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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Observations of Henry, by Jerome K. Jerome
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Observations of Henry
+
+
+Author: Jerome K. Jerome
+
+
+
+Release Date: March 7, 2006  [eBook #17943]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE OBSERVATIONS OF HENRY***
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1901 J. W. Arrowsmith edition by David Price, email
+ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+
+THE OBSERVATIONS OF HENRY
+
+
+BY
+JEROME K. JEROME
+
+AUTHOR OF
+"THREE MEN IN A BOAT," "DIARY OF A PILGRIMAGE," "THREE MEN ON THE
+BUMMEL," ETC.
+
+BRISTOL
+J. W. ARROWSMITH, QUAY STREET
+LONDON
+SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT AND COMPANY LIMITED
+1901
+
+
+
+
+THE GHOST OF THE MARCHIONESS OF APPLEFORD.
+
+
+This is the story, among others, of Henry the waiter--or, as he now
+prefers to call himself, Henri--told to me in the long dining-room of the
+Riffel Alp Hotel, where I once stayed for a melancholy week "between
+seasons," sharing the echoing emptiness of the place with two maiden
+ladies, who talked all day to one another in frightened whispers.  Henry's
+construction I have discarded for its amateurishness; his method being
+generally to commence a story at the end, and then, working backwards to
+the beginning, wind up with the middle.  But in all other respects I have
+endeavoured to retain his method, which was individual; and this, I
+think, is the story as he would have told it to me himself, had he told
+it in this order:
+
+My first place--well to be honest, it was a coffee shop in the Mile End
+Road--I'm not ashamed of it.  We all have our beginnings.  Young
+"Kipper," as we called him--he had no name of his own, not that he knew
+of anyhow, and that seemed to fit him down to the ground--had fixed his
+pitch just outside, between our door and the music hall at the corner;
+and sometimes, when I might happen to have a bit on, I'd get a paper from
+him, and pay him for it, when the governor was not about, with a mug of
+coffee, and odds and ends that the other customers had left on their
+plates--an arrangement that suited both of us.  He was just about as
+sharp as they make boys, even in the Mile End Road, which is saying a
+good deal; and now and then, spying around among the right sort, and
+keeping his ears open, he would put me up to a good thing, and I would
+tip him a bob or a tanner as the case might be.  He was the sort that
+gets on--you know.
+
+One day in he walks, for all the world as if the show belonged to him,
+with a young imp of a girl on his arm, and down they sits at one of the
+tables.
+
+"Garsong," he calls out, "what's the menoo to-day?"
+
+"The menoo to-day," I says, "is that you get outside 'fore I clip you
+over the ear, and that you take that back and put it where you found it;"
+meaning o' course, the kid.
+
+She was a pretty little thing, even then, in spite of the dirt, with
+those eyes like saucers, and red hair.  It used to be called "carrots" in
+those days.  Now all the swells have taken it up--or as near as they can
+get to it--and it's auburn.
+
+"'Enery," he replied to me, without so much as turning a hair, "I'm
+afraid you're forgetting your position.  When I'm on the kerb shouting
+'Speshul!' and you comes to me with yer 'a'penny in yer 'and, you're
+master an' I'm man.  When I comes into your shop to order refreshments,
+and to pay for 'em, I'm boss.  Savey?  You can bring me a rasher and two
+eggs, and see that they're this season's.  The lidy will have a
+full-sized haddick and a cocoa."
+
+Well, there was justice in what he said.  He always did have sense, and I
+took his order.  You don't often see anybody put it away like that girl
+did.  I took it she hadn't had a square meal for many a long day.  She
+polished off a ninepenny haddick, skin and all, and after that she had
+two penny rashers, with six slices of bread and butter--"doorsteps," as
+we used to call them--and two half pints of cocoa, which is a meal in
+itself the way we used to make it.  "Kipper" must have had a bit of luck
+that day.  He couldn't have urged her on more had it been a free feed.
+
+"'Ave an egg," he suggested, the moment the rashers had disappeared.  "One
+of these eggs will just about finish yer."
+
+"I don't really think as I can," says she, after considering like.
+
+"Well, you know your own strength," he answers.  "Perhaps you're best
+without it.  Speshully if yer not used to 'igh living."
+
+I was glad to see them finish, 'cause I was beginning to get a bit
+nervous about the coin, but he paid up right enough, and giv me a
+ha'penny for myself.
+
+That was the first time I ever waited upon those two, but it wasn't to be
+the last by many a long chalk, as you'll see.  He often used to bring her
+in after that.  Who she was and what she was he didn't know, and she
+didn't know, so there was a pair of them.  She'd run away from an old
+woman down Limehouse way, who used to beat her.  That was all she could
+tell him.  He got her a lodging with an old woman, who had an attic in
+the same house where he slept--when it would run to that--taught her to
+yell "Speshul!" and found a corner for her.  There ain't room for boys
+and girls in the Mile-End Road.  They're either kids down there or
+they're grown-ups.  "Kipper" and "Carrots"--as we named her--looked upon
+themselves as sweethearts, though he couldn't have been more than
+fifteen, and she barely twelve; and that he was regular gone on her
+anyone could see with half an eye.  Not that he was soft about it--that
+wasn't his style.  He kept her in order, and she had just to mind, which
+I guess was a good thing for her, and when she wanted it he'd use his
+hand on her, and make no bones about it.  That's the way among that
+class.  They up and give the old woman a friendly clump, just as you or
+me would swear at the missus, or fling a boot-jack at her.  They don't
+mean anything more.
+
+I left the coffee shop later on for a place in the city, and saw nothing
+more of them for five years.  When I did it was at a restaurant in Oxford
+Street--one of those amatoor shows run by a lot of women, who know
+nothing about the business, and spend the whole day gossiping and
+flirting--"love-shops," I call 'em.  There was a yellow-haired lady
+manageress who never heard you when you spoke to her, 'cause she was
+always trying to hear what some seedy old fool would be whispering to her
+across the counter.  Then there were waitresses, and their notion of
+waiting was to spend an hour talking to a twopenny cup of coffee, and to
+look haughty and insulted whenever anybody as really wanted something
+ventured to ask for it.  A frizzle-haired cashier used to make love all
+day out of her pigeon-hole with the two box-office boys from the Oxford
+Music Hall, who took it turn and turn about.  Sometimes she'd leave off
+to take a customer's money, and sometimes she wouldn't.  I've been to
+some rummy places in my time; and a waiter ain't the blind owl as he's
+supposed to be.  But never in my life have I seen so much love-making,
+not all at once, as used to go on in that place.  It was a dismal, gloomy
+sort of hole, and spoony couples seemed to scent it out by instinct, and
+would spend hours there over a pot of tea and assorted pastry.  "Idyllic,"
+some folks would have thought it: I used to get the fair dismals watching
+it.  There was one girl--a weird-looking creature, with red eyes and long
+thin hands, that gave you the creeps to look at.  She'd come in regular
+with her young man, a pale-faced nervous sort of chap, at three o'clock
+every afternoon.  Theirs was the funniest love-making I ever saw.  She'd
+pinch him under the table, and run pins into him, and he'd sit with his
+eyes glued on her as if she'd been a steaming dish of steak and onions
+and he a starving beggar the other side of the window.  A strange story
+that was--as I came to learn it later on.  I'll tell you that, one day.
+
+I'd been engaged for the "heavy work," but as the heaviest order I ever
+heard given there was for a cold ham and chicken, which I had to slip out
+for to the nearest cook-shop, I must have been chiefly useful from an
+ornamental point of view.
+
+I'd been there about a fortnight, and was feeling pretty sick of it, when
+in walked young "Kipper."  I didn't know him at first, he'd changed so.
+He was swinging a silver-mounted crutch stick, which was the kind that
+was fashionable just then, and was dressed in a showy check suit and a
+white hat.  But the thing that struck me most was his gloves.  I suppose
+I hadn't improved quite so much myself, for he knew me in a moment, and
+held out his hand.
+
+"What, 'Enery!" he says, "you've moved on, then!"
+
+"Yes," I says, shaking hands with him, "and I could move on again from
+this shop without feeling sad.  But you've got on a bit?" I says.
+
+"So-so," he says, "I'm a journalist."
+
+"Oh," I says, "what sort?" for I'd seen a good many of that lot during
+six months I'd spent at a house in Fleet Street, and their get-up hadn't
+sumptuousness about it, so to speak.  "Kipper's" rig-out must have totted
+up to a tidy little sum.  He had a diamond pin in his tie that must have
+cost somebody fifty quid, if not him.
+
+"Well," he answers, "I don't wind out the confidential advice to old
+Beaky, and that sort of thing.  I do the tips, yer know.  'Cap'n Kit,'
+that's my name."
+
+"What, the Captain Kit?" I says.  O' course I'd heard of him.
+
+"Be'old!" he says.
+
+"Oh, it's easy enough," he goes on.  "Some of 'em's bound to come out
+right, and when one does, you take it from me, our paper mentions the
+fact.  And when it is a wrong 'un--well, a man can't always be shouting
+about himself, can 'e?"
+
+He ordered a cup of coffee.  He said he was waiting for someone, and we
+got to chatting about old times.
+
+"How's Carrots?" I asked.
+
+"Miss Caroline Trevelyan," he answered, "is doing well."
+
+"Oh," I says, "you've found out her fam'ly name, then?"
+
+"We've found out one or two things about that lidy," he replies.  "D'yer
+remember 'er dancing?"
+
+"I have seen her flinging her petticoats about outside the shop, when the
+copper wasn't by, if that's what you mean," I says.
+
+"That's what I mean," he answers.  "That's all the rage now,
+'skirt-dancing' they calls it.  She's a-coming out at the Oxford
+to-morrow.  It's 'er I'm waiting for.  She's a-coming on, I tell you she
+is," he says.
+
+"Shouldn't wonder," says I; "that was her disposition."
+
+"And there's another thing we've found out about 'er," he says.  He leant
+over the table, and whispered it, as if he was afraid that anybody else
+might hear: "she's got a voice."
+
+"Yes," I says, "some women have."
+
+"Ah," he says, "but 'er voice is the sort of voice yer want to listen
+to."
+
+"Oh," I says, "that's its speciality, is it?"
+
+"That's it, sonny," he replies.
+
+She came in a little later.  I'd a' known her anywhere for her eyes, and
+her red hair, in spite of her being that clean you might have eaten your
+dinner out of her hand.  And as for her clothes!  Well, I've mixed a good
+deal with the toffs in my time, and I've seen duchesses dressed more
+showily and maybe more expensively, but her clothes seemed to be just a
+framework to show her up.  She was a beauty, you can take it from me; and
+it's not to be wondered that the La-De-Das were round her when they did
+see her, like flies round an open jam tart.
+
+Before three months were up she was the rage of London--leastways of the
+music-hall part of it--with her portrait in all the shop windows, and
+interviews with her in half the newspapers.  It seems she was the
+daughter of an officer who had died in India when she was a baby, and the
+niece of a bishop somewhere in Australia.  He was dead too.  There didn't
+seem to be any of her ancestry as wasn't dead, but they had all been
+swells.  She had been educated privately, she had, by a relative; and had
+early displayed an aptitude for dancing, though her friends at first had
+much opposed her going upon the stage.  There was a lot more of it--you
+know the sort of thing.  Of course, she was a connection of one of our
+best known judges--they all are--and she merely acted in order to support
+a grandmother, or an invalid sister, I forget which.  A wonderful talent
+for swallowing, these newspaper chaps has, some of 'em!
+
+"Kipper" never touched a penny of her money, but if he had been her agent
+at twenty-five per cent. he couldn't have worked harder, and he just kept
+up the hum about her, till if you didn't want to hear anything more about
+Caroline Trevelyan, your only chance would have been to lie in bed, and
+never look at a newspaper.  It was Caroline Trevelyan at Home, Caroline
+Trevelyan at Brighton, Caroline Trevelyan and the Shah of Persia,
+Caroline Trevelyan and the Old Apple-woman.  When it wasn't Caroline
+Trevelyan herself it would be Caroline Trevelyan's dog as would be doing
+something out of the common, getting himself lost or summoned or
+drowned--it didn't matter much what.
+
+I moved from Oxford Street to the new "Horseshoe" that year--it had just
+been rebuilt--and there I saw a good deal of them, for they came in to
+lunch there or supper pretty regular.  Young "Kipper"--or the "Captain"
+as everybody called him--gave out that he was her half-brother.
+
+"I'ad to be some sort of a relation, you see," he explained to me.  "I'd
+a' been 'er brother out and out; that would have been simpler, only the
+family likeness wasn't strong enough.  Our styles o' beauty ain't
+similar."  They certainly wasn't.
+
+"Why don't you marry her?" I says, "and have done with it?"
+
+He looked thoughtful at that.  "I did think of it," he says, "and I know,
+jolly well, that if I 'ad suggested it 'fore she'd found herself, she'd
+have agreed, but it don't seem quite fair now."
+
+"How d'ye mean fair?" I says.
+
+"Well, not fair to 'er," he says.  "I've got on all right, in a small
+way; but she--well, she can just 'ave 'er pick of the nobs.  There's one
+on 'em as I've made inquiries about.  'E'll be a dook, if a kid pegs out
+as is expected to, and anyhow 'e'll be a markis, and 'e means the
+straight thing--no errer.  It ain't fair for me to stand in 'er way."
+
+"Well," I says, "you know your own business, but it seems to me she
+wouldn't have much way to stand in if it hadn't been for you."
+
+"Oh, that's all right," he says.  "I'm fond enough of the gell, but I
+shan't clamour for a tombstone with wiolets, even if she ain't ever Mrs.
+Capt'n Kit.  Business is business; and I ain't going to queer 'er pitch
+for 'er."
+
+I've often wondered what she'd a' said, if he'd up and put the case to
+her plain, for she was a good sort; but, naturally enough, her head was a
+bit swelled, and she'd read so much rot about herself in the papers that
+she'd got at last to half believe some of it.  The thought of her
+connection with the well-known judge seemed to hamper her at times, and
+she wasn't quite so chummy with "Kipper" as used to be the case in the
+Mile-End Road days, and he wasn't the sort as is slow to see a thing.
