Front matter (continued 3)

But he moved on, huge in his belted greatcoat, walking with the elephantine, clumping step begotten of boots with iron toe-caps, and iron-nailed soles at least two inches in thickness; and the dank widow cocked a knowing eye at his retreating back, and the other at her unexpected champion.

"Good for you, my dear! Stand us a drain for luck, since you're so civil!"

He returned:

"I would if I'd got the tin! I believe I'm poorer than you are!"

"S'welp me bob! wot 'ave we 'ere? A haristocrat in distress, har yer?" she demanded.

"Not quite," he told her, as she turned the ponderous batteries of her raillery upon him. "I've seen an aristocrat in distress to-day, and he was worse than me. I'd not change!"

"Fer ten thousand jimmies hannual hincome, an' a 'ouse at Number One 'Yde Park Corner!" she jeered. "'Ow did yer lose the I'm-so-funny?—for if you 'aven't it now, you 'ave 'ad it, I'll tyke me Davy!"

"It's—a long story! Good-bye!"

He nodded and was moving on, when she shot out a gaunt hand and clutched him by the sleeve, crying:

"'Old 'ard, Mister! 'Ang on till I give this 'ere squealer to its mammy. About due now, she ought to be!"

"Isn't it..." His surprised look tickled the relict of the blown-up husband into a chuckle.

"Mine? Not by 'arf! A tizzy per workin'-day is wot I pays for the loan of 'er. Nothin' like a babby—specially in narsty weather like this 'ere—to touch the people's 'arts! Lil's mine, though, ain't you, deary?"

A preternaturally bright-eyed, white-faced, wizened little creature peeped out from the shelter of the ostentatiously clean apron, making a sound as of assent.

"Is she ill?" asked P. C. Breagh commiseratingly.

"Not 'er, that's her color!"

"Hungry, perhaps?" he asked.

"Why should she be? ... Wot did yer 'ave fer dinner, Lil? Speak up like a good gal an' tell the gen'lman!"

The small, grimy finger came out of the wide mouth. She lisped confidingly:

"Ay'po'rth o' gin 'ot, an' a stit o' totlit!"

"My God!" gasped P. C. Breagh in horror, "does that baby drink hot gin?"

"When she can get it! an' so does Hi!" explained the lady of the ballads, whom a short female in a plaid shawl and a battered brown bonnet had now relieved of the baby. She added hospitably: "Come an' 'ave two-pennorth o' comfort along o' me now! It's meat and drink both! as you'll find afore long! I'll stand treat—no blarney!"

But he groaned and fled from the tragic pair, seeing the blazing eyes of the drunkard, set in the small white childish face, staring at him from the gas-lamps and the hoardings, from the paving-stones beneath his hurrying feet, and from under the hats of passing strangers; and peering between the slowly-moving shoals of sooty smoke and muddy vapor, streaking the livid grayness overhead.

XIII

Pall Mall was some relief. He looked for the Junior United Service Club, and found it; for the Rag,—and for a time walked up and down in the vicinity of both of these stately institutions, heartened by the memory that his father had been a member of the former—listening with eager ears to scraps of conversation between soldierly, well-groomed, clear-voiced men in evening dress, lingering on the wide doorsteps to finish some animated discussion, or waiting for cabs and hansoms, the common hack, or the smart private vehicle, low on the wheels at that date, and more heavily built than the later S. and T.

Certain bald, mustached, and red-faced veterans, scrupulously attired for the evening—delighted him extremely.

"By George, General!" he heard one of them say, as he went by, his slouch forgotten, his shoulders squared, his head held up, "look at that seedy-looking chap there! Twelve to one in sixpences he's one of the 'supererogatory useless infantrymen,' kicked out by Cardwell, after twelve years' Service. D'ye take the bet or no?"

The reference to the unpopular War Secretary under whose effacing hand infantry regiments had not only lost their numbers, but in many cases vanished from the rolls of the Army, swallowed up in the New System of Amalgamation—had, as was intended, the effect of the red rag on the bull. The General bellowed:

"Confound me if I don't! Pay the cabman, McIntosh, while I put the fellow through his paces! Hi! Hi! Come here, you, sir!"

Then, as P. C. Breagh, summoned by an imperious wave of the umbrella, stepped out of the fogginess into the mellow circle of light streaming through the glass doors of the brilliant vestibule:

"What's your regiment? ... Give me the old designation! ... I know nothing of new-fangled names; ... All my eye and Betty Martin! and I don't care a dee who hears me say it! ... What is your rank, name and battalion-number? When were you discharged? ... Where's your small-book and certificate? ... Got 'em about you? ... Every soldier has 'em about him! And why don't you answer, dee you!—why don't you answer, man?"

The volley of interrogations left no room for reply. A second might have followed had not the General's crony, in unconcealed ecstasies at the sulky embarrassment of the victim and the determined attitude of the inquisitor, intervened:

"Dashed sorry! My mistake! Believe you've landed a civilian, after all, General!"

"Be dee'd! and so I have!" the General, after a raking stare, admitted. Then he took his crony's arm, they wheeled, and marched into the Club together. From whence issued, a moment later, a small boy in buttons, who, after a look up and a look down the street, pursued the retreating figure of the stalwart young man in the gray felt wide-awake and shaggy greatcoat, and arrested it with the words:

"'Arf a jiff, my covey!" He added, as the retreating figure wheeled and surveyed him in hard-eyed silence: "Wasn't it you what Old Fireworks went for just now on the 'Rag and Famish' steps?"

"The General called to me—mistaking me for——"

"I know!" The boy in buttons winked. "He's always a-pitching into somebody in mistake for somebody else! Catch hold! This is for you!"

This was a warm half-crown, thrust upon P. C. Breagh, without further ceremony. He flushed a murky, savage red, and shouted:

"What is this for? ... Who had the infernal insolence——"

He choked. Buttons, plainly regarding the tramp who could be insulted by half-a-crown as a new species, stared at him with circular orbs of astonishment, retorting:

"What's it for? How do I know, stoopid? He told me to catch you and give it you.... Cool that! Well, blow me!..."

These expressions being evoked by the swift, supple movement of arm and wrist that had sent the half-crown flying into the midst of the Pall Mall traffic. A sharp ring on the wood-pavement, a yell, and a flourish of naked heels, and a street Arab had seized the treasure. As the fog swallowed the wealthy imp, said Buttons icily:

"That's your game, is it?—pavin' Pall Mall with 'arf bulls for gutter-pads to pick up. Better ha' tipped it to me!—or sent it back to Old Fireworks. He ain't got too many of 'em. Signs too many toast-and-water tickets to be flush!"

Perhaps P. C. Breagh, scalding with wrath as he was, would have dived in among the traffic to recover the coin had it been recoverable. But the snows of yester-year were not more irretrievably gone. He realized it, hung his head and hunched his shoulders, and moved away from the region of clubs, where officers of the twin Services talked shop in sublime indifference to other subjects, as white-chokered attendants supplied them with savory meats and cheering drinks.

Be sorry for the boy with the gaunt wolf Hunger at his heels, and the black demon of Despair sitting on his shoulders. That determination of his to face what might come, and take his luck in a cheerful spirit, was to be put to a yet fiercer test before the dawn of a new day.

He was hungry and thirsty, and sorely tempted to break into his solitary shilling. But that silver barrier between himself and pennilessness was not to be lightly changed. He wondered, as he recalled to mind the many occasions upon which he had wantonly squandered and wasted money, whether an experience such as this, previously undergone, would not have been a valuable lesson in thrift?

He presently came by a well-known theater. It was too early for the frequenters of the Stalls and Boxes and Grand Circle. But playgoers of the humbler kind were pouring in to fill the unnumbered seats in the upper tiers, and a crowd composed of the usual elements had gathered at the doors of the Pit and Gallery, and filled the narrow side-alley in which these were situated, and overflowed into the Strand.

Queues not being officially recognized and regulated, there was a good deal of obstruction and pushing and persiflage. Pausing a moment under the gas-jet bordered, glazed shelter ornamenting the box-office entrance, his unseasoned eyes winced as they took in a sad, sad sight.

You saw her as a woman not past early middle-age, nobly proportioned, and even in her dreadful degradation, imperially beautiful. An old velvet mantle covered her, from which the torn and moth-eaten fur-trimming hung in draggled festoons. A trained silk gown, stained and torn and flounced with mud of many thicknesses, trailed upon the slushy Strand pavement; a broken bonnet perched on a palpably false and inconceivably dirty chignon, the false curls that cascaded from beneath it, hid a workhouse-crop of rusty gray.... And she lifted her skirts aside, disclosing muddy bare feet shod with a trodden-down, elastic-sided boot and a ragged slipper; and stepped across the threshold of the gilt and mirrored vestibule with a graceful, royal air....

"Now then, missus! Out of this, will you!"

A uniformed theater-attendant had advanced toward the intruder. But she did not retreat in terror at his truculence. She drew herself up, and folded her arms upon her bosom, and confronted the menial with a haughty, quelling stare.

"Man! who are you to drive me from this threshold? Out of the way! Clear!—and let me look at her. Do you ask whom? She! that woman who stands behind you smiling, with the white dove perched upon her whiter hand. Times have changed, my girl, since you and I last saw each other! Well, well! You are the same, whatever I may be!"

She laughed, a deep, melodious ha, ha, ha! not at all like the laughter of everyday people. Even P. C. Breagh, inexperienced as he was in such matters, recognized it as the artificial laughter of the stage. And, profiting by the momentary confusion of the functionary, she swept in her silken rags toward the person indicated; who looked back at her with beautiful stagey eyes from a life-sized canvas, wearing a stage costume; standing in a pose of the theater; fondling the bird that was palpably a property of the scene.

A long gilt-framed mirror hung beside the portrait, and to this she pointed with the tattered remnants of her theatrical manner, exclaiming with another of the stage laughs:

"Look upon this picture and on that! Ye gods!..." Adding, as the guardian of the vestibule, now wroth, advanced upon her: "No! Don't you hustle me. I'm off, governor! Farewell. Ta-ta!—until we meet again!"

She was gone, but she must have noted the boy who stared, fascinated by her haggard beauty and her dreadful misery. In fact, P. C. Breagh, passing on, had barely traversed a dozen yards of slushy pavement, before, with a bound and rush, a supple movement, predatory and feline, the woman emerged from an alley, and was by his side.

