“So you think he might be hard upon me, eh?”
“I think he might—I am afraid he would. I have known him do it,” says Grandfather Smallweed incautiously, “twenty times.”
Incautiously, because his stricken better-half, who has been dozing over the fire for some time, is instantly aroused and jabbers “Twenty thousand pounds, twenty twenty-pound notes in a money-box, twenty guineas, twenty million twenty per cent, twenty—” and is then cut short by the flying cushion, which the visitor, to whom this singular experiment appears to be a novelty, snatches from her face as it crushes her in the usual manner.
“You’re a brimstone i***t. You’re a scorpion—a brimstone scorpion! You’re a sweltering toad. You’re a chattering clattering broomstick witch that ought to be burnt!” gasps the old man, prostra