+
+One day when he was having lunch by himself, and I was waiting on him, he
+says, raising his glass to his lips, "Well, 'Enery, here's luck to yer!  I
+won't be seeing you agen for some time."
+
+"Oh," I says.  "What's up now?"
+
+"I am," he says, "or rather my time is.  I'm off to Africa."
+
+"Oh," I says, "and what about--"
+
+"That's all right," he interrupts.  "I've fixed up that--a treat.  Truth,
+that's why I'm going."
+
+I thought at first he meant she was going with him.
+
+"No," he says, "she's going to be the Duchess of Ridingshire with the
+kind consent o' the kid I spoke about.  If not, she'll be the Marchioness
+of Appleford.  'E's doing the square thing.  There's going to be a quiet
+marriage to-morrow at the Registry Office, and then I'm off."
+
+"What need for you to go?" I says.
+
+"No need," he says; "it's a fancy o' mine.  You see, me gone, there's
+nothing to 'amper 'er--nothing to interfere with 'er settling down as a
+quiet, respectable toff.  With a 'alf-brother, who's always got to be
+spry with some fake about 'is lineage and 'is ancestral estates, and who
+drops 'is 'h's,' complications are sooner or later bound to a-rise.  Me
+out of it--everything's simple.  Savey?"
+
+Well, that's just how it happened.  Of course, there was a big row when
+the family heard of it, and a smart lawyer was put up to try and undo the
+thing.  No expense was spared, you bet; but it was all no go.  Nothing
+could be found out against her.  She just sat tight and said nothing.  So
+the thing had to stand.  They went and lived quietly in the country and
+abroad for a year or two, and then folks forgot a bit, and they came back
+to London.  I often used to see her name in print, and then the papers
+always said as how she was charming and graceful and beautiful, so I
+suppose the family had made up its mind to get used to her.
+
+One evening in she comes to the Savoy.  My wife put me up to getting that
+job, and a good job it is, mind you, when you know your way about.  I'd
+never have had the cheek to try for it, if it hadn't been for the missis.
+She's a clever one--she is.  I did a good day's work when I married her.
+
+"You shave off that moustache of yours--it ain't an ornament," she says
+to me, "and chance it.  Don't get attempting the lingo.  Keep to the
+broken English, and put in a shrug or two.  You can manage that all
+right."
+
+I followed her tip.  Of course the manager saw through me, but I got in a
+"Oui, monsieur" now and again, and they, being short handed at the time,
+could not afford to be strict, I suppose.  Anyhow I got took on, and
+there I stopped for the whole season, and that was the making of me.
+
+Well, as I was saying, in she comes to the supper rooms, and toffy enough
+she looked in her diamonds and furs, and as for haughtiness there wasn't
+a born Marchioness she couldn't have given points to.  She comes straight
+up to my table and sits down.  Her husband was with her, but he didn't
+seem to have much to say, except to repeat her orders.  Of course I
+looked as if I'd never set eyes on her before in all my life, though all
+the time she was a-pecking at the mayonnaise and a-sipping at the
+Giessler, I was thinking of the coffee-shop and of the ninepenny haddick
+and the pint of cocoa.
+
+"Go and fetch my cloak," she says to him after a while.  "I am cold."
+
+And up he gets and goes out.
+
+She never moved her head, and spoke as though she was merely giving me
+some order, and I stands behind her chair, respectful like, and answers
+according to the same tip,
+
+"Ever hear from 'Kipper'?" she says to me.
+
+"I have had one or two letters from him, your ladyship," I answers.
+
+"Oh, stow that," she says.  "I am sick of 'your ladyship.'  Talk English;
+I don't hear much of it.  How's he getting on?"
+
+"Seems to be doing himself well," I says.  "He's started an hotel, and is
+regular raking it in, he tells me."
+
+"Wish I was behind the bar with him!" says she.
+
+"Why, don't it work then?" I asks.
+
+"It's just like a funeral with the corpse left out," says she.  "Serves
+me jolly well right for being a fool!"
+
+The Marquis, he comes back with her cloak at that moment, and I says:
+"Certainement, madame," and gets clear.
+
+I often used to see her there, and when a chance occurred she would talk
+to me.  It seemed to be a relief to her to use her own tongue, but it
+made me nervous at times for fear someone would hear her.
+
+Then one day I got a letter from "Kipper" to say he was over for a
+holiday and was stopping at Morley's, and asking me to look him up.
+
+He had not changed much except to get a bit fatter and more prosperous-
+looking.  Of course, we talked about her ladyship, and I told him what
+she said.
+
+"Rum things, women," he says; "never know their own minds."
+
+"Oh, they know them all right when they get there," I says.  "How could
+she tell what being a Marchioness was like till she'd tried it?"
+
+"Pity," he says, musing like.  "I reckoned it the very thing she'd tumble
+to.  I only come over to get a sight of 'er, and to satisfy myself as she
+was getting along all right.  Seems I'd better a' stopped away."
+
+"You ain't ever thought of marrying yourself?" I asks.
+
+"Yes, I have," he says.  "It's slow for a man over thirty with no wife
+and kids to bustle him, you take it from me, and I ain't the talent for
+the Don Juan fake."
+
+"You're like me," I says, "a day's work, and then a pipe by your own
+fireside with your slippers on.  That's my swarry.  You'll find someone
+as will suit you before long."
+
+"No I shan't," says he.  "I've come across a few as might, if it 'adn't
+been for 'er.  It's like the toffs as come out our way.  They've been
+brought up on 'ris de veau a la financier,' and sich like, and it just
+spoils 'em for the bacon and greens."
+
+I give her the office the next time I see her, and they met accidental
+like in Kensington Gardens early one morning.  What they said to one
+another I don't know, for he sailed that same evening, and, it being the
+end of the season, I didn't see her ladyship again for a long while.
+
+When I did it was at the Hotel Bristol in Paris, and she was in widow's
+weeds, the Marquis having died eight months before.  He never dropped
+into that dukedom, the kid turning out healthier than was expected, and
+hanging on; so she was still only a Marchioness, and her fortune, though
+tidy, was nothing very big--not as that class reckons.  By luck I was
+told off to wait on her, she having asked for someone as could speak
+English.  She seemed glad to see me and to talk to me.
+
+"Well," I says, "I suppose you'll be bossing that bar in Capetown now
+before long?"
+
+"Talk sense," she answers.  "How can the Marchioness of Appleford marry a
+hotel keeper?"
+
+"Why not," I says, "if she fancies him?  What's the good of being a
+Marchioness if you can't do what you like?"
+
+"That's just it," she snaps out; "you can't.  It would not be doing the
+straight thing by the family.  No," she says, "I've spent their money,
+and I'm spending it now.  They don't love me, but they shan't say as I
+have disgraced them.  They've got their feelings same as I've got mine."
+
+"Why not chuck the money?" I says.  "They'll be glad enough to get it
+back," they being a poor lot, as I heard her say.
+
+"How can I?" she says.  "It's a life interest.  As long as I live I've
+got to have it, and as long as I live I've got to remain the Marchioness
+of Appleford."
+
+She finishes her soup, and pushes the plate away from her.  "As long as I
+live," she says, talking to herself.
+
+"By Jove!" she says, starting up "why not?"
+
+"Why not what?" I says.
+
+"Nothing," she answers.  "Get me an African telegraph form, and be quick
+about it!"
+
+I fetched it for her, and she wrote it and gave it to the porter then and
+there; and, that done, she sat down and finished her dinner.
+
+She was a bit short with me after that; so I judged it best to keep my
+own place.
+
+In the morning she got an answer that seemed to excite her, and that
+afternoon she left; and the next I heard of her was a paragraph in the
+newspaper, headed--"Death of the Marchioness of Appleford.  Sad
+accident."  It seemed she had gone for a row on one of the Italian lakes
+with no one but a boatman.  A squall had come on, and the boat had
+capsized.  The boatman had swum ashore, but he had been unable to save
+his passenger, and her body had never been recovered.  The paper reminded
+its readers that she had formerly been the celebrated tragic actress,
+Caroline Trevelyan, daughter of the well-known Indian judge of that name.
+
+It gave me the blues for a day or two--that bit of news.  I had known her
+from a baby as you might say, and had taken an interest in her.  You can
+call it silly, but hotels and restaurants seemed to me less interesting
+now there was no chance of ever seeing her come into one again.
+
+I went from Paris to one of the smaller hotels in Venice.  The missis
+thought I'd do well to pick up a bit of Italian, and perhaps she fancied
+Venice for herself.  That's one of the advantages of our profession.  You
+can go about.  It was a second-rate sort of place, and one evening, just
+before lighting-up time, I had the salle-a-manger all to myself, and had
+just taken up a paper when I hears the door open, and I turns round.
+
+I saw "her" coming down the room.  There was no mistaking her.  She
+wasn't that sort.
+
+I sat with my eyes coming out of my head till she was close to me, and
+then I says:
+
+"Carrots!" I says, in a whisper like.  That was the name that come to me.
+
+"'Carrots' it is," she says, and down she sits just opposite to me, and
+then she laughs.
+
+I could not speak, I could not move, I was that took aback, and the more
+frightened I looked the more she laughed till "Kipper" comes into the
+room.  There was nothing ghostly about him.  I never see a man look more
+as if he had backed the winner.
+
+"Why, it's 'Enery," he says; and he gives me a slap on the back, as
+knocks the life into me again.
+
+"I heard you was dead," I says, still staring at her.  "I read it in the
+paper--'death of the Marchioness of Appleford.'"
+
+"That's all right," she says.  "The Marchioness of Appleford is as dead
+as a door-nail, and a good job too.  Mrs. Captain Kit's my name, nee
+'Carrots.'"
+
+"You said as 'ow I'd find someone to suit me 'fore long," says "Kipper"
+to me, "and, by Jove! you were right; I 'ave.  I was waiting till I found
+something equal to her ladyship, and I'd 'ave 'ad to wait a long time,
+I'm thinking, if I 'adn't come across this one 'ere"; and he tucks her up
+under his arm just as I remember his doing that day he first brought her
+into the coffee-shop, and Lord, what a long time ago that was!
+
+* * * * *
+
+That is the story, among others, told me by Henry, the waiter.  I have,
+at his request, substituted artificial names for real ones.  For Henry
+tells me that at Capetown Captain Kit's First-class Family and Commercial
+Hotel still runs, and that the landlady is still a beautiful woman with
+fine eyes and red hair, who might almost be taken for a duchess--until
+she opens her mouth, when her accent is found to be still slightly
+reminiscent of the Mile-End Road.
+
+
+
+
+THE USES AND ABUSES OF JOSEPH.
+
+
+"It is just the same with what you may call the human joints," observed
+Henry.  He was in one of his philosophic moods that evening.  "It all
+depends upon the cooking.  I never see a youngster hanging up in the
+refrigerator, as one may put it, but I says to myself: 'Now I wonder what
+the cook is going to make of you!  Will you be minced and devilled and
+fricasseed till you are all sauce and no meat?  Will you be hammered
+tender and grilled over a slow fire till you are a blessing to mankind?
+Or will you be spoilt in the boiling, and come out a stringy rag, an
+immediate curse, and a permanent injury to those who have got to swallow
+you?'
+
+"There was a youngster I knew in my old coffee-shop days," continued
+Henry, "that in the end came to be eaten by cannibals.  At least, so the
+newspapers said.  Speaking for myself, I never believed the report: he
+wasn't that sort.  If anybody was eaten, it was more likely the cannibal.
+But that is neither here nor there.  What I am thinking of is what
+happened before he and the cannibals ever got nigh to one another.  He
+was fourteen when I first set eyes on him--Mile End fourteen, that is;
+which is the same, I take it, as City eighteen and West End
+five-and-twenty--and he was smart for his age into the bargain: a trifle
+too smart as a matter of fact.  He always came into the shop at the same
+time--half-past two; he always sat in the seat next the window; and three
+days out of six, he would order the same dinner: a fourpenny beef-steak
+pudding--we called it beef-steak, and, for all practical purposes, it was
+beef-steak--a penny plate of potatoes, and a penny slice of roly-poly
+pudding--'chest expander' was the name our customers gave it--to follow.
+That showed sense, I always thought, that dinner alone; a more satisfying
+menu, at the price, I defy any human being to work out.  He always had a
+book with him, and he generally read during his meal; which is not a bad
+plan if you don't want to think too much about what you are eating.  There
+was a seedy chap, I remember, used to dine at a cheap restaurant where I
+once served, just off the Euston Road.  He would stick a book up in front
+of him--Eppy something or other--and read the whole time.  Our
+four-course shilling table d'hote with Eppy, he would say, was a banquet
+fit for a prince; without Eppy he was of opinion that a policeman
+wouldn't touch it.  But he was one of those men that report things for
+the newspapers, and was given to exaggeration.
+
+"A coffee-shop becomes a bit of a desert towards three o'clock; and,
+after a while, young Tidelman, for that was his name, got to putting down
+his book and chatting to me.  His father was dead; which, judging from
+what he told me about the old man, must have been a bit of luck for
+everybody; and his mother, it turned out, had come from my own village in
+Suffolk; and that constituted a sort of bond between us, seeing I had
+known all her people pretty intimately.  He was earning good money at a
+dairy, where his work was scouring milk-cans; and his Christian
+name--which was the only thing Christian about him, and that, somehow or
+another, didn't seem to fit him--was Joseph.
+
+"One afternoon he came into the shop looking as if he had lost a shilling
+and found sixpence, as the saying is; and instead of drinking water as
+usual, sent the girl out for a pint of ale.  The moment it came he drank
+off half of it at a gulp, and then sat staring out of the window.
+
+"'What's up?' I says.  'Got the shove?'
+
+"'Yes,' he answers; 'but, as it happens, it's a shove up.  I've been
+taken off the yard and put on the walk, with a rise of two bob a week.'
+Then he took another pull at the beer and looked more savage than ever.
+
+"'Well,' I says, 'that ain't the sort of thing to be humpy about.'
+
+"'Yes it is,' he snaps back; 'it means that if I don't take precious good
+care I'll drift into being a blooming milkman, spending my life yelling
+"Milk ahoi!" and spooning smutty-faced servant-gals across area
+railings.'