"Who are you? A waif, like me? Where do you come from? I saw you looking at me with all your eyes and your heart in them!—I played that scene with the picture and the mirror for you! You know——" She took P. C. Breagh's reluctant arm and leaned to his ear, being taller than he was, "There's always one person in the house you play to—and when that person's not there—the inspiration doesn't come. When it won't, you—shall I tell you what you do if God hasn't made you able to say 'No' to them?—you send out the devils to fetch you brandy and champagne!"

She laughed wildly and looked round suspiciously.

"Walk fast! A policeman's behind us, shadowing us. I'll tell you my story as we go. Did you ever hear of Anabel Foltringham? You must have! Everybody has! I drew crowds to that theater you've seen me kicked out of!—I was beautiful—great—famous! Men gloated over my beauty—they hung upon my every word. That made the devils jealous—the smooth, servile, obsequious devils in white aprons, that you find behind the scenes at every theater. They call them dressers, but I know better, you can't deceive me! You boy, I like your face! You look at me as if I were a Christian, and a man I knew had eyes like yours! ... Don't leave me! I'll make it worth your while to stay, only listen! ... I'll teach you all I know, make you a greater artist than any of them. For the things that you shall learn from me—I learned myself—in Hell!"

She hung upon the boy's wincing arm, her terrible breath scorched him, her burned-out eyes appalled—her greedy, long-nailed clutch found his flesh through his sleeve like the talons of a beast of prey. And he wrenched himself free, and fled, sick at heart; fancying that the old boot and shoe were running after him, and that the mud-trimmed silk gown flapped at his hurrying heels like leathery wings.

He broke into his shilling to pass the turnstile of Waterloo Bridge, stowed himself in a corner of one of the seated niches, and found relief in the presence of a stray kitten, sore-footed, hungry-eyed, ginger-haired, that rubbed against his legs and responded with appreciative purrs to his tentative back-strokings and ear-rubbings, administered half-unconsciously, as he wondered why human beings—under certain given circumstances, should be so much more beastly than the brutes?

The kitten jumped on his knee. He saw that its fur had been torn—probably by a dog—and shuddered at the remembrance of having more than once set a rough-haired terrier—a companion of his early boyhood—to worry stray cats—and enjoyed the carnage resulting. Why did he shudder now? Because by a feat of imagination only possible to one who was beginning to learn what it is to be homeless and hunted and desperate, he had got inside the ginger kitten's ragged skin, and established between himself and what we are content to call inferior creatures a bond of brotherhood.

"Don't you go, Kitty! though I can't make it much worth your while to stop," he muttered. "If I'd got the things—a scrap of lint and a saucer of clean water, a needleful of silk and a dab of carbolic ointment—I could patch up that tear—you'd be as good as new inside of a week."

He yawned, and the tramp of booted feet and the shuffle of naked ones grew faint in his ears; and presently the rush and roar of the Bridge roadway-traffic dulled to a hum—and he was deadly sleepy. With blundering fingers he undid two buttons of the frieze greatcoat and tucked the kitten inside—and after turning round three times, and making a great parade of clawing the surface soft enough for comfort, it curled up and fell asleep, and its host not only slept, but snored.

Even in sleep he was dogged and haunted by those three tragic figures;—the broken-down viveur, the child dying on gin, the lost creature who had once been Anabel Foltringham—they cropped up in his troubled dreams, over and over again. And he woke up, and it was dark, and a sleety rain was stinging him, and even the kitten in his breast was cold and cried.

He got up, aching and stiff, hungry and thirsty, realizing that he must have slept for hours. Big Ben boomed twelve. A midnight express from Charing Cross dragged its chain of yellow lights across the railway bridge with a hollow roar and rattle. One or two shapes passed, vaguely human in the wintry darkness; a Post Office van or so, with an official inside sorting bags by the light of a swinging lantern, three or four crawling cabs, a trolley with a formless mass upon it, pushed by two indistinct, slow-moving figures, coming from the Surrey side.

Toward the Strandward end of the Bridge there was a light, with murky figures moving about it. Revealed by its two flaring naphtha-lamps, the characteristic hostelry of the London gutters, with its gaudy paint and patriotic decorations, its clean shelves piled up with homely food, and hung with common crockery, its steaming urns of hot and comforting drink,—proved a Godsend to one more hungry and homeless vagrant.

The shipwrecked mariner of his analogy might have known the same sense of relief, seeing his signal answered and some stout vessel, flying the red ensign of the British Mercantile Marine, bearing down upon his tiny, wave-washed raft.... P. C. Breagh was guilty of prodigality at that coffee-stall. A penny cup of coffee, weak, but hot, and a twopenny sandwich, consisting of two slices of bread smeared with mustard and inclosing something by courtesy called ham, but really pertaining to that less stylish part of the pig known as "gammon," took the edge off his savage appetite. A ha'porth of milk for the kitten, and another ha'porth of ham-trimmings, left him lord of seven-pence halfpenny cash.

Thus, warmed and cheered, he went back to his seat in the niche again, noting that every stone bench he passed had now its seated group, or prone extended figures. His recently vacated place had its occupant, a thin, barefooted young man, indescribably ragged; who slept with his famished face—sharp and yellow as a wedge of cheese—turned to the sky, and the Adam's apple of his lean throat jerking, as though something alive, swallowed inadvertently, was madly struggling to get out.

And as he leaned upon the eastward parapet of the Bridge with the ginger kitten, now replete and happy, purring on his shoulder, and watched the wild welter of black water, pale-patched with foam and spume, rushing away beneath him, to plunge growling through the arches of Blackfriars Bridge, and speed away under Southwark and London Bridges, past the Custom House, Traitor's Gate and the Docks, between Wapping and Rotherhithe on its way to Greenwich and Poplar and Blackwell; and thence, by the verdant heights of Charlton to Woolwich, widening to a mile here; and so on past Gravesend and the Nore Light to where it flows between Whitstable and Foulness Point—eighteen miles broad; a kingly river, carrying on its back the commerce of the world.

The wind blew bitter cold from the heights of Hampstead. A livid moon blinked through rifts in ink-black cloud-wrack above the Shot Towers and a huge mass of brewery-buildings on the right. On the left, revealed in glimpses and suggestions by stray moonbeams and wind-blown lamp-flares, was a great confusion of trucks and trolleys; huge cranes rearing skeleton arms aloft, colossal cauldrons, heaps of clay beside yawning trenches, winking red eyes of warning for belated wanderers. All this beyond a banking-face of stone masonry with completed piers, showed where the Victoria Embankment would be by-and-by. Meanwhile chaos reigned; the area would have been an appropriate playground for the inhabitants of Bethlem Hospital, in hours of relaxation, or on national holidays.

P. C. Breagh laughed gallantly at his own conceit, and his chapped lips cracked and hurt him. He staunched the bleeding with his handkerchief, conscious that a day might come when he should cease to have any use for such an article. Habits die hard with us, but the cleanly ones go first, being acquired. We continue to desire food and drink long after we have left off caring about the color of our linen—nay! long after we have become indifferent to the fact that we wear no linen at all.

He was bone-weary; his thigh-bones seemed wearing through their sockets. His knees ached, his feet were heavy as solid lumps of lead. It occurred to him that the two things most desirable on earth were an arm-chair and a roasting fire to toast before. Failing that, a seat on a stone bench, with a north wind gnawing you was better than nothing.... He thought that by now one of the sleepers in the niches would have wakened up and moved on.

Vain hope. Where one had withdrawn, his place had been filled by three newcomers. Misery, Dirt, Drunkenness, Disease, and Wretchedness herded in those stony refuges, mercifully winked at by the patroling policeman with the unsavory-smelling bull's-eye. And strange beings perambulated or crept the pavement; 2 a.m. is the time when you may see them!—emerging from the foul hiding-places where they pass the daylight hours, to wander forth unseen....

Such goblin forms, such Gorgon faces, revealed by some fitful ray of watery moonlight, or the lamp of a languid, belated cab.... It was a waking nightmare, a Dantesque vision realized, inconceivably hideous to nerves already weakening. The Celtic strain derived from his father, in conjunction with the sensitive romantic nature bequeathed by Milly Fermeroy, might have urged their son to end things that bleak January night, with a leap from the parapet and a plunge into the wild black welter tumbling under the Bridge arches. But P. C. Breagh was not fated to join the procession of grim, unconscious voyagers, that wallow in the tides and circle in the eddies, flounder under the sides of barges, beat upon the piles and bridge-piers, and sink to slumber in the river-sludge a while, before they rise, more dreadful than before, to journey on again....

His mother's faith plucked him as before, from the desperate brink of the temptation; and—he had worked in the dissecting-rooms and walked the hospitals, toward that end of failure previously recorded,—and the hardening did yeoman's service now. But it went badly with him—at one period of that week-long night particularly.... He never liked to speak of that experience.... But long, long afterward he said to one who loved him:

"I held on to my reason, and prayed Our Lord for daylight. And—I don't know how I managed—but somehow, I got through!"

He found a seat at length, not knowing by whom or how it had been vacated, and dropped into it and slept like the dead. And he awoke in a windless lull,—to a strange bluish-yellow radiance in the sky beyond the great squat dome of St. Paul's and the crowding chimneys of the City: and felt the stir and thrill and quiver that is the sign of this sad world's waking to yet another day.

Three homeless women shared the seat with him. Two were awake, watching him not unkindly. A third slept, leaning forward in a huddled attitude, propped by the handle of a basket she held upon her knees. She breathed in whistling squeals,—a night on Waterloo Bridge in January encourages bronchitis.... He listened for a moment, then with a prodigal impulse, dropped twopence of his eightpence into the basket on her lap. And she woke, and said with an Irish accent:

"May the heavens be yer bed!" and slept again, heavily.

The second woman snuffled out in the accents of the East End:

"Gawd bless you, good gen'leman!"

The third lifted a tattered scarlet head-shawl, and flashed a pair of jet-black Oriental eyes upon him:

"Fortune and Life!"

To her he said, with a creditable effort at cheeriness:

"I've lost the fortune, mother! the life's about all I've got that's left to me!"

"And a good thing too, my gorgious! Don't yer complain of it! Come, tip us yer vast!" She added, as he stared uncomprehending—"Eight or left-hand dook—whichever the Line's brightest in. Have yer a—No! I'll give yer of my jinnepen for naught!"

