hold of his birth certificate, Captain?" asked Squinting Jack.

      "Tortoises live for ever, if you let 'em alone—that's a proverbial fact," stammered the Captain, somewhat taken aback. "You can tell his age by—by merely glancing at his shell. This tortoise has his shell covered with tarpaulin to prevent the newspaper cuttings from being washed off by rain; but if it was removed you would see that the shell is yellow. It is a well known scientific fact that the shell of a tortoise is black during the first century of its life; takes on a bluish tinge for the next two hundred years; and becomes mottled with yellow when it approaches the enormous age of five hundred years."

      "Same as me," said the Yellow Leaf sadly.

CHAPTER III

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THE CAPTAIN MAKES HISTORY

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      One day George entered the churchyard and set his face towards a big sycamore, with the resolution of setting his back against it. He had been tempted by the wide trunk and smooth bark for a long time; but his attempt to reach the tree failed entirely because it stood upon the unfrequented side of the churchyard, and was surrounded by an entanglement of brambles and nettles some yards in depth.

      Determined to reach that sycamore somehow, George complained to his uncle about the abominable condition of the churchyard; and Captain Drake reprimanded the vicar for "allowing the resting places of our historic dead to become a trackless jungle;" and the vicar once more implored the sexton to give up the public-house;