AN INTERVIEW WITH AN EMPEROR.
Under his arm, or flipper, he carries a heavy truncheon, fashioned from the backbone of a seal. As he stood before us, all this could be taken in at a glance.
I have had many a painful interview with gamekeepers, and people of that kidney, but this one would take all my diplomacy to meet. But a bland smile and a voluble tongue might pull us through.
“If you please game-keeper, park-officer, I mean,” I began:-
But he interrupted me in a harsh voice, and with an accent strongly reminiscent of the land of cakes:-
“Noo then, you twa," he cried, “what the deevil are ye daein' here? Ye ken vara weel this is private property. - Let me see what ye hae got in your pockets.”
When I had first seen him I had instinctively plunged my hands into these receptacles, with the idea of dropping anything of a compromising nature into the nearest ditch. But my fingers came in contact with something of a different nature.
I seldom go for a long walk without that vademecum, universal panacea, and open sesame, a pocket-flask.
I grasped it, and my courage revived. If “wi’usquebaugh” I could face the deevil, why not an