He held out the broad, strong palm, grimy enough by dawn-light. She peered, spat on the chilly gray pavement and said:

"You keep up heart—there's a change a-coming soon!"

"Can't come too soon for me!" His smile was rueful.

"Keep up heart, I tell yer!" she bade him. "Yer'll travel a long road and a bloody road, and yer'll tramp it with the one yer love, and never know it. Until the end, that is, when tute is jasing. And there's a finer fortune than I meant yer to get o' me! Shake her up, Bet!" She explained, as the other woman turned to rouse the sleeper, "Taken a great cold, she has! We're fetching her to the Hospital. 'Tholomewses in Smithell, for the gorgio doctors to make her well. Though that's not where I would lie, my rye, and my pipes playing the death-tune. Shoon tu, dilya! Better shake her again!"

"Wake up, deer! There's a good soul!"

They stood up, supporting the bronchial Irishwoman between them, shaking and straightening their frowsy garments—tidying themselves as the poorest women will. Then with, a farewell word they moved on, northward. And P. C. Breagh, following them with reddened, night-weary eyes, saw his Fate coming, though he did not know it, in the person of a small and shabbily-attired elderly man.

XIV

He came striding from the Strand side, in a red-hot hurry, making as much noise with his boots as three ordinary pedestrians. He wore no overcoat, but was buttoned up in a decent black serge frock, having his throat protected by a large white cashmere wrapper. Also he wore gray mixture trousers, rather baggy at the knees, and shiny, and was crowned with a well-worn silk top-hat.

He walked at a great pace, swinging his arms, which were inordinately lengthy, and finished with hands of extra size, encased in white knitted woolen bags not distantly resembling boxing-gloves. When he reached the middle of the Bridge, he stopped and backed against the west parapet, folded his arms, and,—or so it seemed to P. C. Breagh, who was watching him for the sole reason that he happened to be the only cheerful-looking, decently-clad human being within his range of vision—snuffed the breeze, and considered the prospect with a consciously-possessive air. In moving his head sideways, so as to extend his view, his sharp black glance encountered that of his neighbor, and he nodded, and thus their acquaintance began.

"I'm glad to see, young gentleman," said the little man—and "My eye! Do I still look like anything of that sort?" was the young gentleman's unvoiced aside: "I'm glad to see that you don't number one among the many thousands—if I was to say Millions I shouldn't be guilty of exaggeration—who under-estimate the value of fresh morning air. For my part, without boasting, I may call myself a walking Monument to its healthiness, or as you can't put up a monument to a live man—I'll say, a Living Testimonial."

He had a yellow, tight-drawn, wearied skin, with a patch of rather hectic red on either cheekbone, and his bright black eyes twinkled at the bottom of hollow orbits, overshadowed by shaggy eyebrows of the deepest black. When he took off his hat to cool his head, from which quite a cloud of steam arose, you could perceive that he was baldish, and that his bristly hair and large mutton-chop side-whiskers owed, like his shaggy eyebrows, their intense and aggressive blackness to a conscientious but unskillful dyer, for by the cold and searching light of morning, delicate nuances of green and purple were seen to mingle with their youthful sable, and here and there the roots showed grayish-white.

"I was given up by the Doctors at the age of twenty," said the little man, "as I had been previously give up by 'em at eleven and fifteen. 'The boy's in Rapid Decline,' says one, 'keep him out o' drafts and give him boiled snails and asses' milk.' My poor mother did her best, stopping up window-cracks with paste and paper, and stuffing chimneys with old carpets. And living as we was at Hampstead Village, and the Heath being productive in snails and donkeys, the rest o' the prescription was easy to carry out. Still I got lankier and went on coughing o' nights. Says Doctor Number Two, 'It's a case of Galloping Consumption. Feed him up, clothe him warmly, encourage him to take gentle exercise, and avoid chills whatever you do!' So my mother swadged me up in flannel, made me eat a mutton chop every two hours, and trot up and down the front-garden for exercise between chops; and she'd pour half-a-pint o' porter down me whenever I stood still. And in spite of all her affectionate solicitude," said the little man with a twinkle, "I kep' on wasting, and coughing and spitting, and doing everything that a young fellow in a galloping consumption could do, short of galloping out o' this world into another. And Doctor Number Three says,—being called in when I was twenty: 'It's phthisis pulmonalis in the advanced and incurable stage. You can do nothing at all for this young man but get him into an Institute for Incurables. Codliver Oil, Care, and Kindness,' so says he, 'may prolong his miserable existence a month or two. For the rest, there's nothing to be done!' If you'll believe me, that news was the death of my poor mother. She'd expected nothing else for years—and yet it killed her at the end! And I acted as Chief Mourner at her funeral," ended the little man with a queer twist of his lean, sharp jaws and a momentary dimming of his keen black eyes, "in the pouring rain, and walked home without an overcoat—and got wet to the skin, and stripped, and rubbed myself dry, and made a rough supper of scalding oatmeal porridge, and went to bed and slep' with the windows open top and bottom. And that was over thirty years ago, and I've never missed my morning sponge-over with cold water since; nor never shut a window night or day, nor never run up a doctor's bill, and don't mean to! I left off coddling—once the blessed old soul was gone! Got better—better still—always expected to die by those who'd knowed mother. I traveled and saw Foreign Parts,—not specially going about to pick the 'ealthiest climates, knocked about abroad—came home and took to Business, and have taken to it ever since, as you may see. My health is robust," he made a show of hitting his chest again, but thought better of it. "I live plain, and make a point of getting Fresh Air into my system whenever possible.—This is the place I come to, as a rule, for the morning's supply. I take it on Blackfriars Bridge after the dinner-hour, the eating-house I patronize being on Ludgate Hill," he added. "And—I don't know whether you happen to be a student of old Bill Shakespeare, but there are some lines of his which might be twisted into applying to me." He drew a deep breath and delivered himself as follows:

"Some are born Tough, some achieve Toughness—others have Toughness thrust upon them."

He smote his chest hard with a muffled hand, and coughed in that rather hollow fashion, adding: "Without vanity, I may consider myself as belonging to the latter class! Eh?"

P. C. Breagh agreed that the speaker might be considered as belonging to the latter class.

"For at this moment I am as fresh as paint," said the little man proudly, "and as lively as a kitten, yet I have been up and about and on my legs all night! I left our place of business at 3.20 a.m., reached Charing Cross by 3.30, was on the platform when the Dover Boat Train steamed in—bringing mails and passengers that have crossed in the Night Boat from Cally—took over a shorthand report from a Special Correspondent—who has been to Paris to gather details of a political murder," he tapped the breast of his black frock-coat, which showed the bulging outline of a thick notebook. "And in the absence of our News Editor—who's been sent to Brummagem to report Mr. Bright's speech on Popular Education, Irish Amelioration, and Free Trade,—Parliamentary affairs being at a standstill this holiday season,—I shall hand 'em to the Senior Sub., who'll distribute the stuff and have it set up by the time the Chief drops in from Putney at eleven. It's for to-morrow's issue, following the ten-line telegram we publish this morning. A column-and-a-half of Latest Intelligence!" the little man screwed up his eyes and licked his lips as though reveling in the flavor of some rare gastronomic delicacy. "And if I had the say as to the setting of it—which I haven't!—and was free to indulge my predilection for showy printing—which I never shall be!—it should be headed with caps an inch high—and spaced and leaded all the way down."

His black eyes snapped: his hectic cheeks grew fiery.

"Headed with inch-high caps, ah! and spaced and leaded from the top to the bottom. Fancy how it 'ud lay siege to the Public Eye, and draw the Public's coppers! When I shut my eyes I can fair see the editions running out."

He recited, marking out the lines and spaces with a finger encased in white woolen:

A PRINCE MURDERS ONE MAN AND FIRES AT ANOTHER IN HIS OWN GILDED DRAWING-ROOM. PARIS SENSATION. COUSIN OF THE FRENCH EMPEROR KILLS A JOURNALIST ON THE VERY DAY WHEN THE FRENCH LEGISLATIVE BODY MEET TO INAUGURATE THE NEW ERA OF CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT UNDER NAPOLEON III.

His eyes snapped, his hectic cheeks flamed, he was evidently launched on a subject that was near the heart beating beneath the bulgy pocket-book. He talked fast; and as he talked he waved his arms, and gesticulated with the large hands encased in the woolly boxing-gloves.

"I cherish ambitions, perhaps you'll say, above my calling, which I don't mind owning is that of Newspaper Publishers' Warehouseman. Perhaps I do—perhaps I don't! My own opinion is I'm before my time, a kind of Anachronism the wrong way round," said the little man rather ruefully, "and rightly belong to—say forty years hence. As the poet Shakespeare says, and if it wasn't him it ought to have been! 'Sweet are the uses of Advertisement.' I'm a believer in Advertisement, always have been and always shall be!"

His garrulity was an individual and not unpleasant trait, implying confidence in others' sympathy. He went on:

"Being Nobody in particular, my views have never been took up and acted on. Though I enjoy a good deal of confidence and am—I hope I am!—respected in my place. For as Solomon said, somewhere in Proverbs—'Designs are strengthened by counsels,' and our Chief himself hasn't been too proud to say, on occasion: 'Knewbit, what would you do in this or that case?' Such as you see me, I am often at the 'Ouse of Commons, when sittings are late and speeches have to be jotted down in mouthfuls and carried away and set up in snacks.... For my constitution is of that degree of toughness—sleep or no sleep matters little to me, and that I am as fresh at this moment as you are," he bit off the end of a yawn, "I wouldn't mind betting a sixpence now!"

Said P. C. Breagh, at last getting in a word edgeways:

"If you lost—and you would lose!—and paid—and I expect you'd pay!—my capital would be doubled. I'm not a young swell who has got up early to look at London. I'm a vagrant on the streets—and it strikes me I must look like it. To-day I've got to find work of some kind. Can you give me a job in your warehouse? I'm strong and willing and honest—up to now! But by G—! if stealing a bunch of turnips off a costermonger's barrow will get me a full belly and a clean bed in prison, I expect I shall have to do it before long, if I can't find work anywhere!"

