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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Novel Notes, 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: Novel Notes
+
+
+Author: Jerome K. Jerome
+
+Release Date: March 24, 2005  [eBook #2037]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NOVEL NOTES***
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1893 Leadenhall Press Ltd. edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+
+NOVEL NOTES
+
+
+To Big-Hearted, Big-Souled, Big-Bodied friend Conan Doyle
+
+
+
+
+PROLOGUE
+
+
+Years ago, when I was very small, we lived in a great house in a long,
+straight, brown-coloured street, in the east end of London.  It was a
+noisy, crowded street in the daytime; but a silent, lonesome street at
+night, when the gas-lights, few and far between, partook of the character
+of lighthouses rather than of illuminants, and the tramp, tramp of the
+policeman on his long beat seemed to be ever drawing nearer, or fading
+away, except for brief moments when the footsteps ceased, as he paused to
+rattle a door or window, or to flash his lantern into some dark passage
+leading down towards the river.
+
+The house had many advantages, so my father would explain to friends who
+expressed surprise at his choosing such a residence, and among these was
+included in my own small morbid mind the circumstance that its back
+windows commanded an uninterrupted view of an ancient and much-peopled
+churchyard.  Often of a night would I steal from between the sheets, and
+climbing upon the high oak chest that stood before my bedroom window, sit
+peering down fearfully upon the aged gray tombstones far below, wondering
+whether the shadows that crept among them might not be ghosts--soiled
+ghosts that had lost their natural whiteness by long exposure to the
+city's smoke, and had grown dingy, like the snow that sometimes lay
+there.
+
+I persuaded myself that they were ghosts, and came, at length, to have
+quite a friendly feeling for them.  I wondered what they thought when
+they saw the fading letters of their own names upon the stones, whether
+they remembered themselves and wished they were alive again, or whether
+they were happier as they were.  But that seemed a still sadder idea.
+
+One night, as I sat there watching, I felt a hand upon my shoulder.  I
+was not frightened, because it was a soft, gentle hand that I well knew,
+so I merely laid my cheek against it.
+
+"What's mumma's naughty boy doing out of bed?  Shall I beat him?"  And
+the other hand was laid against my other cheek, and I could feel the soft
+curls mingling with my own.
+
+"Only looking at the ghosts, ma," I answered.  "There's such a lot of 'em
+down there."  Then I added, musingly, "I wonder what it feels like to be
+a ghost."
+
+My mother said nothing, but took me up in her arms, and carried me back
+to bed, and then, sitting down beside me, and holding my hand in
+hers--there was not so very much difference in the size--began to sing in
+that low, caressing voice of hers that always made me feel, for the time
+being, that I wanted to be a good boy, a song she often used to sing to
+me, and that I have never heard any one else sing since, and should not
+care to.
+
+But while she sang, something fell on my hand that caused me to sit up
+and insist on examining her eyes.  She laughed; rather a strange, broken
+little laugh, I thought, and said it was nothing, and told me to lie
+still and go to sleep.  So I wriggled down again and shut my eyes tight,
+but I could not understand what had made her cry.
+
+Poor little mother, she had a notion, founded evidently upon inborn
+belief rather than upon observation, that all children were angels, and
+that, in consequence, an altogether exceptional demand existed for them
+in a certain other place, where there are more openings for angels,
+rendering their retention in this world difficult and undependable.  My
+talk about ghosts must have made that foolishly fond heart ache with a
+vague dread that night, and for many a night onward, I fear.
+
+For some time after this I would often look up to find my mother's eyes
+fixed upon me.  Especially closely did she watch me at feeding times, and
+on these occasions, as the meal progressed, her face would acquire an
+expression of satisfaction and relief.
+
+Once, during dinner, I heard her whisper to my father (for children are
+not quite so deaf as their elders think), "He seems to eat all right."
+
+"Eat!" replied my father in the same penetrating undertone; "if he dies
+of anything, it will be of eating."
+
+So my little mother grew less troubled, and, as the days went by, saw
+reason to think that my brother angels might consent to do without me for
+yet a while longer; and I, putting away the child with his ghostly
+fancies, became, in course of time, a grown-up person, and ceased to
+believe in ghosts, together with many other things that, perhaps, it were
+better for a man if he did believe in.
+
+But the memory of that dingy graveyard, and of the shadows that dwelt
+therein, came back to me very vividly the other day, for it seemed to me
+as though I were a ghost myself, gliding through the silent streets where
+once I had passed swiftly, full of life.