+
+"'Oh!' I says, 'and what may you prefer to spoon--duchesses?'
+
+"'Yes,' he answers sulky-like; 'duchesses are right enough--some of 'em.'
+
+"'So are servant-gals,' I says, 'some of 'em.  Your hat's feeling a bit
+small for you this morning, ain't it?'
+
+"'Hat's all right,' says he; 'it's the world as I'm complaining
+of--beastly place; there's nothing to do in it.'
+
+"'Oh!' I says; 'some of us find there's a bit too much.'  I'd been up
+since five that morning myself; and his own work, which was scouring milk-
+cans for twelve hours a day, didn't strike me as suggesting a life of
+leisured ease.
+
+"'I don't mean that,' he says.  'I mean things worth doing.'
+
+"'Well, what do you want to do,' I says, 'that this world ain't big
+enough for?'
+
+"'It ain't the size of it,' he says; 'it's the dulness of it.  Things
+used to be different in the old days.'
+
+"'How do you know?' I says.
+
+"'You can read about it,' he answers.
+
+"'Oh,' I says, 'and what do they know about it--these gents that sit down
+and write about it for their living!  You show me a book cracking up the
+old times, writ by a chap as lived in 'em, and I'll believe you.  Till
+then I'll stick to my opinion that the old days were much the same as
+these days, and maybe a trifle worse.'
+
+"'From a Sunday School point of view, perhaps yes,' says he; 'but there's
+no gainsaying--'
+
+"'No what?' I says.
+
+"'No gainsaying,' repeats he; 'it's a common word in literatoor.'
+
+"'Maybe,' says I, 'but this happens to be "The Blue Posts Coffee House,"
+established in the year 1863.  We will use modern English here, if you
+don't mind.'  One had to take him down like that at times.  He was the
+sort of boy as would talk poetry to you if you weren't firm with him.
+
+"'Well then, there's no denying the fact,' says he, 'if you prefer it
+that way, that in the old days there was more opportunity for adventure.'
+
+"'What about Australia?' says I.
+
+"'Australia!' retorts he; 'what would I do there?  Be a shepherd, like
+you see in the picture, wear ribbons, and play the flute?'
+
+"'There's not much of that sort of shepherding over there,' says I,
+'unless I've been deceived; but if Australia ain't sufficiently
+uncivilised for you, what about Africa?'
+
+"'What's the good of Africa?' replies he; 'you don't read advertisements
+in the "Clerkenwell News": "Young men wanted as explorers."  I'd drift
+into a barber's shop at Cape Town more likely than anything else.'
+
+"'What about the gold diggings?' I suggests.  I like to see a youngster
+with the spirit of adventure in him.  It shows grit as a rule.
+
+"'Played out,' says he.  'You are employed by a company, wages ten
+dollars a week, and a pension for your old age.  Everything's played
+out,' he continues.  'Men ain't wanted nowadays.  There's only room for
+clerks, and intelligent artisans, and shopboys.'
+
+"'Go for a soldier,' says I; 'there's excitement for you.'
+
+"'That would have been all right,' says he, 'in the days when there was
+real fighting.'
+
+"'There's a good bit of it going about nowadays,' I says.  'We are
+generally at it, on and off, between shouting about the blessings of
+peace.'
+
+"'Not the sort of fighting I mean,' replies he; 'I want to do something
+myself, not be one of a row.'
+
+"'Well,' I says, 'I give you up.  You've dropped into the wrong world it
+seems to me.  We don't seem able to cater for you here.'
+
+"'I've come a bit too late,' he answers; 'that's the mistake I've made.
+Two hundred years ago there were lots of things a fellow might have
+done.'
+
+"'Yes, I know what's in your mind,' I says: 'pirates.'
+
+"'Yes, pirates would be all right,' says he; 'they got plenty of sea-air
+and exercise, and didn't need to join a blooming funeral club.'
+
+"'You've got ideas above your station,' I says.  'You work hard, and one
+day you'll have a milk-shop of your own, and be walking out with a pretty
+housemaid on your arm, feeling as if you were the Prince of Wales
+himself.'
+
+"'Stow it!' he says; 'it makes me shiver for fear it might come true.  I'm
+not cut out for a respectable cove, and I won't be one neither, if I can
+help it!'
+
+"'What do you mean to be, then?' I says; 'we've all got to be something,
+until we're stiff 'uns.'
+
+"'Well,' he says, quite cool-like, 'I think I shall be a burglar.'
+
+"I dropped into the seat opposite and stared at him.  If any other lad
+had said it I should have known it was only foolishness, but he was just
+the sort to mean it.
+
+"'It's the only calling I can think of,' says he, 'that has got any
+element of excitement left in it.'
+
+"'You call seven years at Portland "excitement," do you?' says I,
+thinking of the argument most likely to tell upon him.
+
+"'What's the difference,' answers he, 'between Portland and the ordinary
+labouring man's life, except that at Portland you never need fear being
+out of work?'  He was a rare one to argue.  'Besides,' says he, 'it's
+only the fools as gets copped.  Look at that diamond robbery in Bond
+Street, two years ago.  Fifty thousand pounds' worth of jewels stolen,
+and never a clue to this day!  Look at the Dublin Bank robbery,' says he,
+his eyes all alight, and his face flushed like a girl's.  'Three thousand
+pounds in golden sovereigns walked away with in broad daylight, and never
+so much as the flick of a coat-tail seen.  Those are the sort of men I'm
+thinking of, not the bricklayer out of work, who smashes a window and
+gets ten years for breaking open a cheesemonger's till with nine and
+fourpence ha'penny in it.'
+
+"'Yes,' says I, 'and are you forgetting the chap who was nabbed at
+Birmingham only last week?  He wasn't exactly an amatoor.  How long do
+think he'll get?'
+
+"'A man like that deserves what he gets,' answers he; 'couldn't hit a
+police-man at six yards.'
+
+"'You bloodthirsty young scoundrel,' I says; 'do you mean you wouldn't
+stick at murder?'
+
+"'It's all in the game,' says he, not in the least put out.  'I take my
+risks, he takes his.  It's no more murder than soldiering is.'
+
+"'It's taking a human creature's life,' I says.
+
+"'Well,' he says, 'what of it?  There's plenty more where he comes from.'
+
+"I tried reasoning with him from time to time, but he wasn't a sort of
+boy to be moved from a purpose.  His mother was the only argument that
+had any weight with him.  I believe so long as she had lived he would
+have kept straight; that was the only soft spot in him.  But
+unfortunately she died a couple of years later, and then I lost sight of
+Joe altogether.  I made enquiries, but no one could tell me anything.  He
+had just disappeared, that's all.
+
+"One afternoon, four years later, I was sitting in the coffee-room of a
+City restaurant where I was working, reading the account of a clever
+robbery committed the day before.  The thief, described as a well-dressed
+young man of gentlemanly appearance, wearing a short black beard and
+moustache, had walked into a branch of the London and Westminster Bank
+during the dinner-hour, when only the manager and one clerk were there.
+He had gone straight through to the manager's room at the back of the
+bank, taken the key from the inside of the door, and before the man could
+get round his desk had locked him in.  The clerk, with a knife to his
+throat, had then been persuaded to empty all the loose cash in the bank,
+amounting in gold and notes to nearly five hundred pounds, into a bag
+which the thief had thoughtfully brought with him.  After which, both of
+them--for the thief seems to have been of a sociable disposition--got
+into a cab which was waiting outside, and drove away.  They drove
+straight to the City: the clerk, with a knife pricking the back of his
+neck all the time, finding it, no doubt, a tiresome ride.  In the middle
+of Threadneedle Street, the gentlemanly young man suddenly stopped the
+cab and got out, leaving the clerk to pay the cabman.
+
+"Somehow or other, the story brought back Joseph to my mind.  I seemed to
+see him as that well-dressed gentlemanly young man; and, raising my eyes
+from the paper, there he stood before me.  He had scarcely changed at all
+since I last saw him, except that he had grown better looking, and seemed
+more cheerful.  He nodded to me as though we had parted the day before,
+and ordered a chop and a small hock.  I spread a fresh serviette for him,
+and asked him if he cared to see the paper.
+
+"'Anything interesting in it, Henry?' says he.
+
+"'Rather a daring robbery committed on the Westminster Bank yesterday,' I
+answers.
+
+"'Oh, ah!  I did see something about that,' says he.
+
+"'The thief was described as a well-dressed young man of gentlemanly
+appearance, wearing a black beard and moustache,' says I.
+
+"He laughs pleasantly.
+
+"'That will make it awkward for nice young men with black beards and
+moustaches,' says he.
+
+"'Yes,' I says.  'Fortunately for you and me, we're clean shaved.'
+
+"I felt as certain he was the man as though I'd seen him do it.
+
+"He gives me a sharp glance, but I was busy with the cruets, and he had
+to make what he chose out of it.
+
+"'Yes,' he replies, 'as you say, it was a daring robbery.  But the man
+seems to have got away all right.'
+
+"I could see he was dying to talk to somebody about it.
+
+"'He's all right to-day,' says I; 'but the police ain't the fools they're
+reckoned.  I've noticed they generally get there in the end.'
+
+"'There's some very intelligent men among them,' says he: 'no question of
+it.  I shouldn't be surprised if they had a clue!'
+
+"'No,' I says, 'no more should I; though no doubt he's telling himself
+there never was such a clever thief.'
+
+"'Well, we shall see,' says he.
+
+"'That's about it,' says I.
+
+"We talked a bit about old acquaintances and other things, and then,
+having finished, he handed me a sovereign and rose to go.
+
+"'Wait a minute,' I says, 'your bill comes to three-and-eight.  Say
+fourpence for the waiter; that leaves sixteen shillings change, which
+I'll ask you to put in your pocket.'
+
+"'As you will,' he says, laughing, though I could see he didn't like it.
+
+"'And one other thing,' says I.  'We've been sort of pals, and it's not
+my business to talk unless I'm spoken to.  But I'm a married man,' I
+says, 'and I don't consider you the sort worth getting into trouble for.
+If I never see you, I know nothing about you.  Understand?'
+
+"He took my tip, and I didn't see him again at that restaurant.  I kept
+my eye on the paper, but the Westminster Bank thief was never discovered,
+and success, no doubt, gave him confidence.  Anyhow, I read of two or
+three burglaries that winter which I unhesitatingly put down to Mr.
+Joseph--I suppose there's style in housebreaking, as in other things--and
+early the next spring an exciting bit of business occurred, which I knew
+to be his work by the description of the man.
+
+"He had broken into a big country house during the servants' supper-hour,
+and had stuffed his pockets with jewels.  One of the guests, a young
+officer, coming upstairs, interrupted him just as he had finished.  Joseph
+threatened the man with his revolver; but this time it was not a nervous
+young clerk he had to deal with.  The man sprang at him, and a desperate
+struggle followed, with the result that in the end the officer was left
+with a bullet in his leg, while Joseph jumped clean through the window,
+and fell thirty feet.  Cut and bleeding, if not broken, he would never
+have got away but that, fortunately for him, a tradesman's cart happened
+to be standing at the servants' entrance.  Joe was in it, and off like a
+flash of greased lightning.  How he managed to escape, with all the
+country in an uproar, I can't tell you; but he did it.  The horse and
+cart, when found sixteen miles off, were neither worth much.
+
+"That, it seems, sobered him down for a bit, and nobody heard any more of
+him till nine months later, when he walked into the Monico, where I was
+then working, and held out his hand to me as bold as brass.
+
+"'It's all right,' says he, 'it's the hand of an honest man.'
+
+"'It's come into your possession very recently then,' says I.
+
+"He was dressed in a black frock-coat and wore whiskers.  If I hadn't
+known him, I should have put him down for a parson out of work.
+
+"He laughs.  'I'll tell you all about it,' he says.
+
+"'Not here,' I answers, 'because I'm too busy; but if you like to meet me
+this evening, and you're talking straight--'
+
+"'Straight as a bullet,' says he.  'Come and have a bit of dinner with me
+at the Craven; it's quiet there, and we can talk.  I've been looking for
+you for the last week.'
+
+"Well, I met him; and he told me.  It was the old story: a gal was at the
+bottom of it.  He had broken into a small house at Hampstead.  He was on
+the floor, packing up the silver, when the door opens, and he sees a gal
+standing there.  She held a candle in one hand and a revolver in the
+other.
+
+"'Put your hands up above your head,' says she.
+
+"'I looked at the revolver,' said Joe, telling me; 'it was about eighteen
+inches off my nose; and then I looked at the gal.  There's lots of 'em
+will threaten to blow your brains out for you, but you've only got to
+look at 'em to know they won't.
+
+"'They are thinking of the coroner's inquest, and wondering how the judge
+will sum up.  She met my eyes, and I held up my hands.  If I hadn't I
+wouldn't have been here.
+
+"'Now you go in front,' says she to Joe, and he went.  She laid her
+candle down in the hall and unbolted the front door.
+
+"'What are you going to do?' says Joe, 'call the police?  Because if so,
+my dear, I'll take my chance of that revolver being loaded and of your
+pulling the trigger in time.  It will be a more dignified ending.'
+
+"'No,' says she, 'I had a brother that got seven years for forgery.  I
+don't want to think of another face like his when he came out.  I'm going
+to see you outside my master's house, and that's all I care about.'
+
+"She went down the garden-path with him, and opened the gate.
+
+"'You turn round,' says she, 'before you reach the bottom of the lane and
+I give the alarm.'  And Joe went straight, and didn't look behind him.
+
+"Well, it was a rum beginning to a courtship, but the end was rummer.  The
+girl was willing to marry him if he would turn honest.  Joe wanted to
+turn honest, but didn't know how.
+
+"'It's no use fixing me down, my dear, to any quiet, respectable
+calling,' says Joe to the gal, 'because, even if the police would let me
+alone, I wouldn't be able to stop there.  I'd break out, sooner or later,
+try as I might.'
+
+"The girl went to her master, who seems to have been an odd sort of a
+cove, and told him the whole story.  The old gent said he'd see Joe, and
+Joe called on him.
+
+"'What's your religion?' says the old gent to Joe.
+
+"'I'm not particular, sir; I'll leave it to you,' says Joe.