"Bless my soul!" said the garrulous little man excitedly. "And I thought you were a Medical Student or an artist (some of 'em aren't over-given to clothes-brushes and soap-and-water), and here I stood a-jawing and you starving all the time! ... Work—of course you shall have work, though I can't promise it'll be the kind o' work that's fit for an educated young gentleman——"

"Any work is fit for a gentleman," snarled P. C. Breagh, "that a decent man can do! What I want is——"

"What you want is—Breakfast and a wash and brush-up!" cried the little man excitedly. "And that you must go to Miss Ling and get. Say Mr. Knewbit sent you—I'm Knewbit,—Christian name Solomon. It's No. 288 Great Coram Street—second turn to your right above Russell Square. Cross the Strand and go up Wellington Street and Bow Street, cross Long Acre and ... but you're too dead-beat to walk it. Take a growler—it'll be eighteenpence from here unless the cabby's lost to every sense of decency. Borrow the money from me—here it is! I give you my word you shall be able to pay me back to-morrow. Here is a cab! Hi! Phew'w!" Mr. Knewbit whistled scientifically, and the preternaturally red-nosed driver of an old and jingling four-wheeler pulled up beside the curb as P. C. Breagh stammered out:

"I—I can't thank! ... You're too confoundedly kind! ... and I'd begun to think that all men were thieves or scoundrels—except a poor, sick beggar of a swell I met yesterday, whose wife and children shun him and whose valet bullies him! I can't refuse, you know! ... Things are too..."

"The fare will be two shillings if you talk one minute longer!" warned Mr. Knewbit, opening the door of the straw-carpeted, moldy-smelling vehicle. "I can see extortion in that man's eye. I'm a judge of character, that's what I am. Bless my soul! Is that kitten yours?"

For the ginger Tom, with arched back and erect tail, was walking round P. C. Breagh's legs, purring insinuatingly, and his companion of the night's vigil said hesitatingly, looking at the meager, homeless mite:

"He seems to think so! And—he helped me through last night. Would you mind if I took him? I'll pay for his keep as soon as ever I——"

Mr. Knewbit shouted in a violent hurry:

"In with you! Cat and all! Don't apologize! Miss Ling adores 'em! Three in the house already—waste bits left on the dustbin for needy strangers. Don't forget! 288 Great Coram Street, Russell Square. Drive on, cabby!"

He added, dancing up and down excitedly on the pavement, as the jingling four-wheeler rolled on, with the pair of castaways:

"Lord! if I only had the setting up of that young fellow's story, how I would give it 'em in leaded capitals!"

He closed his eyes in ecstasy and saw, in large black letters standing out across the clear horizon of the new day to which London was waking:

LONDON DRAMA. BEGGARED HEIR TO WEALTH ROBBED. CAST ON THE STREETS! SOLE COMPANION A KITTEN! PATHETIC STORY.

"Not that I know he is the heir to wealth, but it looks well, uncommon! Uncommon well, it looks!" said Mr. Knewbit.

XV

When the Editorial Staff of the Early Wire had gone home, or to the Club, by cab or private brougham or on foot, in the blackest hours of the night or the smallest hours of the morning; when the Printing Staff had filed out, pale and respectably attired, or thundered down the iron-shod staircases in grimy, inky, oily déshabillé, then the Publishing Staff trooped in and took possession. And, as the lines of carts backed up to the curb, and were filled by brawny shirt-sleeved men, who tossed the huge bales of newspapers from hand to hand with the nonchalant skill of jugglers doing tricks with willow-pattern plates and oranges, the Business Department began to empty so much that you could see the eyebrows of clerks behind the iron-nailed unplaned deal counters; and Mr. Knewbit, slackening in his terrific energy, would cease keeping count, and tallying, and writing cabalistic signs on huge packages with the stump of blue pencil that never was used up. And he would mop his face and say—in the same invariable formula:

"Well! we've broke the back of the day's work, and lucky if no one can say no worse of us!"

Later on, when the last newspaper-cart had been gorged and rattled away, and the last newspaper-boy had darted out with his armful, and his mouth open for the yell that would issue from it the moment his bare feet hit the pavement of Fleet Street, and the office of the Early Wire and all the other offices that had got off the Morning Issue had an air of dozing with blinking eyes and mouths half open—when the Evening Papers were at the height of strenuous effort,—Mr. Knewbit would arrange the limited supply of hair remaining on his cranium with a pocket-comb, titivate his whiskers by the aid of a tiny scrap of looking-glass nailed inside his desk-lid, dust the blacks off his collar, straighten his cravat—which boasted a breastpin that was an oval plaque of china, painted with a miniature of a young lady with flowing ringlets, rosy cheeks, white arms and shoulders, pink legs and a diaphanous tutu, dancing, crowned with roses in front of a sylvan waterfall,—and betake himself out to dine.

Sometimes he would patronize the "Old Cheshire Cheese" chop-house, where they gave you beefsteak puddings on Saturdays. Or "The Cock" would have his custom, or he would drop in at an eating-house in St. Paul's Churchyard, where Irish stew, boiled beef with dumplings and carrots, or tripe and onions were the staple dishes in winter months. In summer you got roast mutton and green peas and gooseberry tart with custard; but whatever the season or the dish, it was always washed down with whisky-and-water, or gin-and-lemonade, or the strongest of strong beer.

For this particular tavern was patronized by the penny-a-liners of Paternoster Row and the vicinity; out-at-elbows, and generally seedy-looking literary free-lances, who picked up a living by inditing touching tracts and poignant pamphlets for religious Societies bearing arresting titles, such as:

"STOP! YOU ARE OUT AT THE GATHERS! Or, The Tale of a Skirt," and "DEAD LOCKS FOR LIVE HEADS! By A Converted Hairdresser." Or biographical accounts of the brief lives and protracted deaths of Little E——, aged seven, or Miss Madeline P—— of X——.

Bearded men these, with bulbous noses, studded with ruby pimples; full of strange oaths, reveling in profane jest and scurrilous talk. Lanky youths with hollow eyes, uncut hair and crimson neckties, who boasted of having cast off all shackles, bonds and fetters, civil, social, moral and religious, and dreamed in their wilder moments of the inauguration of a second British Commonwealth, and the reign of a New Era of Socialism, and the planting of the Tree of Liberty in Buckingham Palace Courtyard....

And over their strong meats, and the stronger liquors with which they moistened them, these would discuss the plots of tracts, and so forth, seasoning their discourse with highly-spiced pleasantries and salacious witticisms, jesting in ribald sort at all things upon earth and elsewhere; until—as Mr. Knewbit frequently said—you expected the ceiling to come down and strike 'em speechless, and fancied you saw wicked little hellish flames playing about the cutlery.

"Not that I ever read any of their stuff, you know!" he explained to P. C. Breagh, "though I am a man that, to a certain extent, might be considered a reader. You've seen my library on the shelf by my bed-head, and though three books might be held—in the opinion of some people—to constitute rather a limited library, they're the three best books that ever were written or ever will be. Bar none!"

He was a Christian believer himself; of the easy-going, undenominational, non-Church-going kind. And when Sunday came round, Miss Ling, after seeing the beef and potatoes and Yorkshire-pudding safely into the oven, would charge him to watch over the same and guard them from burning; and put on her best bonnet and pop over to the Christian Mission Army Hall that used to be in Judd Street, W.C., for a supply of red-hot doctrine sufficient to stand her in a week of working-days, while Mr. Knewbit smoked, kept an eye on the cooking, and occasionally dipped into his library.

A popular edition of the Plays and Poems by one William Shakespeare, together with a stout and bulky volume, "Gallowglass's Encyclopaedia of Literary and Typographical Anecdote," and a worm-eaten, black-leather-bound copy of the Bible—as translated from the Latin Vulgate and published by the English College at Douay A.D. 1609, formed Mr. Knewbit's library. In the pages of these, their owner frequently stated it as his opinion, might be found the finest literature in the world. He always ended:

"And I bought Gallowglass for half-a-crown off a barrow in Camberwell, and Shakespeare was give me by a young fellow who found him dullish reading—and the Book that beats 'em both I picked up in the fourpenny box at a second-hand bookseller's in Clement's Inn!"

King Solomon and the son of Sirach of Jerusalem, with the Prophets Isaiah and Hosea, were Mr. Knewbit's favorite Old Testament authors. Of the Books of Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus he never wearied. One wonders how much he understood, but he quarried diligently in their pages, and sometimes emerged into the light figuratively laden with jewels. Marvelous passages would drive home to the brain of the man in blinding flashes of illumination, and he would lose the place in his excitement,—being an unmethodical if omnivorous reader,—and never be able to find them again.... So he quoted his Prophets from memory and generally inaccurately, yet seldom without point or inappropriately. At other times, wearied with their glorious obscurity, he reverted to the plainest and simplest of all the stories ever written, and the sweetest and the saddest too....

He spoke of the Saviour as though he had known Him....

"I never could forgive them fellers"—I conceive he meant the Disciples—"for cutting off and leaving Him to be pinched by that gang in the Garden. It was mean, that's what I call it. Mean! But I will say they owned up their shabbiness in their writings afterward. Though you notice they hurry over that part. And I'm not surprised! That young feller downstairs yet, Maria?"

This was at eight o 'clock on the Sunday morning following Mr. Knewbit's meeting with Carolan on Waterloo Bridge. Miss Ling, stepping nimbly about the big front kitchen in the basement, busy with her task of getting breakfast, returned that "Mr. Breagh had got up and gone out at half-past six."

"For a shave?"

Mr. Knewbit rubbed his own bristly chin rather dubiously as he asked the question. Miss Ling, impaling a round of stale loaf upon a tin toasting-fork, shook her neat head and answered in the negative. Mr. Breagh had mentioned that he was going to church.

"To church.... We'll hope he has gone," said Mr. Knewbit still more dubiously, "though between me and you and the toasting-fork it sounds too good to be true.... And 'The Brunswick Arms' is handy round the corner. If the young man don't rattle at the area-gate by the time you've finished your toasting, I shall made bold to go and look for him at the Bar. Hulloa! Here he is! Now, that's what you might call a pleasant disappointment!"

For he had glanced up at the strip of area-railings commanded by the upper panes of the kitchen window, and seen the legs of P. C. Breagh stride by at a great rate, stop, turn back, and descend the area-steps.

You are to see Miss Ling receiving his morning greeting with the wide smile that revealed an unbroken row of sound white teeth ("every one her own," as Mr. Knewbit would say) and made her thin, triangular face so pleasant. She was a staid spinster, owning to forty-nine, who would have died rather than confess to being fifty. Her magnificent hair, genuinely black and shining like ebony, was coiled upon the top of her head too tightly for beauty. Her well-marked eyebrows and candid brown eyes slanted a little upward at the temples, and her skin was rather yellowish than olive. She was of a flat and bony figure, active and sound and tough, and, in a plain way, a first-rate cook and caterer.

