Its leader was a ne'er-do-well
young Welshman, who had been dismissed from leadership after leadership
of bands in the East till at last he had drifted into Lebanon. Here,
strange to say, he had never been drunk but once; and that was the night
before he married the widow of a local publican, who had a nice little
block of stock in one of Ingolby's railways, which yielded her seven per
cent., and who knew how to handle the citizens of the City of Booze.
When she married Tom Straker, her first husband, he drank on an average
twenty whiskies a day. She got him down to one; and then he died and had
as fine a funeral as a judge. There were those who said that if Tom's
whiskies hadn't been cut down so--but there it was: Tom was in the bosom
of Abraham, and William Jones, who was never called anything else than
Willy Welsh, had been cut down from his unrecorded bibulations to none at
all; but he smoked twenty-cent cigars at the ex-widow's expense.
To-day Willy Welsh played with heart and courage, "I'm Going Home to
Glory," at the head of the Orange procession; for who that has faced such
a widow as was his for one whole year could fear the onset of faction
fighters! Besides, as the natives of the South Seas will never eat a
Chinaman, so a Western man will never kill a musician.
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