+
+"'Good!' says the old gent.  'You're no fanatic.  What are your
+principles?'
+
+"At first Joe didn't think he'd got any, but, the old gent leading, he
+found to his surprise as he had.
+
+"'I believe,' says Joe, 'in doing a job thoroughly.'
+
+"'What your hand finds to do, you believe in doing with all your might,
+eh?' says the old gent.
+
+"'That's it, sir,' says Joe.  'That's what I've always tried to do.'
+
+"'Anything else?' asks the old gent.
+
+"'Yes; stick to your pals,' said Joe.
+
+"'Through thick and thin,' suggests the old gent.
+
+"'To the blooming end,' agrees Joe.
+
+"'That's right,' says the old gent.  'Faithful unto death.  And you
+really want to turn over a new leaf--to put your wits and your energy and
+your courage to good use instead of bad?'
+
+"'That's the idea,' says Joe.
+
+"The old gent murmurs something to himself about a stone which the
+builders wouldn't have at any price; and then he turns and puts it
+straight:
+
+"'If you undertake the work,' says he, 'you'll go through with it without
+faltering--you'll devote your life to it?'
+
+"'If I undertake the job, I'll do that,' says Joe.  'What may it be?'
+
+"'To go to Africa,' says the old gent, 'as a missionary.'
+
+"Joe sits down and stares at the old gent, and the old gent looks him
+back.
+
+"'It's a dangerous station,' says the old gent.  'Two of our people have
+lost their lives there.  It wants a man there--a man who will do
+something besides preach, who will save these poor people we have
+gathered together there from being scattered and lost, who will be their
+champion, their protector, their friend.'
+
+"In the end, Joe took on the job, and went out with his wife.  A better
+missionary that Society never had and never wanted.  I read one of his
+early reports home; and if the others were anything like it his life must
+have been exciting enough, even for him.  His station was a small island
+of civilisation, as one may say, in the middle of a sea of savages.
+Before he had been there a month the place had been attacked twice.  On
+the first occasion Joe's 'flock' had crowded into the Mission House, and
+commenced to pray, that having been the plan of defence adopted by his
+predecessor.  Joe cut the prayer short, and preached to them from the
+text, 'Heaven helps them as helps themselves'; after which he proceeded
+to deal out axes and old rifles.  In his report he mentioned that he had
+taken a hand himself, merely as an example to the flock; I bet he had
+never enjoyed an evening more in all his life.  The second fight began,
+as usual, round the Mission, but seems to have ended two miles off.  In
+less than six months he had rebuilt the school-house, organised a police
+force, converted all that was left of one tribe, and started a tin
+church.  He added (but I don't think they read that part of his report
+aloud) that law and order was going to be respected, and life and
+property secure in his district so long as he had a bullet left.
+
+"Later on the Society sent him still further inland, to open up a fresh
+station; and there it was that, according to the newspapers, the
+cannibals got hold of him and ate him.  As I said, personally I don't
+believe it.  One of these days he'll turn up, sound and whole; he is that
+sort."
+
+
+
+
+THE SURPRISE OF MR. MILBERRY.
+
+
+"It's not the sort of thing to tell 'em," remarked Henry, as, with his
+napkin over his arm, he leant against one of the pillars of the verandah,
+and sipped the glass of Burgundy I had poured out for him; "and they
+wouldn't believe it if you did tell 'em, not one of 'em.  But it's the
+truth, for all that.  Without the clothes they couldn't do it."
+
+"Who wouldn't believe what?" I asked.  He had a curious habit, had Henry,
+of commenting aloud upon his own unspoken thoughts, thereby bestowing
+upon his conversation much of the quality of the double acrostic.  We had
+been discussing the question whether sardines served their purpose better
+as a hors d'oeuvre or as a savoury; and I found myself wondering for the
+moment why sardines, above all other fish, should be of an unbelieving
+nature; while endeavouring to picture to myself the costume best adapted
+to display the somewhat difficult figure of a sardine.  Henry put down
+his glass, and came to my rescue with the necessary explanation.
+
+"Why, women--that they can tell one baby from another, without its
+clothes.  I've got a sister, a monthly nurse, and she will tell you for a
+fact, if you care to ask her, that up to three months of age there isn't
+really any difference between 'em.  You can tell a girl from a boy and a
+Christian child from a black heathen, perhaps; but to fancy you can put
+your finger on an unclothed infant and say: 'That's a Smith, or that's a
+Jones,' as the case may be--why, it's sheer nonsense.  Take the things
+off 'em, and shake them up in a blanket, and I'll bet you what you like
+that which is which you'd never be able to tell again so long as you
+lived."
+
+I agreed with Henry, so far as my own personal powers of discrimination
+might be concerned, but I suggested that to Mrs. Jones or Mrs. Smith
+there would surely occur some means of identification.
+
+"So they'd tell you themselves, no doubt," replied Henry; "and of course,
+I am not thinking of cases where the child might have a mole or a squint,
+as might come in useful.  But take 'em in general, kids are as much alike
+as sardines of the same age would be.  Anyhow, I knew a case where a fool
+of a young nurse mixed up two children at an hotel, and to this day
+neither of those women is sure that she's got her own."
+
+"Do you mean," I said, "there was no possible means of distinguishing?"
+
+"There wasn't a flea-bite to go by," answered Henry.  "They had the same
+bumps, the same pimples, the same scratches; they were the same age to
+within three days; they weighed the same to an ounce; and they measured
+the same to an inch.  One father was tall and fair, and the other was
+short and dark.  The tall, fair man had a dark, short wife; and the
+short, dark man had married a tall, fair woman.  For a week they changed
+those kids to and fro a dozen times a day, and cried and quarrelled over
+them.  Each woman felt sure she was the mother of the one that was
+crowing at the moment, and when it yelled she was positive it was no
+child of hers.  They thought they would trust to the instinct of the
+children.  Neither child, so long as it wasn't hungry, appeared to care a
+curse for anybody; and when it was hungry it always wanted the mother
+that the other kid had got.  They decided, in the end, to leave it to
+time.  It's three years ago now, and possibly enough some likeness to the
+parents will develop that will settle the question.  All I say is, up to
+three months old you can't tell 'em, I don't care who says you can."
+
+He paused, and appeared to be absorbed in contemplation of the distant
+Matterhorn, then clad in its rosy robe of evening.  There was a vein of
+poetry in Henry, not uncommon among cooks and waiters.  The perpetual
+atmosphere of hot food I am inclined to think favourable to the growth of
+the softer emotions.  One of the most sentimental men I ever knew kept a
+ham-and-beef shop just off the Farringdon Road.  In the early morning he
+could be shrewd and business-like, but when hovering with a knife and
+fork above the mingled steam of bubbling sausages and hissing
+peas-pudding, any whimpering tramp with any impossible tale of woe could
+impose upon him easily.
+
+"But the rummiest go I ever recollect in connection with a baby,"
+continued Henry after a while, his gaze still fixed upon the distant snow-
+crowned peaks, "happened to me at Warwick in the Jubilee year.  I'll
+never forget that."
+
+"Is it a proper story," I asked, "a story fit for me to hear?"
+
+On consideration, Henry saw no harm in it, and told it to me accordingly.
+
+* * * * *
+
+He came by the 'bus that meets the 4.52.  He'd a handbag and a sort of
+hamper: it looked to me like a linen-basket.  He wouldn't let the Boots
+touch the hamper, but carried it up into his bedroom himself.  He carried
+it in front of him by the handles, and grazed his knuckles at every
+second step.  He slipped going round the bend of the stairs, and knocked
+his head a rattling good thump against the balustrade; but he never let
+go that hamper--only swore and plunged on.  I could see he was nervous
+and excited, but one gets used to nervous and excited people in hotels.
+Whether a man's running away from a thing, or running after a thing, he
+stops at a hotel on his way; and so long as he looks as if he could pay
+his bill one doesn't trouble much about him.  But this man interested me:
+he was so uncommonly young and innocent-looking.  Besides, it was a dull
+hole of a place after the sort of jobs I'd been used to; and when you've
+been doing nothing for three months but waiting on commercial gents as
+are having an exceptionally bad season, and spoony couples with guide-
+books, you get a bit depressed, and welcome any incident, however slight,
+that promises to be out of the common.
+
+I followed him up into his room, and asked him if I could do anything for
+him.  He flopped the hamper on the bed with a sigh of relief, took off
+his hat, wiped his head with his handkerchief, and then turned to answer
+me.
+
+"Are you a married man?" says he.
+
+It was an odd question to put to a waiter, but coming from a gent there
+was nothing to be alarmed about.
+
+"Well, not exactly," I says--I was only engaged at that time, and that
+not to my wife, if you understand what I mean--"but I know a good deal
+about it," I says, "and if it's a matter of advice--"
+
+"It isn't that," he answers, interrupting me; "but I don't want you to
+laugh at me.  I thought if you were a married man you would be able to
+understand the thing better.  Have you got an intelligent woman in the
+house?"
+
+"We've got women," I says.  "As to their intelligence, that's a matter of
+opinion; they're the average sort of women.  Shall I call the
+chambermaid?"
+
+"Ah, do," he says.  "Wait a minute," he says; "we'll open it first."
+
+He began to fumble with the cord, then he suddenly lets go and begins to
+chuckle to himself.
+
+"No," he says, "you open it.  Open it carefully; it will surprise you."
+
+I don't take much stock in surprises myself.  My experience is that
+they're mostly unpleasant.
+
+"What's in it?" I says.
+
+"You'll see if you open it," he says: "it won't hurt you."  And off he
+goes again, chuckling to himself.
+
+"Well," I says to myself, "I hope you're a harmless specimen."  Then an
+idea struck me, and I stopped with the knot in my fingers.
+
+"It ain't a corpse," I says, "is it?"
+
+He turned as white as the sheet on the bed, and clutched the mantlepiece.
+"Good God! don't suggest such a thing," he says; "I never thought of
+that.  Open it quickly."
+
+"I'd rather you came and opened it yourself, sir," I says.  I was
+beginning not to half like the business.
+
+"I can't," he says, "after that suggestion of yours--you've put me all in
+a tremble.  Open it quick, man; tell me it's all right."
+
+Well, my own curiosity helped me.  I cut the cord, threw open the lid,
+and looked in.  He kept his eyes turned away, as if he were frightened to
+look for himself.
+
+"Is it all right?" he says.  "Is it alive?"
+
+"It's about as alive," I says, "as anybody'll ever want it to be, I
+should say."
+
+"Is it breathing all right?" he says.
+
+"If you can't hear it breathing," I says, "I'm afraid you're deaf."
+
+You might have heard its breathing outside in the street.  He listened,
+and even he was satisfied.
+
+"Thank Heaven!" he says, and down he plumped in the easy-chair by the
+fireplace.  "You know, I never thought of that," he goes on.  "He's been
+shut up in that basket for over an hour, and if by any chance he'd
+managed to get his head entangled in the clothes--I'll never do such a
+fool's trick again!"
+
+"You're fond of it?" I says.
+
+He looked round at me.  "Fond of it," he repeats.  "Why, I'm his father."
+And then he begins to laugh again.
+
+"Oh!" I says.  "Then I presume I have the pleasure of addressing Mr.
+Coster King?"
+
+"Coster King?" he answers in surprise.  "My name's Milberry."
+
+I says: "The father of this child, according to the label inside the
+cover, is Coster King out of Starlight, his mother being Jenny Deans out
+of Darby the Devil."
+
+He looks at me in a nervous fashion, and puts the chair between us.  It
+was evidently his turn to think as how I was mad.  Satisfying himself, I
+suppose, that at all events I wasn't dangerous, he crept closer till he
+could get a look inside the basket.  I never heard a man give such an
+unearthly yell in all my life.  He stood on one side of the bed and I on
+the other.  The dog, awakened by the noise, sat up and grinned, first at
+one of us and then at the other.  I took it to be a bull-pup of about
+nine months old, and a fine specimen for its age.
+
+"My child!" he shrieks, with his eyes starting out of his head, "That
+thing isn't my child.  What's happened?  Am I going mad?"
+
+"You're on that way," I says, and so he was.  "Calm yourself," I says;
+"what did you expect to see?"
+
+"My child," he shrieks again; "my only child--my baby!"
+
+"Do you mean a real child?" I says, "a human child?"  Some folks have
+such a silly way of talking about their dogs--you never can tell.
+
+"Of course I do," he says; "the prettiest child you ever saw in all your
+life, just thirteen weeks old on Sunday.  He cut his first tooth
+yesterday."
+
+The sight of the dog's face seemed to madden him.  He flung himself upon
+the basket, and would, I believe, have strangled the poor beast if I
+hadn't interposed between them.
+
+"'Tain't the dog's fault," I says; "I daresay he's as sick about the
+whole business as you are.  He's lost, too.  Somebody's been having a
+lark with you.  They've took your baby out and put this in--that is, if
+there ever was a baby there."
+
+"What do you mean?" he says.
+
+"Well, sir," I says, "if you'll excuse me, gentlemen in their sober
+senses don't take their babies about in dog-baskets.  Where do you come
+from?"
+
+"From Banbury," he says; "I'm well known in Banbury."
+
+"I can quite believe it," I says; "you're the sort of young man that
+would be known anywhere."
+
+"I'm Mr. Milberry," he says, "the grocer, in the High Street."
+
+"Then what are you doing here with this dog?" I says.
+
+"Don't irritate me," he answers.  "I tell you I don't know myself.  My
+wife's stopping here at Warwick, nursing her mother, and in every letter
+she's written home for the last fortnight she's said, 'Oh, how I do long
+to see Eric!  If only I could see Eric for a moment!'"
+
+"A very motherly sentiment," I says, "which does her credit."
+
+"So this afternoon," continues he, "it being early-closing day, I thought
+I'd bring the child here, so that she might see it, and see that it was
+all right.  She can't leave her mother for more than about an hour, and I
+can't go up to the house, because the old lady doesn't like me, and I
+excite her.  I wish to wait here, and Milly--that's my wife--was to come
+to me when she could get away.  I meant this to be a surprise to her."
+
+"And I guess," I says, "it will be the biggest one you have ever given
+her."
+
+"Don't try to be funny about it," he says; "I'm not altogether myself,
+and I may do you an injury."