"Though when I left her Ladyship the Countess of Crowmarsh," said Miss Ling, "after fourteen years spent in the Castle nurseries, gradually rising from nursery-maid to under-nurse, and then becoming what his Lordship was pleased to call Head of the Bottle Department—a very humorous nobleman his Lordship was at times!—I had forgotten all I ever knew of my dear mother's kitchen-teaching—she was a cook, Mr. Breagh, who had lived with the first in the land! and when—being pensioned by the family—I decided to risk the step of taking this house, and letting it out to lodgers, preferring single gentlemen—I was forced to engage a widowed person to prepare their meals at first."

"I remember her," said Mr. Knewbit, with his mouth full of poached eggs and bacon. "She could under-boil a pertater and calcine a chop with any elderly female I ever yet come across. Here, pussy! if you ain't too proud for rasher-rinds? And not you!" He leaned to the hearth—he was sitting with his back to the glowing range, and dropped his offering under the nose of the ginger kitten, which, having already disposed of a saucer of bread-and-milk, instantly grabbed.

"To-morrow," said P. C. Breagh, looking up from his rapidly-emptying plate with the smile which Miss Ling had already decided was pleasant, "I hope to prove to you that, like the kitten, I am not too proud for anything that comes in my way."

"Presently, presently!" said Mr. Knewbit sharply. "Everything in good time! ... I don't like to be hurried. And—what did you say was the property you'd left with the—the Greedy Guts who runs that Euston Road hotel?"

"There were three boxes of books—chiefly works on medicine and surgery." Carolan reflected a moment, stirring his coffee with one of Miss Ling's Britannia-metal spoons. "And two trunks, with clothes and all that. Things I valued. My student's cap and schläger, and the silver-mounted beer-horn the English Colony gave me, and—a Crucifix that was my mother's." The speaker blinked and spoke a little huskily: "Used to hang over my bed when I was a little chap in frocks."

"Don't be cast down. Some wave o' luck may wash your property ashore at your feet one of these days. What I will say is—I wish I had the setting-up of that story for the paper!" said Mr. Knewbit, handing in his plate for fried bread. "Supposing you,"—he jerked his eyes at Carolan—"had any talent in the literary line, it 'ud be worth your while to throw off a quarter-col. of descriptive stuff."

"Relating to my experiences in that fellow's bug-ridden lodging-house? Why, I don't doubt I could—after a fashion," said P. C. Breagh.

"After a fashion won't do. Write it the best you know! Sit down at the kitchen-table here, when Maria's gone to her prayer-meeting and I've got my pipe and Solomon to keep me quiet,—and blacken half a quire o' paper—there's plenty in the drawer there!—with the story—told short, crisp and plain, and with a dash o' humor, and within four hundred words. It would space out lovely!" said Mr. Knewbit, arranging imaginary head-lines on the clean coarse tablecloth.

LONDON SHARK VICTIMIZES STUDENT! HE GRABS HIS GOODS AND LETS HIM GO!

"Ah, dear me! If I had had your education. But it's too late to alter that. What were you saying, Maria?"

Miss Ling was hoping that Mr. Breagh had passed a comfortable night?

"First rate, ma'am, many thanks to you!" returned the object of her solicitude.

"For," said Miss Ling, with a homely kind of dignity, "if anything was wanting, Mr. Breagh must make excuses. The arrival being unlooked-for and the notice very short."

"Dropped on you out of the skies, didn't he, Maria?" chuckled Mr. Knewbit. "And you've put him, for the present, in Mr. Ticking's bed!"

"In Mr. Ticking's bed!—Mr. Ticking," explained Miss Ling, turning to the new arrival, "who rents our third-floor front, being in the country for his holidays."

P. C. Breagh expressed the hope that Mr. Ticking would not be offended.

"Lord bless you, no!" responded Mr. Knewbit. "Ticking's an agreeable feller. He'd take you rather as a Boon than otherwise. Contributes a column of cheerful, gossipy items weekly to half-a-dozen of the suburban and district newspapers that are springing up around us like—like mushrooms. Always on the look-out for copy—Ticking is! Now Mounteney——"

"Mr. Mounteney—who is also away on his vacation, and rents the front sitting-room on our ground-floor, and the bedroom behind it," said Miss Ling, "is a gentleman who—owing to the nature of his professional employment—is very refined and sensitive."

"Edits the Health and Beauty column of the Ladies' Mentor," said Mr. Knewbit, crunching fried bread noisily, "and is altogether too ladylike a gentleman to take a liberty with. For the rest, we are Full Up. To begin with, I occupy a combined bed-and-sitting room behind this kitchen, and Miss Ling occupies the large front garret bedroom; the back one being partitioned off as a Box and Lumber room, and a bedroom for the servant gal, who is now having her breakfast in the scullery, as me and Miss Ling agreed would be more considerate toward you.... Coming down again to the first-floor, the front parlor and back bedroom are rented by a German gentleman, Mr. Van Something——"

"Herr von Rosius," interpolated Miss Ling, "who is a teacher at the Institute of Languages in Berners Street.... Second-floor front, another combined bed-and-sitting ... Monsieur Meguet, a French gentleman who is studying Prints at the British Museum. Second-floor back, Miss Kindell, who is a copier of Pictures at the National Gallery, and a sweet artist. Third-floor, Mr. Ticking——"

"You represent him for the present," said Mr. Knewbit, nodding at Carolan.

"The trouble is, and I hope Mr. Breagh will forgive me for mentioning it," hesitated Miss Ling, "that Mr. Ticking comes back to-morrow night...."

"And when does Miss Morency go? ... Miss Morency," explained Mr. Knewbit without waiting for an answer, "is a young person who don't give satisfaction,—regarded as a lodger,—and there you have the truth in a nutshell—Brazil for choice! And Miss Ling's good-nature has led her, before now, to take in such people, and be taken in by 'em too, I'm bound to say!"

The little man broke off as Miss Ling, mindful of P. C. Breagh's flushed and uneasy countenance, coughed warningly.

"Miss Morency has been brought up very well, and is—she has told me,—the daughter of a clergyman in Hertfordshire," she explained as Mr. Knewbit buried his confusion in his coffee-cup. "I cannot but think it right—under the circumstances—to give Miss Morency a little time to turn round."

"She's been turning round for eight weeks," said Mr. Knewbit, rubbing his nose irritably. "And—if I was you, I'd have my latchkey back."

"To ask it would be a want of confidence, which would wound Miss Morency, and upset her," returned Miss Ling, who had risen and was gathering the breakfast things together in rather an agitated way. She added: "And willfully to hurt a person's feelings is a thing I could not bring myself to do, Solomon. And she goes out, evening after evening, poor thing, to call on relatives who live in distant parts of London, and is hardly ever back until very late indeed!"

"She come in at two o'clock this morning," said Mr. Knewbit, screwing up his eyes meaningly at Carolan. "And—being comparatively early myself on Saturdays—I heard her—just as I was getting between the sheets. And being anxious to solve the problem as to Why a young creature like that should go out walking on two feet—and them remarkably small and pretty ones!—and come back with Four—and two of 'em uncommon big and heavy ones, I slipped up the kitchen-stairs and looked round the corner-post. 'The seeing eye and the hearing ear,' said my namesake, 'the Lord hath made them both' ... and then, just as I was a-going to ring the garret-bell and bring you down out of bed in your curl-papers, Maria, I remembered, 'Lie not in wait for wickedness in the house of the just, nor spoil his rest,' 'him' being understood as 'her,' for you're a just woman! But judgment must be executed upon the daughter of Rahab, whether it's Sunday or whether it ain't!"

"When you begin quoting from the prophets, it takes a cleverer than me to understand you," said Miss Ling, flushed to the top of her high cheekbones. "But as a woman that's her elder, I will stand up for that poor unprotected young creature against any man that tries to take her character away!"

"It's nearly time for the Prayer Meeting at the Headquarters Branch Hall of your Christian Mission Army," said Mr. Knewbit, looking at an enormous silver watch he wore, and always set by the Tower clock at Westminster, and calmly taking the poker from the rail above the kitchen-range. "If you'll put on your bonnet and go, what I have made up my mind to do will be comfortably over before the General, or the Colonel, or whichever of 'em is set down to give you Blood and Fire this morning, has fairly warmed to the fight. But if you want to be upset and made uncomfortable in your mind for a week afterwards—you'll stop! You will? Very well, and why not in your own house? Mr. Breagh, will you kindly follow with Miss Ling and act as Reserve Force in this emergency? I thank you, young gentleman!"

And armed with the poker, Mr. Knewbit left the kitchen, followed by Carolan and the landlady, closely attended by the ginger kitten, and mounted the stairs to the third-floor back.

XVI

It was a sordid little scene that followed, but for the sake of the good woman whose unaffected charity and kindly feeling illumined its murky darkness, it shall be recorded here....

Mr. Knewbit, arriving at Miss Morency's door, thumped on it, receiving no answer beyond the hurried shooting of the bolt, and the scuffling of slippered feet across the carpet. Roused by the meaningful silence to indignation, he delivered himself in the following terms:

"You inside there—and you're aware why I don't address you as a young lady!—I'm going to trouble you to unfasten that door!"

"No, you ain't!" said a feminine voice from within, defiantly. "Go downstairs and shave yourself, you silly old man!"

A thickish masculine chuckle greeted this sally.

"When we have got you and your companion out of this respectable house," quoth the wrathful Mr. Knewbit, "I may have time to attend to my Sunday twylett. Not before! Are you a-going to undo this door? Because, if you won't, I am a-going to bust it with the poker! Once!" He applied the end of the weapon named to a panel with a crack in it. "Twice!——"

"Stop!" cried Miss Ling, and Mr. Knewbit lowered the poker. "One moment, Solomon!—I want to speak to her!"

Forgetful of her neat Sabbath attire, she went down upon her knees before the door, as Mr. Knewbit joined P. C. Breagh upon the staircase, and laid her work-worn hand as gently and persuasively upon the threatened panel, as if it had been a human bosom housing an obdurate heart.