+
+Diving into a long unopened drawer, I had, by chance, drawn forth a dusty
+volume of manuscript, labelled upon its torn brown paper cover, NOVEL
+NOTES.  The scent of dead days clung to its dogs'-eared pages; and, as it
+lay open before me, my memory wandered back to the summer evenings--not
+so very long ago, perhaps, if one but adds up the years, but a long, long
+while ago if one measures Time by feeling--when four friends had sat
+together making it, who would never sit together any more.  With each
+crumpled leaf I turned, the uncomfortable conviction that I was only a
+ghost, grew stronger.  The handwriting was my own, but the words were the
+words of a stranger, so that as I read I wondered to myself, saying: did
+I ever think this? did I really hope that? did I plan to do this? did I
+resolve to be such? does life, then, look so to the eyes of a young man?
+not knowing whether to smile or sigh.
+
+The book was a compilation, half diary, half memoranda.  In it lay the
+record of many musings, of many talks, and out of it--selecting what
+seemed suitable, adding, altering, and arranging--I have shaped the
+chapters that hereafter follow.
+
+That I have a right to do so I have fully satisfied my own conscience, an
+exceptionally fussy one.  Of the four joint authors, he whom I call
+"MacShaughnassy" has laid aside his title to all things beyond six feet
+of sun-scorched ground in the African veldt; while from him I have
+designated "Brown" I have borrowed but little, and that little I may
+fairly claim to have made my own by reason of the artistic merit with
+which I have embellished it.  Indeed, in thus taking a few of his bald
+ideas and shaping them into readable form, am I not doing him a kindness,
+and thereby returning good for evil?  For has he not, slipping from the
+high ambition of his youth, sunk ever downward step by step, until he has
+become a critic, and, therefore, my natural enemy?  Does he not, in the
+columns of a certain journal of large pretension but small circulation,
+call me "'Arry" (without an "H," the satirical rogue), and is not his
+contempt for the English-speaking people based chiefly upon the fact that
+some of them read my books?  But in the days of Bloomsbury lodgings and
+first-night pits we thought each other clever.
+
+From "Jephson" I hold a letter, dated from a station deep in the heart of
+the Queensland bush.  "_Do what you like with it, dear boy_," the letter
+runs, "_so long as you keep me out of it.  Thanks for your complimentary
+regrets, but I cannot share them.  I was never fitted for a literary
+career.  Lucky for me, I found it out in time.  Some poor devils don't.
+(I'm not getting at you, old man.  We read all your stuff, and like it
+very much.  Time hangs a bit heavy, you know, here, in the winter, and we
+are glad of almost anything.)  This life suits me better.  I love to feel
+my horse between my thighs, and the sun upon my skin.  And there are the
+youngsters growing up about us, and the hands to look after, and the
+stock.  I daresay it seems a very commonplace unintellectual life to you,
+but it satisfies my nature more than the writing of books could ever do.
+Besides, there are too many authors as it is.  The world is so busy
+reading and writing, it has no time left for thinking.  You'll tell me,
+of course, that books are thought, but that is only the jargon of the
+Press.  You come out here, old man, and sit as I do sometimes for days
+and nights together alone with the dumb cattle on an upheaved island of
+earth, as it were, jutting out into the deep sky, and you will know that
+they are not.  What a man thinks--really thinks--goes down into him and
+grows in silence.  What a man writes in books are the thoughts that he
+wishes to be thought to think_."
+
+Poor Jephson! he promised so well at one time.  But he always had strange
+notions.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+When, on returning home one evening, after a pipe party at my friend
+Jephson's, I informed my wife that I was going to write a novel, she
+expressed herself as pleased with the idea.  She said she had often
+wondered I had never thought of doing so before.  "Look," she added, "how
+silly all the novels are nowadays; I'm sure you could write one."
+(Ethelbertha intended to be complimentary, I am convinced; but there is a
+looseness about her mode of expression which, at times, renders her
+meaning obscure.)
+
+When, however, I told her that my friend Jephson was going to collaborate
+with me, she remarked, "Oh," in a doubtful tone; and when I further went
+on to explain to her that Selkirk Brown and Derrick MacShaughnassy were
+also going to assist, she replied, "Oh," in a tone which contained no
+trace of doubtfulness whatever, and from which it was clear that her
+interest in the matter, as a practical scheme, had entirely evaporated.
+
+I fancy that the fact of my three collaborators being all bachelors
+diminished somewhat our chances of success, in Ethelbertha's mind.
+Against bachelors, as a class, she entertains a strong prejudice.  A
+man's not having sense enough to want to marry, or, having that, not
+having wit enough to do it, argues to her thinking either weakness of
+intellect or natural depravity, the former rendering its victim unable,
+and the latter unfit, ever to become a really useful novelist.
+
+I tried to make her understand the peculiar advantages our plan
+possessed.