+
+He was right.  It wasn't a subject for joking, though it had its humorous
+side.
+
+"But why," I says, "put it in a dog-basket?"
+
+"It isn't a dog-basket," he answers irritably; "it's a picnic hamper.  At
+the last moment I found I hadn't got the face to carry the child in my
+arms: I thought of what the street-boys would call out after me.  He's a
+rare one to sleep, and I thought if I made him comfortable in that he
+couldn't hurt, just for so short a journey.  I took it in the carriage
+with me, and carried it on my knees; I haven't let it out of my hands a
+blessed moment.  It's witchcraft, that's what it is.  I shall believe in
+the devil after this."
+
+"Don't be ridiculous," I says, "there's some explanation; it only wants
+finding.  You are sure this is the identical hamper you packed the child
+in?"
+
+He was calmer now.  He leant over and examined it carefully.  "It looks
+like it," he says; "but I can't swear to it."
+
+"You tell me," I says, "you never let it go out of your hands.  Now
+think."
+
+"No," he says, "it's been on my knees all the time."
+
+"But that's nonsense," I says; "unless you packed the dog yourself in
+mistake for your baby.  Now think it over quietly.  I'm not your wife,
+I'm only trying to help you.  I shan't say anything even if you did take
+your eyes off the thing for a minute."
+
+He thought again, and a light broke over his face.  "By Jove!" he says,
+"you're right.  I did put it down for a moment on the platform at Banbury
+while I bought a 'Tit-Bits.'"
+
+"There you are," I says; "now you're talking sense.  And wait a minute;
+isn't to-morrow the first day of the Birmingham Dog Show?"
+
+"I believe you're right," he says.
+
+"Now we're getting warm," I says.  "By a coincidence this dog was being
+taken to Birmingham, packed in a hamper exactly similar to the one you
+put your baby in.  You've got this man's bull-pup, he's got your baby;
+and I wouldn't like to say off-hand at this moment which of you's feeling
+the madder.  As likely as not, he thinks you've done it on purpose."
+
+He leant his head against the bed-post and groaned.  "Milly may be here
+at any moment," says he, "and I'll have to tell her the baby's been sent
+by mistake to a Dog Show!  I daresn't do it," he says, "I daresn't do
+it."
+
+"Go on to Birmingham," I says, "and try and find it.  You can catch the
+quarter to six and be back here before eight."
+
+"Come with me," he says; "you're a good man, come with me.  I ain't fit
+to go by myself."
+
+He was right; he'd have got run over outside the door, the state he was
+in then.
+
+"Well," I says, "if the guv'nor don't object--"
+
+"Oh! he won't, he can't," cries the young fellow, wringing his hands.
+"Tell him it's a matter of a life's happiness.  Tell him--"
+
+"I'll tell him it's a matter of half sovereign extra on to the bill," I
+says.  "That'll more likely do the trick."
+
+And so it did, with the result that in another twenty minutes me and
+young Milberry and the bull-pup in its hamper were in a third-class
+carriage on our way to Birmingham.  Then the difficulties of the chase
+began to occur to me.  Suppose by luck I was right; suppose the pup was
+booked for the Birmingham Dog Show; and suppose by a bit more luck a gent
+with a hamper answering description had been noticed getting out of the
+5.13 train; then where were we?  We might have to interview every cabman
+in the town.  As likely as not, by the time we did find the kid, it
+wouldn't be worth the trouble of unpacking.  Still, it wasn't my cue to
+blab my thoughts.  The father, poor fellow, was feeling, I take it, just
+about as bad as he wanted to feel.  My business was to put hope into him;
+so when he asked me for about the twentieth time if I thought as he would
+ever see his child alive again, I snapped him up shortish.
+
+"Don't you fret yourself about that," I says.  "You'll see a good deal of
+that child before you've done with it.  Babies ain't the sort of things
+as gets lost easily.  It's only on the stage that folks ever have any
+particular use for other people's children.  I've known some bad
+characters in my time, but I'd have trusted the worst of 'em with a wagon-
+load of other people's kids.  Don't you flatter yourself you're going to
+lose it!  Whoever's got it, you take it from me, his idea is to do the
+honest thing, and never rest till he's succeeded in returning it to the
+rightful owner."
+
+Well, my talking like that cheered him, and when we reached Birmingham he
+was easier.  We tackled the station-master, and he tackled all the
+porters who could have been about the platform when the 5.13 came in.  All
+of 'em agreed that no gent got out of that train carrying a hamper.  The
+station-master was a family man himself, and when we explained the case
+to him he sympathised and telegraphed to Banbury.  The booking-clerk at
+Banbury remembered only three gents booking by that particular train.  One
+had been Mr. Jessop, the corn-chandler; the second was a stranger, who
+had booked to Wolverhampton; and the third had been young Milberry
+himself.  The business began to look hopeless, when one of Smith's
+newsboys, who was hanging around, struck in:
+
+"I see an old lady," says he, "hovering about outside the station, and a-
+hailing cabs, and she had a hamper with her as was as like that one there
+as two peas."
+
+I thought young Milberry would have fallen upon the boy's neck and kissed
+him.  With the boy to help us, we started among the cabmen.  Old ladies
+with dog-baskets ain't so difficult to trace.  She had gone to a small
+second-rate hotel in the Aston Road.  I heard all particulars from the
+chambermaid, and the old girl seems to have had as bad a time in her way
+as my gent had in his.  They couldn't get the hamper into the cab, it had
+to go on the top.  The old lady was very worried, as it was raining at
+the time, and she made the cabman cover it with his apron.  Getting it
+off the cab they dropped the whole thing in the road; that woke the child
+up, and it began to cry.
+
+"Good Lord, Ma'am! what is it?" asks the chambermaid, "a baby?"
+
+"Yes, my dear, it's my baby," answers the old lady, who seems to have
+been a cheerful sort of old soul--leastways, she was cheerful up to then.
+"Poor dear, I hope they haven't hurt him."
+
+The old lady had ordered a room with a fire in it.  The Boots took the
+hamper up, and laid it on the hearthrug.  The old lady said she and the
+chambermaid would see to it, and turned him out.  By this time, according
+to the girl's account, it was roaring like a steam-siren.
+
+"Pretty dear!" says the old lady, fumbling with the cord, "don't cry;
+mother's opening it as fast as she can."  Then she turns to the
+chambermaid--"If you open my bag," says she, "you will find a bottle of
+milk and some dog-biscuits."
+
+"Dog-biscuits!" says the chambermaid.
+
+"Yes," says the old lady, laughing, "my baby loves dog-biscuits."
+
+The girl opened the bag, and there, sure enough, was a bottle of milk and
+half a dozen Spratt's biscuits.  She had her back to the old lady, when
+she heard a sort of a groan and a thud as made her turn round.  The old
+lady was lying stretched dead on the hearthrug--so the chambermaid
+thought.  The kid was sitting up in the hamper yelling the roof off.  In
+her excitement, not knowing what she was doing, she handed it a biscuit,
+which it snatched at greedily and began sucking.
+
+Then she set to work to slap the old lady back to life again.  In about a
+minute the poor old soul opened her eyes and looked round.  The baby was
+quiet now, gnawing the dog-biscuit.  The old lady looked at the child,
+then turned and hid her face against the chambermaid's bosom.
+
+"What is it?" she says, speaking in an awed voice.  "The thing in the
+hamper?"
+
+"It's a baby, Ma'am," says the maid.
+
+"You're sure it ain't a dog?" says the old lady.  "Look again."
+
+The girl began to feel nervous, and to wish that she wasn't alone with
+the old lady.
+
+"I ain't likely to mistake a dog for a baby, Ma'am," says the girl.  "It's
+a child--a human infant."
+
+The old lady began to cry softly.  "It's a judgment on me," she says.  "I
+used to talk to that dog as if it had been a Christian, and now this
+thing has happened as a punishment."
+
+"What's happened?" says the chambermaid, who was naturally enough growing
+more and more curious.
+
+"I don't know," says the old lady, sitting up on the floor.  "If this
+isn't a dream, and if I ain't mad, I started from my home at Farthinghoe,
+two hours ago, with a one-year-old bulldog packed in that hamper.  You
+saw me open it; you see what's inside it now."
+
+"But bulldogs," says the chambermaid, "ain't changed into babies by
+magic."
+
+"I don't know how it's done," says the old lady, "and I don't see that it
+matters.  I know I started with a bulldog, and somehow or other it's got
+turned into that."
+
+"Somebody's put it there," says the chambermaid; "somebody as wanted to
+get rid of a child.  They've took your dog out and put that in its
+place."
+
+"They must have been precious smart," says the old lady; "the hamper
+hasn't been out of my sight for more than five minutes, when I went into
+the refreshment-room at Banbury for a cup of tea."
+
+"That's when they did it," says the chambermaid, "and a clever trick it
+was."
+
+The old lady suddenly grasped her position, and jumped up from the floor.
+"And a nice thing for me," she says.  "An unmarried woman in a scandal-
+mongering village!  This is awful!"
+
+"It's a fine-looking child," says the chambermaid.
+
+"Would you like it?" says the old lady.
+
+The chambermaid said she wouldn't.  The old lady sat down and tried to
+think, and the more she thought the worse she felt.  The chambermaid was
+positive that if we hadn't come when we did the poor creature would have
+gone mad.  When the Boots appeared at the door to say there was a gent
+and a bulldog downstairs enquiring after a baby, she flung her arms round
+the man's neck and hugged him.
+
+We just caught the train to Warwick, and by luck got back to the hotel
+ten minutes before the mother turned up.  Young Milberry carried the
+child in his arms all the way.  He said I could have the hamper for
+myself, and gave me half-a-sovereign extra on the understanding that I
+kept my mouth shut, which I did.
+
+I don't think he ever told the child's mother what had
+happened--leastways, if he wasn't a fool right through, he didn't.
+
+
+
+
+THE PROBATION OF JAMES WRENCH.
+
+
+"There are two sorts of men as gets hen-pecked," remarked Henry--I forgot
+how the subject had originated, but we had been discussing the merits of
+Henry VIII., considered as a father and a husband,--"the sort as likes it
+and the sort as don't, and I wouldn't be too cocksure that the sort as
+does isn't on the whole in the majority.
+
+"You see," continued Henry argumentatively, "it gives, as it were, a kind
+of interest to life which nowadays, with everything going smoothly, and
+no chance of a row anywhere except in your own house, is apt to become a
+bit monotonous.  There was a chap I got to know pretty well one winter
+when I was working in Dresden at the Europaischer Hof: a quiet, meek
+little man he was, a journeyman butcher by trade; and his wife was a
+dressmaker, a Schneiderin, as they call them over there, and ran a fairly
+big business in the Praguer Strasse.  I've always been told that German
+husbands are the worst going, treating their wives like slaves, or, at
+the best, as mere upper servants.  But my experience is that human nature
+don't alter so much according to distance from London as we fancy it
+does, and that husbands have their troubles same as wives all the world
+over.  Anyhow, I've come across a German husband or two as didn't carry
+about with him any sign of the slave driver such as you might notice, at
+all events not in his own house; and I know for a fact that Meister
+Anton, which was the name of the chap I'm telling you about, couldn't
+have been much worse off, not even if he'd been an Englishman born and
+bred.  There were no children to occupy her mind, so she just devoted
+herself to him and the work-girls, and made things hum, as they say in
+America, for all of them.  As for the girls, they got away at six in the
+evening, and not many of them stopped more than the first month.  But the
+old man, not being able to give notice, had to put up with an average of
+eighteen hours a day of it.  And even when, as was sometimes the case, he
+managed to get away for an hour or two in the evening for a quiet talk
+with a few of us over a glass of beer, he could never be quite happy,
+thinking of what was accumulating for him at home.  Of course everybody
+as knew him knew of his troubles--for a scolding wife ain't the sort of
+thing as can be hid under a bushel,--and was sorry for him, he being as
+amiable and good-tempered a fellow as ever lived, and most of us spent
+our time with him advising him for his good.  Some of the more ardent
+would give him recipes for managing her, but they, being generally
+speaking bachelors, their suggestions lacked practicability, as you might
+say.  One man bored his life out persuading him to try a bucket of cold
+water.  He was one of those cold-water enthusiasts, this fellow; took it
+himself for everything, and always went to a hydropathic establishment
+for his holidays.  Rumour had it that Meister Anton really did try this
+experiment on one unfortunate occasion--worried into it, I suppose, by
+the other chap's persistency.  Anyhow, we didn't see him again for a
+week, he being confined to his bed with a chill on the liver.  And the
+next suggestion made to him he rejected quite huffily, explaining that he
+had no intention of putting any fresh ideas into his wife's head.
+
+"She wasn't a bad woman, mind you--merely given to fits of temper.  At
+times she could be quite pleasant: but when she wasn't life with her must
+have been exciting.  He had stood it for about seven years; and then one
+day, without a word of warning to anyone, he went away and left her.  As
+she was quite able to keep herself, this seemed to be the best
+arrangement possible, and everybody wondered why he had never thought of
+it before, I did not see him again for nine months, until I ran against
+him by pure chance on the Koln platform, where I was waiting for a train
+to Paris.  He told me they had made up all their differences by
+correspondence, and that he was then on his way back to her.  He seemed
+quite cheerful and expectant.
+
+"'Do you think she's really reformed?' I says.  'Do you think nine months
+is long enough to have taught her a lesson?'  I didn't want to damp him,
+but personally I have never known but one case of a woman being cured of
+nagging, and that being brought about by a fall from a third-story
+window, resulting in what the doctors called permanent paralysis of the
+vocal organs, can hardly be taken as a precedent.
+
+"'No,' he answers, 'nor nine years.  But it's been long enough to teach
+me a lesson.'
+
+"'You know me,' he goes on.  'I ain't a quarrelsome sort of chap.  If
+nobody says a word to me, I never says a word to anybody; and it's been
+like that ever since I left her, day in and day out, all just the same.
+Up in the morning, do your bit of work, drink your glass of beer, and to
+bed in the evening; nothing to excite you, nothing to rouse you.  Why,
+it's a mere animal existence.'
+
+"He was a rum sort of chap, always thought things out from his own point
+of view as it were."