"Miss Morency! Don't be afraid, my dear! Maria Ling it is a-speaking to you!" She waited an instant, and receiving no response, went on.

"Mr. Knewbit has got it in his head—he best knows why!—that you're not Alone in that room, in a manner of speaking.... Open the door and prove to him he's wrong; or tell me on your solemn honor—before the God who made you and me both women!—that he's mistaken, and I'll believe you—and ask your pardon—and we'll all go downstairs again!"

There was a silence within the room, and then a thick whispering voice and a thin whispering voice held indistinct colloquy. P. C. Breagh and Mr. Knewbit exchanged looks, Miss Ling grew pale, rose, and withdrew from the door. Her clean Sunday handkerchief was in her hand and the hand shook, and her mouth was shut tightly, as, with much shuffling, an obstacle—probably a chest of drawers—was removed from the other side, the key was turned, and the bolt withdrawn.

The door opened. The defiant figure and the angry painted face of a good-looking young woman were revealed beyond the threshold. She wore a gaudy dressing-gown trimmed with cheap lace, and a butterfly cap in the prevailing mode was set upon her mound of dyed hair. Her companion might have been the manager of a restaurant, or a West End shopwalker. His face was sallow with debauch, and his eyes were red from liquor or sleeplessness. With the rosebud of the previous night still drooping in the buttonhole of his fashionably cut frock-coat, and the mud of the previous night soiling his trouser-ends and his shiny boots and drab spats, and his silk hat fixed firmly on his head as though in anticipation of a scuffle, he stood behind the woman; maintaining a sulky silence, gripping his cane in a hand that was mottled and shaky. And the roll of his eyes said "Two of 'em!" as his glance took in Mr. Knewbit and P. C. Breagh.

Said the rouged, defiant young woman in the flyaway cap, turning a glare of defiance upon her landlady:

"You see now whether that"—she employed a term reflecting on the moral character of her assailant—"was mistaken, or whether he wasn't, I hope?"

Returned Miss Ling, looking mildly at the brazen countenance:

"I see! May the Lord forgive you, poor ruined young creature. But for Him having given me a good, good mother, I might be standing where you are now!"

"Never!" said Mr. Knewbit under his breath. The kind soul went on without heeding him:

"Were you led away? ... Was it the first time? ... Whether or no, it's not too late to change, and lead a life of decency. As for this—man...."

The young woman interrupted, with lowered eyes shunning her:

"We're to be married! He's promised me upon his oath!"

Her companion purpled furiously, and broke out:

"You're lying, you——! I picked you up in the Haymarket! Do you think I'm afraid of you and your bullies there? Stand back!"

Fulminating threats, he thrust roughly past Miss Ling, driving her, possibly not with intention, against the landing wall. She gave a little cry, and the poker fell.... He bellowed:

"—— you! You've broken my arm, you—blackguard! Where's the police?"

A grip of steel shut upon his scruff, and the voice belonging to the grip said cheerfully:

"In the street. Come down and look for 'em, my man!"

His protests were drowned in the rattling of his boot-heels on the oil-cloth-covered staircase, in the violence of his transit to the ground-floor. There, as Mr. Knewbit, dodging past, opened the hall door, he was shot from its threshold as a human bullet from a spring-cannon, even then supplying a sensational turn at the Royal Alhambra Theater—rolled down the steps, gathering momentum, and colliding with a late milk-truck that happened to be passing, suffered abrasions and the ruin of his smart frock-coat. Leaving the victim of righteous judgment to appease the justly-indignant milkman with some of the silver shed from his trousers-pockets in the transit, Mr. Knewbit slammed the door, and crowed, slapping P. C. Breagh heartily upon the back.

"Neatly done! You could get a well-paid job as pitcher-out at a West End bar, if you'd nothing better than your muscles to rely upon.... Wait a bit!" He vanished upstairs, walking as softly as a cat does, to return and explain:

"The pumps are at work up there! Both of 'em crying—Rahab's Daughter and Solomon's Virtuous Woman, I mean.... You remember the text? 'Her price is above rubies.' I remembered it when I saw her sitting dropping tears upon that trollop's head, that was a-lying in her lap. Well, well!" He led the way down into the kitchen, muttering, "'As golden pillars upon bases of silver, so are the firm feet upon the soles of a steady woman....' and 'Her husband's heart delighteth in her!' Sit down, you must want a breather ... 'Delighteth in her'—or would have if she'd married one capable of appreciating a character like hers."

Seeing that the mind of Mr. Knewbit was still running upon Miss Ling, P. C. Breagh ventured to ask:

"And has she never entertained any intention of——"

Mr. Knewbit nodded sagely.

"Once. You might say—there has been a Romance in her life, without exaggeration. When in service with that family of Nobs you've heard her mention,—about twenty-four years ago, when she was a strapping young woman of twenty-six—she got engaged to an underbutler—a young man with an affectionate nature and a changeable disposition, in conjunction with weak lungs. Weak lungs——"

Mr. Knewbit opened the oven-door and looked in to ascertain how the mutton and Yorkshire pudding were getting on. "I've had weak lungs myself, but never found 'em an excuse for villainy! Mph! ... Don't smell like burning—pretty right, it seems to me!"

He sat down in his Windsor arm-chair near the hearth, stretched out his carpet-slippered feet, and broke out:

"So—in the interests o' them weak lungs of his, his master's son, Lord Wallingbrook—to whom he sometimes acted as valet, took him in that capacity on a steam-yacht-trip from Plymouth, via Trinidad to the Southern Seas. And they cruised among the Islands of the Pacific for months—a gay party of bachelors amusing themselves!—and—in the Paumotu Group—this precious young man of Maria's up-stick and took French leave.... And that's all. And whether his master knew more than he'd tell—that's uncertain. Anyhow, a letter arrived six months after the steam-yacht dropped anchor at Plymouth, to say that he was safe and well and happy—but was never coming Home any more. And she believes ... 'Ssh! Here she is!"

It was Miss Ling, who had been crying, undoubtedly, for her Sunday bonnet-strings were spotted as with rain, and her clean handkerchief was reduced to a damp wad. Said she:

"I have talked to that poor thing upstairs, as a woman of my age is privileged to do. And she has softened wonderful, Solomon, and from what she has owned—has seen the shame and wickedness of her life clear, and longed to be delivered from it—this many and many a day, I'm sure! So if you'll kindly whistle up a four-wheeler, I'll make bold—being late for the speaking at the Judd Street Branch Hall!—to take her down to the Christian Mission Army Headquarters in the Whitechapel Road. Where I shall find not only the General, as they call Mr. Booth, but Mrs. Booth, ready and willing, please Heaven! to help the poor soul to a better life! And though Lilla has gone home to spend Sunday with her mother at Southampton Mews, I'll stop there passing and send a note in, and she'll come round and dish up dinner—and don't you, either of you, dream of waiting a minute for me! Now, I'm going back to Miss Morency—though her real name is nothing like so grand as that, poor creature!"

She turned at the door to nod and smile and say: "And her and me will carry down her box between us, so don't show yourselves to shame her poor swelled face before the cabman."

"There's a woman!" said Mr. Knewbit exultantly, a few minutes later, as the hall-door shut and the cab-door banged, and the vehicle containing the Daughter of Rahab and the Woman Above Rubies rattled away in the direction of Holborn Circus.

"I wonder you——" P. C. Breagh was beginning, when he stopped himself on the brink of an indiscretion.

"Eh?..." interrogated Mr. Knewbit. "What? ... Oh, but I did, though!"

Mr. Knewbit rubbed his chin, which needed shaving, and shook his head in a despondent way.

"I did. She was thirty-one when the Earl and Countess pensioned her—thirty-one pound a year For Life they promised.... And it's been paid regularly, going on for nineteen year now. And in the second year I came to lodge here early in January, and finding her a comfortable, cleanly, kindly creature, I stopped on—and all but asked her to marry me next time New Year came round. On the following anniversary I took the plunge! after reading a passage of Solomon's peculiarly applicable to my case. 'He that hath found a good wife hath found a good thing,' it was. Turned it up by accident, and showed it to her, and asked her. And she said No! And goes on saying it—though I ask her for the last time regularly every year. Here's the gal coming down the area-steps. Now that meat and pudding's off my conscience, I shall put on my boots for an airing before dinner. And while I'm gone—try your hand at a neat article in moderate paragraphs describing the methods of that"—Mr. Knewbit cast about for a new term—"that Man-eating Alligator in the Euston Road. What was the name of the place? 'Royal Copenhagen Hotel!' ... Why, it fairly smells of roguery! 'Royal Greenhorn' would be pretty well up to the mark."

Mr. Knewbit returned, just as the little servant pronounced dinner to be in danger of spoiling—in a cab; and thereupon ensued much jolting and bumping, suggestive of the conveyance of heavy articles up the doorsteps into the hall. Where, being summoned from the kitchen by a bellow, P. C. Breagh recognized his own trunks and book-boxes, and wrung the hand of his good genius with a grateful swelling of the heart, and an irrepressible watering of the eyes.

"It was so kind!—and suppose I never am able to pay you—or keep you waiting a devil of a time?" he protested incoherently.

"Young fellow," said Mr. Knewbit, scowling with his heavy brows and twinkling pleasantly from under them. "You are a gentleman born and bred and taught. You must have your Books to keep up your Latin and Greek and other learning—and to keep up your appearance you must have your clothes. No man is so down in the world that he can afford to go downer. This is my opinion, and also Miss Ling's!"

"And to-morrow Mr. Breagh will find poor Miss Morency's room swept and scrubbed and got ready for him," said Miss Ling that evening, during Mr. Knewbit's absence. "And the rent is—including Kitchen Board with myself and Mr. Knewbit, who likes homeliness, sixteen shillings per week. And if I trust Mr. Breagh for a month—that will be a chance for him of getting work to do. And that he will turn from nothing that will bring him in an honest living, I am certain; and that he will justify the confidence of Mr. Knewbit, I am equally sure!"

Said P. C. Breagh, rather chokily:

"I hope to God I may one day be able to thank you both as I should like to! You don't know what you have done for me, either of you! But I will—will repay you, I swear!"

She said in her quaint way:

"What obligation there may be could be repaid now—with Mr. Breagh's permission. He saw that most unhappy girl to-day.... He has seen a-many—many like her! If he would promise me—never to bring about a fall like that, or help to drag a head so fallen, lower! Perhaps I take a liberty," said Miss Ling, "and presume, being almost a stranger.... Yet I ask it of Mr. Breagh, I do indeed!"