+
+"You see," I explained, "in the usual commonplace novel we only get, as a
+matter of fact, one person's ideas.  Now, in this novel, there will be
+four clever men all working together.  The public will thus be enabled to
+obtain the thoughts and opinions of the whole four of us, at the price
+usually asked for merely one author's views.  If the British reader knows
+his own business, he will order this book early, to avoid disappointment.
+Such an opportunity may not occur again for years."
+
+Ethelbertha agreed that this was probable.
+
+"Besides," I continued, my enthusiasm waxing stronger the more I
+reflected upon the matter, "this work is going to be a genuine bargain in
+another way also.  We are not going to put our mere everyday ideas into
+it.  We are going to crowd into this one novel all the wit and wisdom
+that the whole four of us possess, if the book will hold it.  We shall
+not write another novel after this one.  Indeed, we shall not be able to;
+we shall have nothing more to write.  This work will partake of the
+nature of an intellectual clearance sale.  We are going to put into this
+novel simply all we know."
+
+Ethelbertha shut her lips, and said something inside; and then remarked
+aloud that she supposed it would be a one volume affair.
+
+I felt hurt at the implied sneer.  I pointed out to her that there
+already existed a numerous body of specially-trained men employed to do
+nothing else but make disagreeable observations upon authors and their
+works--a duty that, so far as I could judge, they seemed capable of
+performing without any amateur assistance whatever.  And I hinted that,
+by his own fireside, a literary man looked to breathe a more sympathetic
+atmosphere.
+
+Ethelbertha replied that of course I knew what she meant.  She said that
+she was not thinking of me, and that Jephson was, no doubt, sensible
+enough (Jephson is engaged), but she did not see the object of bringing
+half the parish into it.  (Nobody suggested bringing "half the parish"
+into it.  Ethelbertha will talk so wildly.)  To suppose that Brown and
+MacShaughnassy could be of any use whatever, she considered absurd.  What
+could a couple of raw bachelors know about life and human nature?  As
+regarded MacShaughnassy in particular, she was of opinion that if we only
+wanted out of him all that _he_ knew, and could keep him to the subject,
+we ought to be able to get that into about a page.
+
+My wife's present estimate of MacShaughnassy's knowledge is the result of
+reaction.  The first time she ever saw him, she and he got on wonderfully
+well together; and when I returned to the drawing-room, after seeing him
+down to the gate, her first words were, "What a wonderful man that Mr.
+MacShaughnassy is.  He seems to know so much about everything."
+
+That describes MacShaughnassy exactly.  He does seem to know a tremendous
+lot.  He is possessed of more information than any man I ever came
+across.  Occasionally, it is correct information; but, speaking broadly,
+it is remarkable for its marvellous unreliability.  Where he gets it from
+is a secret that nobody has ever yet been able to fathom.
+
+Ethelbertha was very young when we started housekeeping.  (Our first
+butcher very nearly lost her custom, I remember, once and for ever by
+calling her "Missie," and giving her a message to take back to her
+mother.  She arrived home in tears.  She said that perhaps she wasn't fit
+to be anybody's wife, but she did not see why she should be told so by
+the tradespeople.)  She was naturally somewhat inexperienced in domestic
+affairs, and, feeling this keenly, was grateful to any one who would give
+her useful hints and advice.  When MacShaughnassy came along he seemed,
+in her eyes, a sort of glorified Mrs. Beeton.  He knew everything wanted
+to be known inside a house, from the scientific method of peeling a
+potato to the cure of spasms in cats, and Ethelbertha would sit at his
+feet, figuratively speaking, and gain enough information in one evening
+to make the house unlivable in for a month.
+
+He told her how fires ought to be laid.  He said that the way fires were
+usually laid in this country was contrary to all the laws of nature, and
+he showed her how the thing was done in Crim Tartary, or some such place,
+where the science of laying fires is alone properly understood.  He
+proved to her that an immense saving in time and labour, to say nothing
+of coals, could be effected by the adoption of the Crim Tartary system;
+and he taught it to her then and there, and she went straight downstairs
+and explained it to the girl.
+
+Amenda, our then "general," was an extremely stolid young person, and, in
+some respects, a model servant.  She never argued.  She never seemed to
+have any notions of her own whatever.  She accepted our ideas without
+comment, and carried them out with such pedantic precision and such
+evident absence of all feeling of responsibility concerning the result as
+to surround our home legislation with quite a military atmosphere.
+
+On the present occasion she stood quietly by while the MacShaughnassy
+method of fire-laying was expounded to her.  When Ethelbertha had
+finished she simply said:--
+
+"You want me to lay the fires like that?"
+
+"Yes, Amenda, we'll always have the fires laid like that in future, if
+you please."