+
+"Yes, a curious case," I remarked to Henry; "not the sort of story to put
+about, however.  It might give women the idea that nagging is attractive,
+and encourage them to try it upon husbands who do not care for that kind
+of excitement."
+
+"Not much fear of that," replied Henry.  "The nagging woman is born, as
+they say, not made; and she'll nag like the roses bloom, not because she
+wants to, but because she can't help it.  And a woman to whom it don't
+come natural will never be any real good at it, try as she may.  And as
+for the men, why we'll just go on selecting wives according to the old
+rule, so that you never know what you've got till it's too late for you
+to do anything but make the best or the worst of it, according as your
+fancy takes you.
+
+"There was a fellow," continued Henry, "as used to work with me a good
+many years ago now at a small hotel in the City.  He was a waiter, like
+myself--not a bad sort of chap, though a bit of a toff in his off-hours.
+He'd been engaged for some two or three years to one of the chambermaids.
+A pretty, gentle-looking little thing she was, with big childish eyes,
+and a voice like the pouring out of water.  They are strange things,
+women; one can never tell what they are made of from the taste of them.
+And while I was there, it having been a good season for both of them,
+they thought they'd risk it and get married.  They did the sensible
+thing, he coming back to his work after the week's holiday, and she to
+hers; the only difference being that they took a couple of rooms of their
+own in Middleton Row, from where in summer-time you can catch the glimpse
+of a green tree or two, and slept out.
+
+"The first few months they were as happy as a couple in a play, she
+thinking almost as much of him as he thought of himself, which must have
+been a comfort to both of them, and he as proud of her as if he made her
+himself.  And then some fifteenth cousin or so of his, a man he had never
+heard of before, died in New Zealand and left him a fortune.
+
+"That was the beginning of his troubles, and hers too.  I don't say it
+was enough to buy a peerage, but to a man accustomed to dream of half-
+crown tips it seemed an enormous fortune.  Anyhow, it was sufficient to
+turn his head and give him ideas above his station.  His first move, of
+course, was to chuck his berth and set fire to his dress suit, which,
+being tolerably greasy, burned well.  Had he stopped there nobody could
+have blamed him.  I've often thought myself that I would willingly give
+ten years of my life, provided anybody wanted them, which I don't see how
+they should, to put my own behind the fire.  But he didn't.  He took a
+house in a mews, with the front door in a street off Grosvenor Square,
+furnished it like a second-class German restaurant, dressed himself like
+a bookmaker, and fancied that with the help of a few shady City chaps and
+a broken-down swell or two he had gathered round him, he was fairly on
+the road to Park Lane and the House of Lords.
+
+"And the only thing that struck him as being at all in his way was his
+wife.  In her cap and apron, or her Sunday print she had always looked as
+dainty and fetching a little piece of goods as a man could wish to be
+seen out with.  Dressed according to the advice of his new-found friends,
+of course she looked like nothing else so much as a barn-yard chicken in
+turkey-cock's feathers.  He was shocked to find that her size in gloves
+was seven-and-a-quarter, and in boots something over four, and that sort
+of thing naturally irritates a woman more even than finding fault with
+her immortal soul.  I guess for about a year he made her life pretty well
+a burden for her, trying to bring her up to the standard of the Saturday-
+to-Monday-at-Brighton set with which he had surrounded himself, or which,
+to speak more correctly, had got round him.  She'd a precious sight more
+gumption than he had ever possessed, and if he had listened to her
+instead of insisting upon her listening to him it would have been better
+for him.  But there are some men who think that if you have a taste for
+champagne and the ballet that proves you are intended by nature for a
+nob, and he was one of them; and any common-sense suggestion of hers only
+convinced him of her natural unfitness for an exalted station.
+
+"He grumbled at her accent, which, seeing that his own was acquired in
+Lime-house and finished off in the Minories, was just the sort of thing a
+fool would do.  And he insisted on her reading all the society novels as
+they came out--you know the sort I mean,--where everybody snaps everybody
+else's head off, and all the proverbs are upside down; people leave them
+about the hotels when they've done with them, and one gets into the habit
+of dipping into them when one's nothing better to do.  His hope was that
+she might, with pains, get to talk like these books.  That was his ideal.
+
+"She did her best, but of course the more she got away from herself the
+more absurd she became; and the rubbish and worse that he had about him
+would ridicule her more or less openly.  And he, instead of kicking them
+out into the mews--which could have been done easily without Grosvenor
+Square knowing anything about it, and thereby having its high-class
+feelings hurt--he would blame her when they had all gone, just as if it
+was her fault that she was the daughter of a respectable bootmaker in the
+Mile End Road instead of something more likely than not turned out of the
+third row of the ballet because it couldn't dance, and didn't want to
+learn.
+
+"He played a bit in the City, and won at first, and that swelled his head
+worse than ever.  It also brought him a good deal of sympathy from an
+Italian Countess, the sort you find at Homburg, and that generally
+speaking is a widow.  Her chief sorrow was for society--that in him was
+losing an ornament.  She explained to him how an accomplished and
+experienced woman could help a man to gain admittance into the tiptop
+circles, which, according to her, were just thirsting for him.  As a
+waiter, he had his share of brains, and it's a business that requires
+more insight than perhaps you'd fancy, if you don't want to waste your
+time on a rabbit-skin coat and a paste ring, and give the burnt sole to
+the real gent.  But in the hands of this swell mob he was, of course,
+just the young man from the country; and the end of it was that he played
+the game down pretty low.
+
+"She--not the Countess, I shouldn't like you to have that idea, but his
+wife--came to be pretty friendly with my missus later on, and that's how
+I got to know the details.  He comes to her one day looking pretty
+sheepish-like, as one can well believe, and maybe he'd been drinking a
+bit to give himself courage.
+
+"'We ain't been getting along too well together of late, have we, Susan?'
+says he.
+
+"'We ain't seen much of one another,' she answers; 'but I agree with you,
+we don't seem to enjoy it much when we do.'
+
+"'It ain't your fault,' says he.
+
+"'I'm glad you think that,' she answers; 'it shows me you ain't quite as
+foolish as I was beginning to think you.'
+
+"'Of course, I didn't know when I married you,' he goes on, 'as I was
+going to come into this money.'
+
+"'No, nor I either,' says she, 'or you bet it wouldn't have happened.'
+
+"'It seems to have been a bit of a mistake,' says he, 'as things have
+turned out.'
+
+"'It would have been a mistake, and more than a bit of a one in any
+case,' answers she.
+
+"'I'm glad you agree with me,' says he; 'there'll be no need to quarrel.'
+
+"'I've always tried to agree with you,' says she.  'We've never
+quarrelled yet, and that ought to be sufficient proof to you that we
+never shall.'
+
+"'It's a mistake that can be rectified,' says he, 'if you are sensible,
+and that without any harm to anyone.'
+
+"'Oh!' says she, 'it must be a new sort of mistake, that kind.'
+
+"'We're not fitted for one another,' says he.
+
+"'Out with it,' says she.  'Don't you be afraid of my feelings; they are
+well under control, as I think I can fairly say by this time.'
+
+"'With a man in your own station of life,' says he, 'you'd be happier.'
+
+"'There's many a man I might have been happier with,' replies she.  'That
+ain't the thing to be discussed, seeing as I've got you.'
+
+"'You might get rid of me,' says he.
+
+"'You mean you might get rid of me,' she answers.
+
+"'It comes to the same thing,' he says.
+
+"'No, it don't,' she replies, 'nor anything like it.  I shouldn't have
+got rid of you for my pleasure, and I'm not going to do it for yours.  You
+can live like a decent man, and I'll go on putting up with you; or you
+can live like a fool, and I shan't stand in your way.  But you can't do
+both, and I'm not going to help you try.'
+
+"Well, he argued with her, and he tried the coaxing dodge, and he tried
+the bullying dodge, but it didn't work, neither of it.
+
+"'I've done my duty by you,' says she, 'so far as I've been able, and
+that I'll go on doing or not, just as you please; but I don't do more.'
+
+"'We can't go on living like this,' says he, 'and it isn't fair to ask me
+to.  You're hammering my prospects.'
+
+"'I don't want to do that,' says she.  'You take your proper position in
+society, whatever that may be, and I'll take mine.  I'll be glad enough
+to get back to it, you may rest assured.'
+
+"'What do you mean?' says he.
+
+"'It's simple enough,' she answers.  'I was earning my living before I
+married you, and I can earn it again.  You go your way, I go mine.'
+
+"It didn't satisfy him; but there was nothing else to be done, and there
+was no moving her now in any other direction whatever, even had he wanted
+to.  He offered her anything in the way of money--he wasn't a mean
+chap,--but she wouldn't touch a penny.  She had kept her old clothes--I'm
+not sure that some idea of needing them hadn't always been in her
+head,--applied for a place under her former manager, who was then bossing
+a hotel in Kensington, and got it.  And there was an end of high life so
+far as she was concerned.
+
+"As for him, he went the usual way.  It always seems to me as if men and
+women were just like water; sooner or later they get back to the level
+from which they started--that is, of course, generally speaking.  Here
+and there a drop clings where it climbs; but, taking them on the whole,
+pumping-up is a slow business.  Lord!  I have seen them, many of them,
+jolly clever they've thought themselves, with their diamond rings and big
+cigars.  'Wait a bit,' I've always said to myself, 'there'll come a day
+when you'll walk in and be glad enough of your chop and potatoes again
+with your half-pint of bitter.'  And nine cases out of ten I've been
+right.  James Wrench followed the course of the majority, only a little
+more so: tried to do others a precious sight sharper than himself, and
+got done; tried a dozen times to scramble up again, each time coming down
+heavier than before, till there wasn't another spring left in him, and
+his only ambition victuals.  Then, of course, he thought of his wife--it's
+a wonderful domesticator, ill luck--and wondered what she was doing.
+
+"Fortunately for him, she'd been doing well.  Her father died and left
+her a bit, just a couple of hundred or so, and with this and her own
+savings she started with a small inn in a growing town, and had sold out
+again three years later at four times what she had paid for it.  She had
+done even better than that for herself.  She had developed a talent for
+cooking--that was a settled income in itself,--and at this time was
+running a small hotel in Brighton, and making it pay to a tune that would
+have made the shareholders of some of its bigger rivals a bit envious
+could they have known.
+
+"He came to me, having found out, I don't know how--necessity smartens
+the wits, I suppose,--that my missis still kept up a sort of friendship
+with her, and begged me to try and arrange a meeting between them, which
+I did, though I told him frankly that from what I knew his welcome
+wouldn't be much more enthusiastic than what he'd any right to expect.
+But he was always of a sanguine disposition; and borrowing his fare and
+an old greatcoat of mine, he started off, evidently thinking that all his
+troubles were over.
+
+"But they weren't exactly.  The Married Women's Property Act had altered
+things a bit, and Master James found himself greeted without any
+suggestion of tenderness by a business-like woman of thirty-six or
+thereabouts, and told to wait in the room behind the bar till she could
+find time to talk to him.
+
+"She kept him waiting there for three-quarters of an hour, just
+sufficient time to take the side out of him; and then she walks in and
+closes the door behind her.
+
+"'I'd say you hadn't changed hardly a day, Susan,' says he, 'if it wasn't
+that you'd grown handsomer than ever.'
+
+"I guess he'd been turning that over in his mind during the
+three-quarters of an hour.  It was his fancy that he knew a bit about
+women.
+
+"'My name's Mrs. Wrench,' says she; 'and if you take your hat off and
+stand up while I'm talking to you it will be more what I'm accustomed
+to.'
+
+"Well, that staggered him a bit; but there didn't seem anything else to
+be done, so he just made as if he thought it funny, though I doubt if at
+the time he saw the full humour of it.
+
+"'And now, what do you want?" says she, seating herself in front of her
+desk, and leaving him standing, first on one leg and then on the other,
+twiddling his hat in his hands.
+
+"'I've been a bad husband to you, Susan,' begins he.
+
+"'I could have told you that,' she answers.  'What I asked you was what
+you wanted.'
+
+"'I want for us to let bygones be bygones,' says he.
+
+"'That's quite my own idea,' says she, 'and if you don't allude to the
+past, I shan't.'
+
+"'You're an angel, Susan,' says he.
+
+"'I've told you once,' answers she, 'that my name's Mrs. Wrench.  I'm
+Susan to my friends, not to every broken-down tramp looking for a job.'
+
+"'Ain't I your husband?' says he, trying a bit of dignity.
+
+"She got up and took a glance through the glass-door to see that nobody
+was there to overhear her.
+
+"'For the first and last time,' says she, 'let you and me understand one
+another.  I've been eleven years without a husband, and I've got used to
+it.  I don't feel now as I want one of any kind, and if I did it wouldn't
+be your sort.  Eleven years ago I wasn't good enough for you, and now
+you're not good enough for me.'
+
+"'I want to reform,' says he.
+
+"'I want to see you do it,' says she.
+
+"'Give me a chance,' says he.
+
+"'I'm going to,' says she; 'but it's going to be my experiment this time,
+not yours.  Eleven years ago I didn't give you satisfaction, so you
+turned me out of doors.'
+
+"'You went, Susan,' says he; 'you know it was your own idea.'
+
+"'Don't you remind me too much of the circumstances,' replies she,
+turning on him with a look in her eyes that was probably new to him, 'I
+went because there wasn't room for two of us; you know that.  The other
+kind suited you better.  Now I'm going to see whether you suit me,' and
+she sits herself again in her landlady's chair.
+
+"'In what way?' says he.
+
+"'In the way of earning your living,' says she, 'and starting on the road
+to becoming a decent member of society.'
+
+"He stood for a while cogitating.
+
+"'Don't you think,' says he at last, 'as I could manage this hotel for
+you?'
+
+"'Thanks,' says she; 'I'm doing that myself.'
+
+"'What about looking to the financial side of things,' says he, 'and
+keeping the accounts?  It's hardly your work.'
+
+"'Nor yours either,' answers she drily, 'judging by the way you've been
+keeping your own.'
+
+"'You wouldn't like me to be head-waiter, I suppose?' says he.  'It would
+be a bit of a come-down.'