He gave the promise, in words that were broken and hurried, and with eyes that shunned her plain, kind, earnest face. She said:

"There will be a beautiful young lady, one of these days, all the happier for that promise Mr. Breagh has given. And I hope he won't think me unjust—because I am a woman! and blind to the wreck and ruin that my sex can bring about. I knew a young man, once; who was good, and honest, and worthy; and engaged to marry a young person of his own rank in life...."

Carolan remembered Mr. Knewbit's story of the faithless underbutler.

"He went Abroad to Foreign Countries," said Miss Ling, mildly, "sailing on a ship that voyaged for months at a time. I am told that the women are very beautiful in the islands that he visited; and somehow or another, he was led away...."

Though she looked at Carolan, her regard was curiously impersonal. It was as though she saw the wraith of some face once dear, and although changed, never to be forgotten, appear within the outlines of the face that looked back at her.

"The ship sailed Home without him. He wrote—by another vessel—to the young woman he was to have married, begging her forgiveness.... He had loved her, he said, and looked to be happy with her. But the sunshine and perfume and color of them foreign places, and the spell of the beauty of their wild brown foreign women was over him. He could not come back.... He never may come back again.... But if it happened so—and he, being old and worn, and weary of strange ways and distant places, was looking for an honest roof to shelter him, and a loving heart to lean upon at the last...."

"He would find both here, I know!" said Carolan, gently.

She started and, recalling herself, said in a changed tone:

"Mr. Breagh must excuse my having delayed him here a-talking. To work and bustle is more natural to me!"

He took her hand, and having learned in Germany to pay such pretty homage without looking foolish, he stooped above it and touched it with his lips. She smiled her wise, kind smile, and said with a touching simplicity:

"Mr. Breagh is good enough to honor a poor, hard, working hand!"

He said, and the tone had the ring of sincerity:

"I wish, with all my heart, I were worthier of touching it!"

And so went upstairs to sleep in Mr. Ticking's bed.

XVII

"My student-cap and schläger and the silver-mounted beer-horn the English Colony gave me, and my mother's Crucifix" found their places on the walls of the clean and comfortable room, and upon cheap stained-deal shelves the books of which Mr. Knewbit had spoken so respectfully were ranged, waiting to refresh their owner's memory whenever he chose to dip into them.

The sharkish manager of the "Royal Copenhagen Hotel" had been cowed into giving up the detained luggage by Mr. Knewbit's assurance that the story of his knavery was even then taking literary form under the skilled hand of a young and aspiring journalist of his (Knewbit's) own acquaintance, and might shortly appear in a newspaper to the confusion of the said manager, unless the property was surrendered upon payment of a corrected version of the bill.

These terms being hastily accepted, the Rules of Fair Play, according to Mr. Knewbit, demanded that the written record of the manager's iniquity should be consigned to Miss Ling's kitchen-fire.

"Not that it ain't a pity, for it ain't half bad for a beginner, though wanting in what I call snap and sparkle. But honor is honor—and if Mr. Ticking reads this knowing you're not going to use it—you'll find the story cropping up presently in the Camberwell Clarion or the Islington Excelsior.... Couldn't you do something else—just for a taster? Or haven't you something finished and put away and forgot?"

P. C. Breagh finally disinterred from the litter of manuscript notes at the bottom of a book-box, a scrawled description of a duel between two Freshmen at a well-known tavern and concert-room outside the walls of Schwürz-Brettingen. The humors of the battle, waged in a low-ceiled room in the upper story, crowded with chaffing, drinking, smoking students; the marvelous nature of the defensive armor worn by the inexperienced Füchse, the blows that fell flat, the final entanglement of their swords, and abandonment of these unfamiliar weapons in favor of fisticuffs, made Mr. Knewbit chuckle, and won the suffrages of Mr. Ticking; who said the fight and the bit of knock-about at the end was nearly good enough to be put on at the Halls.

Mr. Ticking was a journalist who possessed a knack of rhyme, penned comic ditties for Lion Comiques, when these gentlemen would sing them,—and lived in the hope of getting a Burlesque produced at a West-End Theater one day. He had educated himself because you couldn't get on if you were not educated. He could not have explained to you how the process had been carried out. By dexterously angling matter for short paragraphs from the swirl of happenings about him, he contrived—between the Camberwell Clarion, the Islington Excelsior, and the Afternoon, a late daily published in Fleet Street—to net some three pounds at the end of each week. Thirty shillings of this went to support an aged and invalid mother resident at Brixton; and if you had lauded Mr. Ticking as a heroic exemplar of filial virtues, he would have been excessively surprised. Though if you had told him that he wrote Burlesque better than Byron, he would have believed you implicitly.

Mr. Mounteney, Miss Ling's ladylike gentleman, proved to be a tall, stout, elderly, rather depressed individual, whose gold-rimmed glasses, attached to a broad black ribbon, sat a little crookedly upon a high, pink Roman nose. His light blue eyes were over-tried and rather watery, his hair had come off at the top, leaving his crown bald and shiny; his customary attire was a rather seedy black frock-coat, a drab vest with pearl buttons, and rather baggy brown trousers, and he wore turned-down collars and black ribbon neckties, and displayed onyx studs and links in a carefully preserved shirt. Pieces of paper protected his cuffs, invariably covered with memoranda written in violet-ink-pencil, referring to the most delicate and confidential affairs.

For Mr. Mounteney, under the nom de guerre of "Araminta," edited the "Happiness, Health, and Beauty" column of that fashionable feminine monthly, the Ladies' Mentor, into whose bureau, according to Mr. Mounteney, a vast correspondence,—penned by the wives and daughters of what Mr. Mounteney termed the Flower of Britain's Nobility and Gentry, as by their governesses and maids, and the wives and daughters of their butchers, bakers, and candlestick-makers,—continually flowed. Signing themselves by fancy names, these confiding ones would put questions concerning matters of the toilette and so forth, the Answers to which interrogations, with the pseudonyms prefixed, were inserted month by month.

"Little Fairy.—A lady who weighs fourteen stone need not necessarily give up waltzing.

"Ruby.—We should recommend you to powder it.

"Ravenlocks.—To stand in the sun too soon after applying is prejudicial to a successful result.

"Peri.—Try peppermint."

Or the bosom of Araminta, guarded by the onyx studs and the black pince-nez ribbon, would be made, according to its owner, the receptacle of confidences calculated, if revealed, to convulse Society to its core. Thus burdened with secrets, it weighed heavily on Mr. Mounteney. When lachrymose with gin-and-water, to which cooling beverage he was rather addicted, he would with tears deplore the wreck of a once noble constitution, caused by reason of emotional strain. But he never gave any of his correspondents away. And being of a kindly disposition, he induced the Editor of the Ladies' Mentor to read and accept a brief, mildly-humorous article, descriptive of a German ladies' cake-and-coffee party; the details having been long ago previously supplied by a fellow-student at Schwärz-Brettingen, and worked up by P. C. Breagh.

Several other social paragraphs by the same hand found their way, thanks to Mr. Ticking's introduction, into the columns of the Islington Excelsior. In recognition, P. C. Breagh, producing pairs of basket-hilted swords, pads, cravats and goggles from one of the cases rescued from the hotel manager, instructed Mr. Ticking in the noble art of fence.

Their thrusts, lunges and stampings seriously threatening the stability of the third-floor landing, these combats were transferred to the back-yard in fine weather, and permitted in the kitchen when it was wet. And Mr. Ticking, though he never mastered the science of the schläger, inducted P. C. Breagh into the mysteries of boating and velocipeding,—having a cutter-rigged Thames sailing-boat in housing near Chelsea Bridge Stairs, and a huge-wheeled bone-shaker of the prevailing type stowed away in a decrepit conservatory adjoining the bathroom on Miss Ling's second floor.

Mr. Mounteney could not be prevailed upon to handle what he stigmatized as "deadly weapons," or to risk his person on the whirling wheel, while even fresh-water boating caused him to suffer from symptoms not distantly resembling those peculiar to the malady of the ocean. But, flabby as the ladylike gentleman appeared, he was a vigorous and tireless pedestrian, able to reduce Mr. Ticking, who was not unhandy in the usage of his feet, into a human pulp, and walk Mr. Knewbit, who had reason to pride himself upon his powers of locomotion, completely off his legs.

Expeditions were made to Addiscombe, in the green swelling Surrey country, where the once famous East India College was founded in 1812, and sold and dismantled in 1858 upon the transfer of the Company to the Crown. Of the 3,600 cadets who were trained here, the names of Lawrence, Napier, Durand, and Roberts are written upon the rolls in letters of undimming gold. Or to Sydenham with its acres of glittering crystal, its matchless fountains, and the view from the North Tower, extending over six counties and compassing the whole course of the Thames. Or to Ascot, with its stretches of sandy heathland, its noble racecourse and its woods of fir and birch, would the lady-like gentleman, accompanied by one or the other or both of his young friends, betake himself upon a highday or a holiday, when duchesses ceased from troubling and milliners were at rest. Or they would make for Hampton Court or Bushey Park, or the ancient manor of Cheshunt, or to Chigwell, immortalized by Dickens, where in the oak-wainscoted dining-room of the King's Head, such rare refreshment of cold beef and salad, apple pie and Stilton cheese could be had, and washed down by the soundest and brightest of ales; then even "Araminta" was tempted to forget the crushing responsibilities inseparable from the delicate position of adviser upon Health, Happiness, and Beauty to the feminine flower of England's nobility and gentry, and eat and drink like a navvy free from care.

And upon the return of the three wearied pedestrians from these excursions, there would be a cheery supper in Mr. Ticking's room, or in Mr. Mounteney's, or, best of all, in Miss Ling's clean and comfortable kitchen, with more beer and more tobacco,—though by reason of a digestion impaired by the continual wear and tear of his fair clients' confidences, or by excessive indulgence in tea, Mr. Mounteney restricted himself to the mildest of Turkish cigarettes.

Mr. Knewbit, who reveled in the growing popularity of his protégé, though he might in secret have shaken his head over the articles and paragraphs published in the Ladies' Mentor and the Islington Excelsior, learned very willingly to whistle a beer-waltz, knocking the bottom of his tumbler on the table in time to the tune; to say "Prosit" when he drank, and vocally unite in the final melodic outburst of: "O jerum, jerum, jerum, jerum, la la la!" In which historic and legendary burden Miss Ling would also join, and laugh until the tears ran down.