+
+"All right, mum," replied Amenda, with perfect unconcern, and there the
+matter ended, for that evening.
+
+On coming downstairs the next morning we found the breakfast table spread
+very nicely, but there was no breakfast.  We waited.  Ten minutes went
+by--a quarter of an hour--twenty minutes.  Then Ethelbertha rang the
+bell.  In response Amenda presented herself, calm and respectful.
+
+"Do you know that the proper time for breakfast is half-past eight,
+Amenda?"
+
+"Yes'm."
+
+"And do you know that it's now nearly nine?"
+
+"Yes'm."
+
+"Well, isn't breakfast ready?"
+
+"No, mum."
+
+"Will it _ever_ be ready?"
+
+"Well, mum," replied Amenda, in a tone of genial frankness, "to tell you
+the truth, I don't think it ever will."
+
+"What's the reason?  Won't the fire light?"
+
+"Oh yes, it lights all right."
+
+"Well, then, why can't you cook the breakfast?"
+
+"Because before you can turn yourself round it goes out again."
+
+Amenda never volunteered statements.  She answered the question put to
+her and then stopped dead.  I called downstairs to her on one occasion,
+before I understood her peculiarities, to ask her if she knew the time.
+She replied, "Yes, sir," and disappeared into the back kitchen.  At the
+end of thirty seconds or so, I called down again.  "I asked you, Amenda,"
+I said reproachfully, "to tell me the time about ten minutes ago."
+
+"Oh, did you?" she called back pleasantly.  "I beg your pardon.  I
+thought you asked me if I knew it--it's half-past four."
+
+Ethelbertha inquired--to return to our fire--if she had tried lighting it
+again.
+
+"Oh yes, mum," answered the girl.  "I've tried four times."  Then she
+added cheerfully, "I'll try again if you like, mum."
+
+Amenda was the most willing servant we ever paid wages to.
+
+Ethelbertha said she would step down and light the fire herself, and told
+Amenda to follow her and watch how she did it.  I felt interested in the
+experiment, and followed also.  Ethelbertha tucked up her frock and set
+to work.  Amenda and I stood around and looked on.
+
+At the end of half an hour Ethelbertha retired from the contest, hot,
+dirty, and a trifle irritable.  The fireplace retained the same cold,
+cynical expression with which it had greeted our entrance.
+
+Then I tried.  I honestly tried my best.  I was eager and anxious to
+succeed.  For one reason, I wanted my breakfast.  For another, I wanted
+to be able to say that I had done this thing.  It seemed to me that for
+any human being to light a fire, laid as that fire was laid, would be a
+feat to be proud of.  To light a fire even under ordinary circumstances
+is not too easy a task: to do so, handicapped by MacShaughnassy's rules,
+would, I felt, be an achievement pleasant to look back upon.  My idea,
+had I succeeded, would have been to go round the neighbourhood and brag
+about it.
+
+However, I did not succeed.  I lit various other things, including the
+kitchen carpet and the cat, who would come sniffing about, but the
+materials within the stove appeared to be fire-proof.
+
+Ethelbertha and I sat down, one each side of our cheerless hearth, and
+looked at one another, and thought of MacShaughnassy, until Amenda chimed
+in on our despair with one of those practical suggestions of hers that
+she occasionally threw out for us to accept or not, as we chose.
+
+"Maybe," said she, "I'd better light it in the old way just for to-day."
+
+"Do, Amenda," said Ethelbertha, rising.  And then she added, "I think
+we'll always have them lighted in the old way, Amenda, if you please."
+
+Another time he showed us how to make coffee--according to the Arabian
+method.  Arabia must be a very untidy country if they made coffee often
+over there.  He dirtied two saucepans, three jugs, one tablecloth, one
+nutmeg-grater, one hearthrug, three cups, and himself.  This made coffee
+for two--what would have been necessary in the case of a party, one dares
+not think.
+
+That we did not like the coffee when made, MacShaughnassy attributed to
+our debased taste--the result of long indulgence in an inferior article.
+He drank both cups himself, and afterwards went home in a cab.
+
+He had an aunt in those days, I remember, a mysterious old lady, who
+lived in some secluded retreat from where she wrought incalculable
+mischief upon MacShaughnassy's friends.  What he did not know--the one or
+two things that he was _not_ an authority upon--this aunt of his knew.
+"No," he would say with engaging candour--"no, that is a thing I cannot
+advise you about myself.  But," he would add, "I'll tell you what I'll
+do.  I'll write to my aunt and ask her."  And a day or two afterwards he
+would call again, bringing his aunt's advice with him; and, if you were
+young and inexperienced, or a natural born fool, you might possibly
+follow it.
