the Honourable Miss--well, never mind her name--he'd have said it at
his leisure, and gone on saying it. Now, no one should never take back
a servant what has given notice and then says he's sorry, for if he does
the sorrow will be on the other side before it's all done; and much less
should he take back a _fiancée_ (Quick said a 'finance'), on the whole,
he'd better drown himself--I tried it once, and I know. So that's the
tail of the business.

"But," he went on, "it has a couple of fins as well, like that eel beast
I caught in the Nile. One of them is that the Captain promised and vowed
to go through with this expedition, and if a man's got to die, he'd
better die honest without breaking his word. And the other is what
I said to you in London when I signed on, that he won't die a minute
before his time, and nothing won't happen to him, but what's bound
to happen, and therefore it ain't a ha'porth of use bothering about
anything, and that's where the East's well ahead of the West.

"And now, sir, I'll go and look after the camels and those half-bred
Jew boys what you call Abati, but I call rotten sneaks, for if they get
their thieving fingers into those canisters of picric salts, thinking
they're jam, as I found them trying to do yesterday, something may
happen in Egypt that'll make the Pharaohs turn in their graves and the
Ten Plagues look silly."

So, having finished his oration, Quick went, and in due course we
started for Mur.

The second incident that is perhaps worth recording was an adventure
that happened to us when we had completed about two of our four months'
journey.