Of the junior-staff room of the Early Wire, a bare, gaunt place, lighted by three seldom-washed windows looking on a sooty yard, or by six flaring gas-jets by night or in foggy weather, Carolan was, by the interest of Mr. Ticking, one day made free. Names of power were cut with penknives on the ink-splashed deal tables, and the bottoms of the cane-seated chairs had given way under the weight of personalities now famous, men who were paid for a single article as much as Ticking earned in a year.

And thus P. C. Breagh joined the gallant company of the Free Lances of Fleet Street, and very soon had its offices and eating-houses, its haunts and traditions by heart. What demi-gods walked upon those historic flags and cobblestones! Russell, the pioneer and King of War Correspondents, and Simpson of Crimean fame, whose war-sketches for the Illustrated London News had set England ablaze in '54-5, and George Augustus Sala, and Macready—long since retired from the stage in 1870,—the veteran Charles Mathews and Byron of burlesque fame, and Bulwer Lytton, and Tennyson and Browning, and Planche and Edmund Yates, and genial, handsome Tom Robertson, who was to die, with his laurels green upon him, in another year. All these were pointed out to the young man, with certain places rendered for ever sacred by the footsteps of Dickens and Thackeray, and other of the Immortals who have passed beyond these voices into peace.

And into the world of Music and the Drama, our fortunate youth, by virtue of his initiation into the cheery brotherhood of Pressmen, was now admitted. There were free admissions for Popular Concerts where one could hear Professor Burnett and Signor Piatti play the piano and violoncello, and Santley most gloriously sing, and Sims Reeves deliver Beethoven's incomparable "Adelaida" with that splendor of voice and style that will never be surpassed. The Christy Minstrels of St. James's Hall beguiled our hero of a stealthy tear or two, and made him roar with laughter; and Blanchard's Drury Lane Pantomime of "Beauty and the Beast," with Kate Santley as Azalea, the Peri, and Miss Vokes as the lovely Zemira, was an eye-opener to a youth who had witnessed only provincial productions in his native country, and half a dozen performances of Schiller's "Robbers," "Don Carlos," and "The Stranger" of Kotzebu as given by a stock-company of Bavarian actors at the Theater of Schwärz-Brettingen.

Also our hero was privileged to witness the performances of Mrs. Wood as Miss Hardcastle in "She Stoops to Conquer," and afterwards in the extravaganza of "La Belle Sauvage," at the St. James's Theater, and J. S. Clarke, then drawing the town with "Amongst the Breakers" at the Strand.

At the Olympic, Patti Josephs was touching the hearts of the British Public as Little Em'ly, Rowe was tickling people to laughter with the unctuosities and impecuniosities of Micawber, a certain Mr. Henry Irving was holding his audiences spellbound with the sardonic slyness and hypocritical cunning displayed in his performance of Uriah Heep, and beautiful Mrs. Rousby was breaking hearts at the Queen's Theater. And evenings spent with these, or with Professor Pepper at the Polytechnic, or the German Reeds, who were playing Gilbert and Sullivan's little operas, and "Cox and Box" at the Gallery of Illustration,—were crowned by suppers in the grill-room of "The Albion" in Drury Lane, or at Evan's at the north-west corner of Covent Garden. And these were merry times and merry mimes, my masters, and we shall not look upon their like again.

And in the environment I have endeavored to depict, and with the associates I have tried to delineate, and with the pleasant hum and swirl of this new life setting the tune for his young pulses and mingling with his blood, Carolan's temperament recovered its elasticity, and his character developed apace. The magic gift of sympathy found in the gutter on that night of homeless, hungry wandering was his now, never to be lost or alienated. He had learned much when he had discovered how to fit himself inside the ginger kitten's ragged skin.

The bond of brotherhood, established between a shaggy-haired boy and all other created beings capable of joy and susceptible to suffering, would hold unbroken through all the years to come. We are aware that the confidence of Mr. Knewbit had been won that morning on Waterloo Bridge, and we have heard Miss Ling (not ordinarily given to broach the subject of the faithless underbutler) tell him in her simple way of the desertion that had left her kind heart empty and sore. We may know also that Mr. Ticking revealed, with the fact of the existence of the invalid mother resident at Brixton, the secret that he was beloved by a certain Annie, the orphan daughter of a deceased relative, who lived with the old lady as housekeeper and nurse. Annie, it seemed, had a little fortune of her own, and was so kind, so clever and so charming, that only the indiscreetly-evident anxiety of Ticking's mother to bring about a match, and the too plainly manifested willingness of Annie to accept the hand of Mr. Ticking, were it offered—held him back from becoming an engaged man. As it was, he spoke, in somber whispers, of an amatory entanglement with a splendid creature, not good as Annie was good, but possessing the beauty in whose baleful luster honest prettiness pales, and the charm whose sorcery kills the conscience, and wakens the scorching desires of man.

"Passion!—there's no going against that, you know!" he would say, wagging his head dismally, "and if ever you see Leah, you'll understand."

But when P. C. Breagh did see Leah, who presided over the gaudy necktie and imitation gold cuff-link department at an East Strand hosier's, he failed to understand at all. She had big burnt-out dusky-brown eyes and loops of coarse black hair, and a big bust and a tiny waist with a gilt dog-collar belt about it. Ticking had paid for the belt when he had taken her to the Crystal Palace, and she had admired the trinket on one of the fancy stalls in the French Court next the Great Concert Hall. And there had been a display of fireworks on the Terrace, and in the dark interval between two set-pieces there had been a mutual declaration; and the moth Ticking had singed his wings in the flame of illicit passion, and would return to flutter about the candle, he supposed, until he met his doom.

Mr. Mounteney spoke of Passion as well as Mr. Ticking, but in the exhausted accents of a world-weary cynic who had drunk of the cup to satiety. He knew so much of women, thanks to "Araminta," that he had nothing more to learn. Yet when a pert and pretty waitress, who served the table at which he commonly lunched at a Fleet Street chop-house, proved ungrateful after six months of extra tips, trips to Kew and Rosherville Gardens and innumerable theater tickets, and told Mr. Mounteney in the plainest terms that he was "too bow-windowy in figure for a beau," and that she preferred young swells on the Stock Exchange to elderly newspaper gents, Mounteney—the expressed preference having been illustrated by demonstration,—was tragically comic in his manifestations of wounded vanity, quite funnily touching in his display of jealousy and despair. For a whole week following the betrayal his pale blue eyes were suffused with tears, his Roman nose was red, and his light hair stood up on end, where his despairing fingers had rumpled it. His black ribbon necktie straggled untied over a limp shirt-front, the violet-ink-pencil memoranda on his paper cuffs had merged into blotches and blurs.

Then suddenly his dismal countenance recovered its mild placidity, his necktie was tied, his hair lay once more in smoothly brushed streaks across his shining crown. His nose paled, his eyes reverted to their purely normal wateriness. It seemed that nestling amid the grasses at the feet of one who had plucked the fairest flowers that bloom in the garden of Passion and sickened of their cloying perfume and dazzling hues, the disillusioned Mounteney had discovered a simple violet, and that the humble sweetness and modest beauty of this shrinking blossom had refreshed his jaded senses and solaced his wearied mind.

In terms less obscure, Mr. Ticking explained that the humble violet was a certain Miss Rooper, who for a monthly salary attended at the office of the Ladies' Mentor thrice a week to assist in the Herculean task of opening the letters addressed to "Araminta"—take down in shorthand her representative's replies to the interrogations therein contained—make notes of queries impossible to answer on the spot, and ferret out the answers by application at such leading centers of information as the Reading-room of the British Museum, Heralds' College, the Zoological Gardens, the Doctors' Commons Will Office, Marshall and Snelgrove's, Whiteley's, Parkins and Gotto's, Twinings', the Burlington Arcade, Scotland Yard, and the Coöperative Stores. Ticking added that for years Miss Rooper had brought her luncheon-sandwiches to the office in a velvet reticule, and consumed them under cover of the lid of her desk, but that now, the lady being regularly engaged to Mr. Mounteney, he supposed the couple would go out to "Araminta's" usual ordinary arm-in-arm. It would be a jolly lark, he added, if Mounteney took his betrothed to his customary table, as Flossie had already been thrown over by the young jobber from Capel Court.

And when P. C. Breagh saw Flossie, who owned a turned-up nose (I quote Mr. Ticking) that you might have hung your hat on, and when he was introduced to Miss Rooper, who was on the shady side of thirty-five and had a long sagacious equine face, and boasted a fringe and chignon and waterfall of black hair as coarse as the mane of a Shetland pony, and was bridled with bands of red velvet, as the pony might have been,—and caparisoned with leather belts and strappings garnished with steel rivets, and tossed her head when she was coquettish, and whinnied when she laughed, and looked less like a modest violet than anything else you could have imagined, he wondered very much. For Mr. Mounteney had spoken of Passion in connection with the faithless Flossie, and by the latest bulletins his sentiment for Miss Rooper had developed into Passion of the strictly honorable kind.

Could the passion on which Shakespeare had strung the pearls and rubies of Romeo and Juliet, and to which the lyre of Keats throbbed out the deathless music of "Endymion" have anything in common with the loves of Ticking and Leah, or the emotion wakened in the bosom of Mr. Mounteney by Flossie and Miss Rooper?

Could the emotion of which Carolan himself was conscious, the sudden, fierce, stinging temptation born of the bold glance of a pair of painted eyes, ogling and laughing from under a clipped fringe and a tilted hat, partake of the nature, be worthy of the designation? For Sin beckoned sometimes, and the boy would tug at his chain, forged of links of instilled religion and honor, instinctive cleanliness and a sensitive, secret shrinking from the purchase of something that was never meant to be bartered or sold.

But there were times when, sitting at the rickety but useful and capacious old davenport in the room from tenancy of which Miss Morency had been ejected, the pen would hang idle between the fingers of P. C. Breagh, and the article commissioned by the benevolent editor of the Camberwell Clarion or the Islington Excelsior, or the more ambitious magazine-story that was being written as a bait to catch a literary reputation,—and would return as surely as the swallow of the previous summer, from the editorial offices of Blackwood's, or the Cornhill, or even Tinsley's—would hang fire.