+
+She sent us a recipe on one occasion, through MacShaughnassy, for the
+extermination of blackbeetles.  We occupied a very picturesque old house;
+but, as with most picturesque old houses, its advantages were chiefly
+external.  There were many holes and cracks and crevices within its
+creaking framework.  Frogs, who had lost their way and taken the wrong
+turning, would suddenly discover themselves in the middle of our dining-
+room, apparently quite as much to their own surprise and annoyance as to
+ours.  A numerous company of rats and mice, remarkably fond of physical
+exercise, had fitted the place up as a gymnasium for themselves; and our
+kitchen, after ten o'clock, was turned into a blackbeetles' club.  They
+came up through the floor and out through the walls, and gambolled there
+in their light-hearted, reckless way till daylight.
+
+The rats and mice Amenda did not object to.  She said she liked to watch
+them.  But against the blackbeetles she was prejudiced.  Therefore, when
+my wife informed her that MacShaughnassy's aunt had given us an
+infallible recipe for their annihilation, she rejoiced.
+
+We purchased the materials, manufactured the mixture, and put it about.
+The beetles came and ate it.  They seemed to like it.  They finished it
+all up, and were evidently vexed that there was not more.  But they did
+not die.
+
+We told these facts to MacShaughnassy.  He smiled, a very grim smile, and
+said in a low tone, full of meaning, "Let them eat!"
+
+It appeared that this was one of those slow, insidious poisons.  It did
+not kill the beetle off immediately, but it undermined his constitution.
+Day by day he would sink and droop without being able to tell what was
+the matter with himself, until one morning we should enter the kitchen to
+find him lying cold and very still.
+
+So we made more stuff and laid it round each night, and the blackbeetles
+from all about the parish swarmed to it.  Each night they came in greater
+quantities.  They fetched up all their friends and relations.  Strange
+beetles--beetles from other families, with no claim on us whatever--got
+to hear about the thing, and came in hordes, and tried to rob our
+blackbeetles of it.  By the end of a week we had lured into our kitchen
+every beetle that wasn't lame for miles round.
+
+MacShaughnassy said it was a good thing.  We should clear the suburb at
+one swoop.  The beetles had now been eating this poison steadily for ten
+days, and he said that the end could not be far off.  I was glad to hear
+it, because I was beginning to find this unlimited hospitality expensive.
+It was a dear poison that we were giving them, and they were hearty
+eaters.
+
+We went downstairs to see how they were getting on.  MacShaughnassy
+thought they seemed queer, and was of opinion that they were breaking up.
+Speaking for myself, I can only say that a healthier-looking lot of
+beetles I never wish to see.
+
+One, it is true, did die that very evening.  He was detected in the act
+of trying to make off with an unfairly large portion of the poison, and
+three or four of the others set upon him savagely and killed him.
+
+But he was the only one, so far as I could ever discover, to whom
+MacShaughnassy's recipe proved fatal.  As for the others, they grew fat
+and sleek upon it.  Some of them, indeed, began to acquire quite a
+figure.  We lessened their numbers eventually by the help of some common
+oil-shop stuff.  But such vast numbers, attracted by MacShaughnassy's
+poison, had settled in the house, that to finally exterminate them now
+was hopeless.
+
+I have not heard of MacShaughnassy's aunt lately.  Possibly, one of
+MacShaughnassy's bosom friends has found out her address and has gone
+down and murdered her.  If so, I should like to thank him.
+
+I tried a little while ago to cure MacShaughnassy of his fatal passion
+for advice-giving, by repeating to him a very sad story that was told to
+me by a gentleman I met in an American railway car.  I was travelling
+from Buffalo to New York, and, during the day, it suddenly occurred to me
+that I might make the journey more interesting by leaving the cars at
+Albany and completing the distance by water.  But I did not know how the
+boats ran, and I had no guide-book with me.  I glanced about for some one
+to question.  A mild-looking, elderly gentleman sat by the next window
+reading a book, the cover of which was familiar to me.  I deemed him to
+be intelligent, and approached him.
+
+"I beg your pardon for interrupting you," I said, sitting down opposite
+to him, "but could you give me any information about the boats between
+Albany and New York?"
+
+"Well," he answered, looking up with a pleasant smile, "there are three
+lines of boats altogether.  There is the Heggarty line, but they only go
+as far as Catskill.  Then there are the Poughkeepsie boats, which go
+every other day.  Or there is what we call the canal boat."
+
+"Oh," I said.  "Well now, which would you advise me to--"
+
+He jumped to his feet with a cry, and stood glaring down at me with a
+gleam in his eyes which was positively murderous.
+
+"You villain!" he hissed in low tones of concentrated fury, "so that's
+your game, is it?  I'll give you something that you'll want advice
+about," and he whipped out a six-chambered revolver.