+
+"'You're thinking of the hotel, I suppose,' says she.  'Perhaps you are
+right.  My customers are mostly an old-fashioned class; it's probable
+enough they might not like you.  You had better suggest something else.'
+
+"'I could hardly be an under-waiter,' says he.
+
+"'Perhaps not,' says she; 'your manners strike me as a bit too familiar
+for that.'
+
+"Then he thought he'd try sarcasm.
+
+"'Perhaps you'd fancy my being the boots,' says he.
+
+"'That's more reasonable,' says she.  'You couldn't do much harm there,
+and I could keep an eye on you.'
+
+"'You really mean that?' says he, starting to put on his dignity.
+
+"But she cut him short by ringing the bell.
+
+"'If you think you can do better for yourself,' she says, 'there's an end
+of it.  By a curious coincidence the place is just now vacant.  I'll keep
+it open for you till to-morrow night; you can turn it over in your mind.'
+And one of the page boys coming in she just says 'Good-morning,' and the
+interview was at an end.
+
+"Well, he turned it over, and he took the job.  He thought she'd relent
+after the first week or two, but she didn't.  He just kept that place for
+over fifteen months, and learnt the business.  In the house he was James
+the boots, and she Mrs. Wrench the landlady, and she saw to it that he
+didn't forget it.  He had his wages and he made his tips, and the food
+was plentiful; but I take it he worked harder during that time than he'd
+ever worked before in his life, and found that a landlady is just twice
+as difficult to please as the strictest landlord it can be a man's
+misfortune to get under, and that Mrs. Wrench was no exception to the
+rule.
+
+"At the end of the fifteen months she sends for him into the office.  He
+didn't want telling by this time; he just stood with his hat in his hand
+and waited respectful like.
+
+"'James,' says she, after she had finished what she was doing, 'I find I
+shall want another waiter for the coffee-room this season.  Would you
+care to try the place?'
+
+"'Thank you, Mrs. Wrench,' he answers; 'it's more what I've been used to,
+and I think I'll be able to give satisfaction.'
+
+"'There's no wages attached, as I suppose you know,' continues she; 'but
+the second floor goes with it, and if you know your business you ought to
+make from twenty-five to thirty shillings a week.'
+
+"Thank you, Mrs. Wrench; that'll suit me very well,' replies he; and it
+was settled.
+
+"He did better as a waiter; he'd got it in his blood, as you might say;
+and so after a time he worked up to be head-waiter.  Now and then, of
+course, it came about that he found himself waiting on the very folks
+that he'd been chums with in his classy days, and that must have been a
+bit rough on him.  But he'd taken in a good deal of sense since then; and
+when one of the old sort, all rings and shirt-front, dining there one
+Sunday evening, started chaffing him, Jimmy just shut him up with a
+quiet: 'Yes, I guess we were both a bit out of our place in those days.
+The difference between us now is that I have got back to mine,' which
+cost him his tip, but must nave been a satisfaction to him.
+
+"Altogether he worked in that hotel for some three and a half years, and
+then Mrs. Wrench sends for him again into the office.
+
+"'Sit down, James,' says she.
+
+"'Thank you, Mrs. Wrench,' says James, and sat.
+
+"'I'm thinking of giving up this hotel, James,' says she, 'and taking
+another near Dover, a quiet place with just such a clientele as I shall
+like.  Do you care to come with me?'
+
+"'Thank you,' says he, 'but I'm thinking, Mrs. Wrench, of making a change
+myself.'
+
+"'Oh,' says she, 'I'm sorry to hear that, James.  I thought we'd been
+getting on very well together.'
+
+"'I've tried to do my best, Mrs. Wrench,' says he, 'and I hope as I've
+given satisfaction.'
+
+"'I've nothing to complain of, James,' says she.
+
+"'I thank you for saying it,' says he, 'and I thank you for the
+opportunity you gave me when I wanted it.  It's been the making of me.'
+
+"She didn't answer for about a minute.  Then says she: 'You've been
+meeting some of your old friends, James, I'm afraid, and they've been
+persuading you to go back into the City.'
+
+"'No, Mrs. Wrench,' says he; 'no more City for me, and no more
+neighbourhood of Grosvenor Square, unless it be in the way of business;
+and that couldn't be, of course, for a good long while to come.'
+
+"'What do you mean by business?' asks she.
+
+"'The hotel business,' replies he.  'I believe I know the bearings by
+now.  I've saved a bit, thanks to you, Mrs. Wrench, and a bit's come in
+from the wreck that I never hoped for.'
+
+"'Enough to start you?' asks she.
+
+"'Not quite enough for that,' answers he.  'My idea is a small
+partnership.'
+
+"'How much is it altogether?' says she, 'if it's not an impertinent
+question.'
+
+"'Not at all,' answers he.  'It tots up to 900 pounds about.'
+
+"She turns back to her desk and goes on with her writing.
+
+"'Dover wouldn't suit you, I suppose?' says she without looking round.
+
+"'Dover's all right,' says he, 'if the business is a good one.'
+
+"'It can be worked up into one of the best things going,' says she, 'and
+I'm getting it dirt cheap.  You can have a third share for a thousand
+pounds, that's just what it's costing, and owe me the other hundred."
+
+"'And what position do I take?' says he.
+
+"'If you come in on those terms,' says she, 'then, of course, it's a
+partnership.'
+
+"He rose and came over to her.  'Life isn't all business, Susan,' says
+he.
+
+"'I've found it so mostly,' says she.
+
+"'Fourteen years ago,' says he, 'I made the mistake; now you're making
+it.'
+
+"'What mistake am I making?' says she.
+
+"'That man's the only thing as can't learn a lesson,' says he.
+
+"'Oh,' says she, 'and what's the lesson that you've learnt?'
+
+"'That I never get on without you, Susan,' says he.
+
+"'Well,' says she, 'you suggested a partnership, and I agreed to it.  What
+more do you want?'
+
+"'I want to know the name of the firm,' says he.
+
+"'Mr. and Mrs. Wrench,' says she, turning round to him and holding out
+her hand.  'How will that suit you?'
+
+"'That'll do me all right,' answers he.  'And I'll try and give
+satisfaction,' adds he.
+
+"'I believe you,' says she.
+
+"And in that way they made a fresh start, as it were."
+
+
+
+
+THE WOOING OF TOM SLEIGHT'S WIFE.
+
+
+"It's competition," replied Henry, "that makes the world go round.  You
+never want a thing particularly until you see another fellow trying to
+get it; then it strikes you all of a sudden that you've a better right to
+it than he has.  Take barmaids: what's the attraction about 'em?  In
+looks they're no better than the average girl in the street; while as for
+their temper, well that's a bit above the average--leastways, so far as
+my experience goes.  Yet the thinnest of 'em has her dozen, making
+sheep's-eyes at her across the counter.  I've known girls that on the
+level couldn't have got a policeman to look at 'em.  Put 'em behind a row
+of tumblers and a shilling's-worth of stale pastry, and nothing outside a
+Lincoln and Bennett is good enough for 'em.  It's the competition that's
+the making of 'em.
+
+"Now, I'll tell you a story," continued Henry, "that bears upon the
+subject.  It's a pretty story, if you look at it from one point of view;
+though my wife maintains--and she's a bit of a judge, mind you--that it's
+not yet finished, she arguing that there's a difference between marrying
+and being married.  You can have a fancy for the one, without caring much
+about the other.  What I tell her is that a boy isn't a man, and a man
+isn't a boy.  Besides, it's five years ago now, and nothing has happened
+since: though of course one can never say."
+
+"I would like to hear the story," I ventured to suggest; "I'll be able to
+judge better afterwards."
+
+"It's not a long one," replied Henry, "though as a matter of fact it
+began seventeen years ago in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.  He was a wild
+young fellow, and always had been."
+
+"Who was?" I interrupted.
+
+"Tom Sleight," answered Henry, "the chap I'm telling you about.  He
+belonged to a good family, his father being a Magistrate for
+Monmouthshire; but there had been no doing anything with young Tom from
+the very first.  At fifteen he ran away from school at Clifton, and with
+everything belonging to him tied up in a pocket-handkerchief made his way
+to Bristol Docks.  There he shipped as boy on board an American schooner,
+the Cap'n not pressing for any particulars, being short-handed, and the
+boy himself not volunteering much.  Whether his folks made much of an
+effort to get him back, or whether they didn't, I can't tell you.  Maybe,
+they thought a little roughing it would knock some sense into him.
+Anyhow, the fact remains that for the next seven or eight years, until
+the sudden death of his father made him a country gentleman, a more or
+less jolly sailor-man he continued to be.  And it was during that
+period--to be exact, three years after he ran away and four years before
+he returned--that, as I have said, at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, he
+married, after ten days' courtship, Mary Godselle, only daughter of Jean
+Godselle, saloon keeper of that town."
+
+"That makes him just eighteen," I remarked; "somewhat young for a
+bridegroom."
+
+"But a good deal older than the bride," was Henry's comment, "she being
+at the time a few months over fourteen."
+
+"Was it legal?" I enquired.
+
+"Quite legal," answered Henry.  "In New Hampshire, it would seem, they
+encourage early marriages.  'Can't begin a good thing too soon,' is, I
+suppose, their motto."
+
+"How did the marriage turn out?" was my next question.  The married life
+of a lady and gentleman, the united ages of whom amounted to thirty-two,
+promised interesting developments.
+
+"Practically speaking," replied Henry, "it wasn't a marriage at all.  It
+had been a secret affair from the beginning, as perhaps you can imagine.
+The old man had other ideas for his daughter, and wasn't the sort of
+father to be played with.  They separated at the church door, intending
+to meet again in the evening.  Two hours later Master Tom Sleight got
+knocked on the head in a street brawl.  If a row was to be had anywhere
+within walking distance he was the sort of fellow to be in it.  When he
+came to his senses he found himself lying in his bunk, and the 'Susan
+Pride'--if that was the name of the ship; I think it was--ten miles out
+to sea.  The Captain declined to put the vessel about to please either a
+loving seaman or a loving seaman's wife; and to come to the point, the
+next time Mr. Tom Sleight saw Mrs. Tom Sleight was seven years later at
+the American bar of the Grand Central in Paris; and then he didn't know
+her."
+
+"But what had she been doing all the time?" I queried.  "Do you mean to
+tell me that she, a married woman, had been content to let her husband
+disappear without making any attempt to trace him?"
+
+"I was making it short," retorted Henry, in an injured tone, "for your
+benefit; if you want to have the whole of it, of course you can.  He
+wasn't a scamp; he was just a scatterbrain--that was the worst you could
+say against him.  He tried to communicate with her, but never got an
+answer.  Then he wrote to the father, and told him frankly the whole
+story.  The letter came back six months later, marked--'Gone away; left
+no address.'  You see, what had happened was this: the old man died
+suddenly a month or two after the marriage, without ever having heard a
+word about it.  The girl hadn't a relative or friend in the town, all her
+folks being French Canadians.  She'd got her pride, and she'd got a sense
+of humour not common in a woman.  I was with her at the Grand Central for
+over a year, and came to know her pretty well.  She didn't choose to
+advertise the fact that her husband had run away from her, as she
+thought, an hour after he had married her.  She knew he was a gentleman
+with rich relatives somewhere in England; and as the months went by
+without bringing word or sign of him, she concluded he'd thought the
+matter over and was ashamed of her.  You must remember she was merely a
+child at the time, and hardly understood her position.  Maybe later on
+she would have seen the necessity of doing something.  But Chance, as it
+were, saved her the trouble; for she had not been serving in the Cafe
+more than a month when, early one afternoon, in walked her Lord and
+Master.  'Mam'sell Marie,' as of course we called her over there, was at
+that moment busy talking to two customers, while smiling at a third; and
+our hero, he gave a start the moment he set eyes on her."
+
+"You told me that when he saw her there he didn't know her," I reminded
+Henry.
+
+"Quite right, sir," replied Henry, "so I did; but he knew a pretty girl
+when he saw one anywhere at any time--he was that sort, and a prettier,
+saucier looking young personage than Marie, in spite of her misfortunes,
+as I suppose you'd call 'em, you wouldn't have found had you searched
+Paris from the Place de la Bastille to the Arc de Triomphe."
+
+"Did she," I asked, "know him, or was the forgetfulness mutual?"
+
+"She recognised him," returned Henry, "before he entered the Cafe, owing
+to catching sight of his face through the glass door while he was trying
+to find the handle.  Women on some points have better memories than men.
+Added to which, when you come to think of it, the game was a bit
+one-sided.  Except that his moustache, maybe, was a little more imposing,
+and that he wore the clothes of a gentleman in place of those of an able-
+bodied seaman before the mast, he was to all intents and purposes the
+same as when they parted six years ago outside the church door; while she
+had changed from a child in a short muslin frock and a 'flapper,' as I
+believe they call it, tied up in blue ribbon, to a self-possessed young
+woman in a frock that might have come out of a Bond Street show window,
+and a Japanese coiffure, that being then the fashion.
+
+"She finished with her French customers, not hurrying herself in the
+least--that wasn't her way; and then strolling over to her husband, asked
+him in French what she could have the pleasure of doing for him.  His
+education on board the 'Susan Pride' and others had, I take it, gone back
+rather than forward.  He couldn't understand her, so she translated it
+for him into broken English, with an accent.  He asked her how she knew
+he was English.  She told him it was because Englishmen had such pretty
+moustaches, and came back with his order, which was rum punch.  She kept
+him waiting about a quarter of an hour before she returned with it.  He
+filled up the time looking into the glass behind him when he thought
+nobody was observing him.
+
+"One American drink, as they used to concoct it in that bar, was
+generally enough for most of our customers, but he, before he left,
+contrived to put away three; also contriving, during the same short space
+of time, to inform 'Mam'sel Marie' that Paris, since he had looked into
+her eyes, had become the only town worth living in, so far as he was
+concerned, throughout the whole universe.  He had his failings, had
+Master Tom Sleight, but shyness wasn't one of them.  She gave him a smile
+when he left that would have brought a less impressionable young man than
+he back again to that Cafe; but for the rest of the day I noticed
+'Mam'sel Marie' frowned to herself a good deal, and was quite unusually
+cynical in her view of things in general.
