IT was Christmas Eve. I remember it just as if it was yesterday. The Colonel had been pretending not to notice it, but when Drinkwater Torm knocked over both the great candlesticks, and in his attempt to pick them up lurched over himself and fell sprawling on the floor, he yelled at him. Torm pulled himself together, and began an explanation, in which the point was that he had not "teched a drap in Gord knows how long," but the Colonel cut him short. "Get out of the room, you drunken vagabond!" he roared. Torm was deeply offended. He made a low, grand bow, and with as much dignity as his unsteady condition would admit, marched very statelily from the room, and passing out through the dining-room, where he stopped to abstract only one more drink from the long, heavy, cut-glass decanter on the sideboard, meandered to his house in the back-yard. Meanderer was Drinkwater Torm. The Colonel gave him the name, "because," he said, "if he were to drink water once he would die."
- ISBN10 0483258938
- ISBN13 9780483258938
- Publish Date 5 January 2019 (first published 5 March 2014)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Forgotten Books
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 68
- Language English