+
+I felt hurt.  I also felt that if the interview were prolonged I might
+feel even more hurt.  So I left him without a word, and drifted over to
+the other end of the car, where I took up a position between a stout lady
+and the door.
+
+I was still musing upon the incident, when, looking up, I observed my
+elderly friend making towards me.  I rose and laid my hand upon the door-
+knob.  He should not find me unprepared.  He smiled, reassuringly,
+however, and held out his hand.
+
+"I've been thinking," he said, "that maybe I was a little rude just now.
+I should like, if you will let me, to explain.  I think, when you have
+heard my story, you will understand, and forgive me."
+
+There was that about him which made me trust him.  We found a quiet
+corner in the smoking-car.  I had a "whiskey sour," and he prescribed for
+himself a strange thing of his own invention.  Then we lighted our
+cigars, and he talked.
+
+"Thirty years ago," said he, "I was a young man with a healthy belief in
+myself, and a desire to do good to others.  I did not imagine myself a
+genius.  I did not even consider myself exceptionally brilliant or
+talented.  But it did seem to me, and the more I noted the doings of my
+fellow-men and women, the more assured did I become of it, that I
+possessed plain, practical common sense to an unusual and remarkable
+degree.  Conscious of this, I wrote a little book, which I entitled _How
+to be Happy, Wealthy, and Wise_, and published it at my own expense.  I
+did not seek for profit.  I merely wished to be useful.
+
+"The book did not make the stir that I had anticipated.  Some two or
+three hundred copies went off, and then the sale practically ceased.
+
+"I confess that at first I was disappointed.  But after a while, I
+reflected that, if people would not take my advice, it was more their
+loss than mine, and I dismissed the matter from my mind.
+
+"One morning, about a twelvemonth afterwards, I was sitting in my study,
+when the servant entered to say that there was a man downstairs who
+wanted very much to see me.
+
+"I gave instructions that he should be sent up, and up accordingly he
+came.
+
+"He was a common man, but he had an open, intelligent countenance, and
+his manner was most respectful.  I motioned him to be seated.  He
+selected a chair, and sat down on the extreme edge of it.
+
+"'I hope you'll pard'n this intrusion, sir,' he began, speaking
+deliberately, and twirling his hat the while; 'but I've come more'n two
+hundred miles to see you, sir.'
+
+"I expressed myself as pleased, and he continued: 'They tell me, sir, as
+you're the gentleman as wrote that little book, _How to be Happy,
+Wealthy, and Wise_."
+
+He enumerated the three items slowly, dwelling lovingly on each.  I
+admitted the fact.
+
+"'Ah, that's a wonderful book, sir,' he went on.  'I ain't one of them as
+has got brains of their own--not to speak of--but I know enough to know
+them as has; and when I read that little book, I says to myself, Josiah
+Hackett (that's my name, sir), when you're in doubt don't you get addling
+that thick head o' yours, as will only tell you all wrong; you go to the
+gentleman as wrote that little book and ask him for his advice.  He is a
+kind-hearted gentleman, as any one can tell, and he'll give it you; and
+_when_ you've got it, you go straight ahead, full steam, and don't you
+stop for nothing, 'cause he'll know what's best for you, same as he knows
+what's best for everybody.  That's what I says, sir; and that's what I'm
+here for.'
+
+"He paused, and wiped his brow with a green cotton handkerchief.  I
+prayed him to proceed.
+
+"It appeared that the worthy fellow wanted to marry, but could not make
+up his mind _whom_ he wanted to marry.  He had his eye--so he expressed
+it--upon two young women, and they, he had reason to believe, regarded
+him in return with more than usual favour.  His difficulty was to decide
+which of the two--both of them excellent and deserving young
+persons--would make him the best wife.  The one, Juliana, the only
+daughter of a retired sea-captain, he described as a winsome lassie.  The
+other, Hannah, was an older and altogether more womanly girl.  She was
+the eldest of a large family.  Her father, he said, was a God-fearing
+man, and was doing well in the timber trade.  He asked me which of them I
+should advise him to marry.
+
+"I was flattered.  What man in my position would not have been?  This
+Josiah Hackett had come from afar to hear my wisdom.  He was willing--nay,
+anxious--to entrust his whole life's happiness to my discretion.  That he
+was wise in so doing, I entertained no doubt.  The choice of a wife I had
+always held to be a matter needing a calm, unbiassed judgment, such as no
+lover could possibly bring to bear upon the subject.  In such a case, I
+should not have hesitated to offer advice to the wisest of men.  To this
+poor, simple-minded fellow, I felt it would be cruel to refuse it.
+
+"He handed me photographs of both the young persons under consideration.