+
+"Next afternoon he found his way to us again, and much the same sort of
+thing went on, only a little more of it.  A sailor-man, so I am told,
+makes love with his hour of departure always before his mind, and so gets
+into the habit of not wasting time.  He gave her short lessons in
+English, for which she appeared to be grateful, and she at his request
+taught him the French for 'You are just charming!  I love you!' with
+which, so he explained, it was his intention, on his return to England,
+to surprise his mother.  He turned up again after dinner, and the next
+day before lunch, when after that I looked up and missed him at his usual
+table, the feeling would come to me that business was going down.  Marie
+always appeared delighted to see him, and pouted when he left; but what
+puzzled me at the time was, that though she fooled him to the top of his
+bent, she flirted every bit as much, if not more, with her other
+customers--leastways with the nicer ones among them.  There was one young
+Frenchman in particular--a good-looking chap, a Monsieur Flammard, son of
+the painter.  Up till then he'd been making love pretty steadily to Miss
+Marie, as, indeed, had most of 'em, without ever getting much forrarder;
+for hitherto a chat about the weather, and a smile that might have meant
+she was in love with you or might have meant she was laughing at you--no
+man could ever tell which,--was all the most persistent had got out of
+her.  Now, however, and evidently to his own surprise, young Monsieur
+Flammard found himself in clover.  Provided his English rival happened to
+be present and not too far removed, he could have as much flirtation as
+he wanted, which, you may take it, worked out at a very tolerable amount.
+Master Tom could sit and scowl, and for the matter of that did; but as
+Marie would explain to him, always with the sweetest of smiles, her
+business was to be nice to all her customers, and to this, of course, he
+had nothing to reply: that he couldn't understand a word of what she and
+Flammard talked and laughed about didn't seem to make him any the
+happier.
+
+"Well, this sort of thing went on for perhaps a fortnight, and then one
+morning over our dejeune, when she and I had the Cafe entirely to
+ourselves, I took the opportunity of talking to Mam'sel Marie like a
+father.
+
+"She heard me out without a murmur, which showed her sense; for liking
+the girl sincerely, I didn't mince matters with her, but spoke plainly
+for her good.  The result was, she told me her story much as I have told
+it to you.
+
+"'It's a funny tale,' says I when she'd finished, 'though maybe you
+yourself don't see the humour of it.'
+
+"'Yes, I do,' was her answer.  'But there's a serious side to it also,'
+says she, 'and that interests me more.'
+
+"'You're sure you're not making a mistake?' I suggested.
+
+"'He's been in my thoughts too much for me to forget him,' she replied.
+'Besides, he's told me his name and all about himself.'
+
+"'Not quite all,' says I.
+
+"'No, and that's why I feel hard toward him,' answers she.
+
+"'Now you listen to me,' says I.  'This is a very pretty comedy, and the
+way you've played it does you credit up till now.  Don't you run it on
+too long, and turn it into a problem play.'
+
+"'How d'ye mean?' says she.
+
+"'A man's a man,' says I; 'anyhow he's one.  He fell in love with you six
+years ago when you were only a child, and now you're a woman he's fallen
+in love with you again.  If that don't convince you of his constancy,
+nothing will.  You stop there.  Don't you try to find out any more.'
+
+"'I mean to find out one thing, answers she: 'whether he's a man--or a
+cad.'
+
+"'That's a severe remark,' says I, 'to make about your own husband.'
+
+"'What am I to think?' says she.  'He fooled me into loving him when, as
+you say, I was only a child.  Do you think I haven't suffered all these
+years?  It's the girl that cries her eyes out for her lover; we learn to
+take 'em for what they're worth later on.'
+
+"'But he's in love with you still,' I says.  I knew what was in her mind,
+but I wanted to lead her away from it if I could.
+
+"'That's a lie,' says she, 'and you know it.'  She wasn't choosing her
+words; she was feeling, if you understand.  'He's in love with a pretty
+waitress that he met for the first time a fortnight ago.'
+
+"'That's because she reminds him of you,' I replied, 'or because you
+remind him of her, whichever you prefer.  It shows you're the sort of
+woman he'll always be falling in love with.'
+
+"She laughed at that, but the next moment she was serious again.  'A
+man's got to fall out of love before he falls into it again,' she
+replied.  'I want a man that'll stop there.  Besides,' she goes on, 'a
+woman isn't always young and pretty: we've got to remember that.  We want
+something else in a husband besides eyes.'
+
+"'You seem to know a lot about it,' says I.
+
+"'I've thought a lot about it,' says she.
+
+"'What sort of husband do you want?' says I.
+
+"'I want a man of honour,' says she.
+
+"That was sense.  One don't often find a girl her age talking it, but her
+life had made her older than she looked.  All I could find to say was
+that he appeared to be an honest chap, and maybe was one.
+
+"'Maybe,' says she; 'that's what I mean to find out.  And if you'll do me
+a kindness,' she adds, 'you won't mind calling me Marie Luthier for the
+future, instead of Godselle.  It was my mother's name, and I've a fancy
+for it.'
+
+"Well, there I left her to work out the thing for herself, having come to
+the conclusion she was capable of doing it; and so for another couple of
+weeks I merely watched.  There was no doubt about his being in love with
+her.  He had entered that Cafe at the beginning of the month with as good
+an opinion of himself as a man can conveniently carry without tumbling
+down and falling over it.  Before the month was out he would sit with his
+head between his hands, evidently wondering why he had been born.  I've
+seen the game played before, and I've seen it played since.  A waiter has
+plenty of opportunities if he only makes use of them; for if it comes to
+a matter of figures, I suppose there's more love-making done in a month
+under the electric light of the restaurant than the moon sees in a
+year--leastways, so far as concerns what we call the civilised world.
+I've seen men fooled, from boys without hair on their faces, to old men
+without much on their heads.  I've seen it done in a way that was pretty
+to watch, and I've seen it done in a manner that has made me feel that
+given a wig and a petticoat I could do it better myself.  But never have
+I seen it neater played than Marie played it on that young man of hers.
+One day she would greet him for all the world like a tired child that at
+last has found its mother, and the next day respond to him in a style
+calculated to give you the idea of a small-sized empress in misfortune
+compelled to tolerate the familiarities of an anarchist.  One moment she
+would throw him a pout that said as clearly as words: 'What a fool you
+are not to put your arms round me and kiss me'; and five minutes later
+chill him with a laugh that as good as told him he must be blind not to
+see that she was merely playing with him.  What happened outside the
+Cafe--for now and then she would let him meet her of a morning in the
+Tuileries and walk down to the Cafe with her, and once or twice had
+allowed him to see her part of the way home--I cannot tell you: I only
+know that before strangers it was her instinct to be reserved.  I take it
+that on such occasions his experiences were interesting; but whether they
+left him elated or depressed I doubt if he could have told you himself.
+
+"But all the time Marie herself was just going from bad to worse.  She
+had come to the Cafe a light-hearted, sweet-tempered girl; now, when she
+wasn't engaged in her play-acting--for that's all it was, I could see
+plainly enough--she would go about her work silent and miserable-looking,
+or if she spoke at all it would be to say something bitter.  Then one
+morning after a holiday she had asked for, and which I had given her
+without any questions, she came to business more like her old self than I
+had seen her since the afternoon Master Tom Sleight had appeared upon the
+scene.  All that day she went about smiling to herself; and young
+Flammard, presuming a bit too far maybe upon past favours, found himself
+sharply snubbed: it was a bit rough on him, the whole thing.
+
+"'It's come to a head,' says I to myself; 'he has explained everything,
+and has managed to satisfy her.  He's a cleverer chap than I took him
+for.'
+
+"He didn't turn up at the Cafe that day, however, at all, and she never
+said a word until closing time, when she asked me to walk part of the way
+home with her.
+
+"'Well,' I says, so soon as we had reached a quieter street, 'is the
+comedy over?'
+
+"'No,' says she, 'so far as I'm concerned it's commenced.  To tell you
+the truth, it's been a bit too serious up to now to please me.  I'm only
+just beginning to enjoy myself,' and she laughed, quite her old light-
+hearted laugh.
+
+"'You seem to be a bit more cheerful,' I says.
+
+"'I'm feeling it,' says she; 'he's not as bad as I thought.  We went to
+Versailles yesterday.'
+
+"'Pretty place, Versailles,' says I; 'paths a bit complicated if you
+don't know your way among 'em.'
+
+"'They do wind,' says she.
+
+"'And there he told you that he loved you, and explained everything?'
+
+"'You're quite right,' says she, 'that's just what happened.  And then he
+kissed me for the first and last time, and now he's on his way to
+America.'
+
+"'On his way to America?' says I, stopping still in the middle of the
+street.
+
+"'To find his wife,' she says.  'He's pretty well ashamed of himself for
+not having tried to do it before.  I gave him one or two hints how to set
+about it--he's not over smart--and I've got an idea he will discover
+her.'  She dropped her joking manner, and gave my arm a little squeeze.
+She'd have flirted with her own grandfather--that's my opinion of her.
+
+"'He was really nice,' she continues.  'I had to keep lecturing myself,
+or I'd have been sorry for him.  He told me it was his love for me that
+had shown him what a wretch he had been.  He said he knew I didn't care
+for him two straws--and there I didn't contradict him--and that he
+respected me all the more for it.  I can't explain to you how he worked
+it out, but what he meant was that I was so good myself that no one but a
+thoroughly good fellow could possibly have any chance with me, and that
+any other sort of fellow ought to be ashamed of himself for daring even
+to be in love with me, and that he couldn't rest until he had proved to
+himself that he was worthy to have loved me, and then he wasn't going to
+love me any more.'
+
+"'It's a bit complicated,' says I.  'I suppose you understood it?'
+
+"'It was perfectly plain,' says she, somewhat shortly, 'and, as I told
+him, made me really like him for the first time.'
+
+"'It didn't occur to him to ask you why you had been flirting like a
+volcano with a chap you didn't like,' says I.
+
+"'He didn't refer to it as flirtation,' says she.  'He regarded it as
+kindness to a lonely man in a strange land.'
+
+"'I think you'll be all right,' says I.  'There's all the makings of a
+good husband in him--seems to be simple-minded enough, anyhow.'
+
+"'He has a very lovable personality when you once know him,' says she.
+'All sailors are apt to be thoughtless.'
+
+"'I should try and break him of it later on,' says I.
+
+"'Besides, she was a bit of a fool herself, going away and leaving no
+address,' adds she; and having reached her turning, we said good-night to
+one another.
+
+"About a month passed after that without anything happening.  For the
+first week Marie was as merry as a kitten, but as the days went by, and
+no sign came, she grew restless and excited.  Then one morning she came
+into the Cafe twice as important as she had gone out the night before,
+and I could see by her face that her little venture was panning out
+successfully.  She waited till we had the Cafe to ourselves, which
+usually happened about mid-day, and then she took a letter out of her
+pocket and showed it me.  It was a nice respectful letter containing
+sentiments that would have done honour to a churchwarden.  Thanks to
+Marie's suggestions, for which he could never be sufficiently grateful,
+and which proved her to be as wise as she was good and beautiful, he had
+traced Mrs. Sleight, nee Mary Godselle, to Quebec.  From Quebec, on the
+death of her uncle, she had left to take a situation as waitress in a New
+York hotel, and he was now on his way there to continue his search.  The
+result he would, with Miss Marie's permission, write and inform her.  If
+he obtained happiness he would owe it all to her.  She it was who had
+shown him his duty; there was a good deal of it, but that's what it
+meant.
+
+"A week later came another letter, dated from New York this time.  Mary
+could not be discovered anywhere; her situation she had left just two
+years ago, but for what or for where nobody seemed to know.  What was to
+be done?
+
+"Mam'sel Marie sat down and wrote him by return of post, and wrote him
+somewhat sharply--in broken English.  It seemed to her he must be
+strangely lacking in intelligence.  Mary, as he knew, spoke French as
+well as she did English.  Such girls--especially such waitresses--he
+might know, were sought after on the Continent.  Very possibly there were
+agencies in New York whose business it was to offer good Continental
+engagements to such young ladies.  Even she herself had heard of one
+such--Brathwaite, in West Twenty-third Street, or maybe Twenty-fourth.
+She signed her new name, Marie Luthier, and added a P.S. to the effect
+that a right-feeling husband who couldn't find his wife would have
+written in a tone less suggestive of resignation.
+
+"That helped him considerably, that suggestion of Marie's about the agent
+Brathwaite.  A fortnight later came a third letter.  Wonderful to relate,
+his wife was actually in Paris, of all places in the world!  She had
+taken a situation in the Hotel du Louvre.  Master Tom expected to be in
+Paris almost as soon as his letter.
+
+"'I think I'll go round to the Louvre if you can spare me for quarter of
+an hour,' said Marie, 'and see the manager.'
+
+"Two days after, at one o'clock precisely, Mr. Tom Sleight walked into
+the Cafe.  He didn't look cheerful and he didn't look sad.  He had been
+to the 'Louvre'; Mary Godselle had left there about a year ago; but he
+had obtained her address in Paris, and had received a letter from her
+that very morning.  He showed it to Marie.  It was short, and not well
+written.  She would meet him in the Tuileries that evening at seven, by
+the Diana and the Nymph; he would know her by her wearing the onyx brooch
+he had given her the day before their wedding.  She mentioned it was
+onyx, in case he had forgotten.  He only stopped a few minutes, and both
+he and Marie spoke gravely and in low tones.  He left a small case in her
+hands at parting; he said he hoped she would wear it in remembrance of
+one in whose thoughts she would always remain enshrined.  I can't tell
+you what he meant; I only tell you what he said.  He also gave me a very
+handsome walking-stick with a gold handle--what for, I don't know; I take
+it he felt like that.
+
+"Marie asked to leave that evening at half-past six.  I never saw her
+looking prettier.  She called me into the office before she went.  She
+wanted my advice.  She had in one hand a beautiful opal brooch set in
+diamonds--it was what he had given her that morning--and in her other
+hand the one of onyx.
+
+"'Shall I wear them both?' asked she, 'or only the one?'  She was half
+laughing, half crying, already.
+
+"I thought for a bit.  'I should wear the onyx to-night,' I said, 'by
+itself.'"
+
+
+
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