+I jotted down on the back of each such particulars as I deemed would
+assist me in estimating their respective fitness for the vacancy in
+question, and promised to carefully consider the problem, and write him
+in a day or two.
+
+"His gratitude was touching.  'Don't you trouble to write no letters,
+sir,' he said; 'you just stick down "Julia" or "Hannah" on a bit of
+paper, and put it in an envelope.  I shall know what it means, and that's
+the one as I shall marry.'
+
+"Then he gripped me by the hand and left me.
+
+"I gave a good deal of thought to the selection of Josiah's wife.  I
+wanted him to be happy.
+
+"Juliana was certainly very pretty.  There was a lurking playfulness
+about the corners of Juliana's mouth which conjured up the sound of
+rippling laughter.  Had I acted on impulse, I should have clasped Juliana
+in Josiah's arms.
+
+"But, I reflected, more sterling qualities than mere playfulness and
+prettiness are needed for a wife.  Hannah, though not so charming,
+clearly possessed both energy and sense--qualities highly necessary to a
+poor man's wife.  Hannah's father was a pious man, and was 'doing well'--a
+thrifty, saving man, no doubt.  He would have instilled into her lessons
+of economy and virtue; and, later on, she might possibly come in for a
+little something.  She was the eldest of a large family.  She was sure to
+have had to help her mother a good deal.  She would be experienced in
+household matters, and would understand the bringing up of children.
+
+"Julia's father, on the other hand, was a retired sea-captain.  Seafaring
+folk are generally loose sort of fish.  He had probably been in the habit
+of going about the house, using language and expressing views, the
+hearing of which could not but have exercised an injurious effect upon
+the formation of a growing girl's character.  Juliana was his only child.
+Only children generally make bad men and women.  They are allowed to have
+their own way too much.  The pretty daughter of a retired sea-captain
+would be certain to be spoilt.
+
+"Josiah, I had also to remember, was a man evidently of weak character.
+He would need management.  Now, there was something about Hannah's eye
+that eminently suggested management.
+
+"At the end of two days my mind was made up.  I wrote 'Hannah' on a slip
+of paper, and posted it.
+
+"A fortnight afterwards I received a letter from Josiah.  He thanked me
+for my advice, but added, incidentally, that he wished I could have made
+it Julia.  However, he said, he felt sure I knew best, and by the time I
+received the letter he and Hannah would be one.
+
+"That letter worried me.  I began to wonder if, after all, I had chosen
+the right girl.  Suppose Hannah was not all I thought her!  What a
+terrible thing it would be for Josiah.  What data, sufficient to reason
+upon, had I possessed?  How did I know that Hannah was not a lazy, ill-
+tempered girl, a continual thorn in the side of her poor, overworked
+mother, and a perpetual blister to her younger brothers and sisters?  How
+did I know she had been well brought up?  Her father might be a precious
+old fraud: most seemingly pious men are.  She may have learned from him
+only hypocrisy.
+
+"Then also, how did I know that Juliana's merry childishness would not
+ripen into sweet, cheerful womanliness?  Her father, for all I knew to
+the contrary, might be the model of what a retired sea-captain should be;
+with possibly a snug little sum safely invested somewhere.  And Juliana
+was his only child.  What reason had I for rejecting this fair young
+creature's love for Josiah?
+
+"I took her photo from my desk.  I seemed to detect a reproachful look in
+the big eyes.  I saw before me the scene in the little far-away home when
+the first tidings of Josiah's marriage fell like a cruel stone into the
+hitherto placid waters of her life.  I saw her kneeling by her father's
+chair, while the white-haired, bronzed old man gently stroked the golden
+head, shaking with silent sobs against his breast.  My remorse was almost
+more than I could bear.
+
+"I put her aside and took up Hannah--my chosen one.  She seemed to be
+regarding me with a smile of heartless triumph.  There began to take
+possession of me a feeling of positive dislike to Hannah.
+
+"I fought against the feeling.  I told myself it was prejudice.  But the
+more I reasoned against it the stronger it became.  I could tell that, as
+the days went by, it would grow from dislike to loathing, from loathing
+to hate.  And this was the woman I had deliberately selected as a life
+companion for Josiah!
+
+"For weeks I knew no peace of mind.  Every letter that arrived I dreaded
+to open, fearing it might be from Josiah.  At every knock I started up,
+and looked about for a hiding-place.  Every time I came across the
+heading, 'Domestic Tragedy,' in the newspapers, I broke into a cold
+perspiration.  I expected to read that Josiah and Hannah had murdered
+each other, and died cursing me.
+
+"As the time went by, however, and I heard nothing, my fears began to
+assuage, and my belief in my own intuitive good judgment to return.
+Maybe, I had done a good thing for Josiah and Hannah, and they were
+blessing me.  Three years passed peacefully away, and I was beginning to
+forget the existence of the Hacketts.
+
+"Then he came again.  I returned home from business one evening to find
+him waiting for me in the hall.  The moment I saw him I knew that my
+worst fears had fallen short of the truth.  I motioned him to follow me
+to my study.  He did so, and seated himself in the identical chair on
+which he had sat three years ago.  The change in him was remarkable; he
+looked old and careworn.  His manner was that of resigned hopelessness.
+
+"We remained for a while without speaking, he twirling his hat as at our
+first interview, I making a show of arranging papers on my desk.  At
+length, feeling that anything would be more bearable than this silence, I
+turned to him.
+
+"'Things have not been going well with you, I'm afraid, Josiah?' I said.
+
+"'No, sir,' he replied quietly; 'I can't say as they have, altogether.
+That Hannah of yours has turned out a bit of a teaser.'
+
+"There was no touch of reproach in his tones.  He simply stated a
+melancholy fact.
+
+"'But she is a good wife to you in other ways,' I urged.  'She has her
+faults, of course.  We all have.  But she is energetic.  Come now, you
+will admit she's energetic.'
+
+"I owed it to myself to find some good in Hannah, and this was the only
+thing I could think of at that moment.
+
+"'Oh yes, she's that,' he assented.  'A little too much so for our sized
+house, I sometimes think.'
+
+"'You see,' he went on, 'she's a bit cornery in her temper, Hannah is;
+and then her mother's a bit trying, at times.'
+
+"'Her mother!' I exclaimed, 'but what's _she_ got to do with you?'
+
+"'Well, you see, sir,' he answered, 'she's living with us now--ever since
+the old man went off.'
+
+"'Hannah's father!  Is he dead, then?'
+
+"'Well, not exactly, sir,' he replied.  'He ran off about a twelvemonth
+ago with one of the young women who used to teach in the Sunday School,
+and joined the Mormons.  It came as a great surprise to every one.'
+
+"I groaned.  'And his business,' I inquired--'the timber business, who
+carries that on?'
+
+"'Oh, that!' answered Josiah.  'Oh, that had to be sold to pay his
+debts--leastways, to go towards 'em.'
+
+"I remarked what a terrible thing it was for his family.  I supposed the
+home was broken up, and they were all scattered.
+
+"'No, sir,' he replied simply, 'they ain't scattered much.  They're all
+living with us.'
+
+"'But there,' he continued, seeing the look upon my face; 'of course, all
+this has nothing to do with you sir.  You've got troubles of your own, I
+daresay, sir.  I didn't come here to worry you with mine.  That would be
+a poor return for all your kindness to me.'
+
+"'What has become of Julia?' I asked.  I did not feel I wanted to
+question him any more about his own affairs.
+
+"A smile broke the settled melancholy of his features.  'Ah,' he said, in
+a more cheerful tone than he had hitherto employed, 'it does one good to
+think about _her_, it does.  She's married to a friend of mine now, young
+Sam Jessop.  I slips out and gives 'em a call now and then, when Hannah
+ain't round.  Lord, it's like getting a glimpse of heaven to look into
+their little home.  He often chaffs me about it, Sam does.  "Well, you
+_was_ a sawny-headed chunk, Josiah, _you_ was," he often says to me.
+We're old chums, you know, sir, Sam and me, so he don't mind joking a bit
+like.'
+
+"Then the smile died away, and he added with a sigh, 'Yes, I've often
+thought since, sir, how jolly it would have been if you could have seen
+your way to making it Juliana.'
+
+"I felt I must get him back to Hannah at any cost.  I said, 'I suppose
+you and your wife are still living in the old place?'
+
+"'Yes,' he replied, 'if you can call it living.  It's a hard struggle
+with so many of us.'
+
+"He said he did not know how he should have managed if it had not been
+for the help of Julia's father.  He said the captain had behaved more
+like an angel than anything else he knew of.
+
+"'I don't say as he's one of your clever sort, you know, sir,' he
+explained.  'Not the man as one would go to for advice, like one would to
+you, sir; but he's a good sort for all that.'
+
+"'And that reminds me, sir,' he went on, 'of what I've come here about.
+You'll think it very bold of me to ask, sir, but--'
+
+"I interrupted him.  'Josiah,' I said, 'I admit that I am much to blame
+for what has come upon you.  You asked me for my advice, and I gave it
+you.  Which of us was the bigger idiot, we will not discuss.  The point
+is that I did give it, and I am not a man to shirk my responsibilities.
+What, in reason, you ask, and I can grant, I will give you.'
+
+"He was overcome with gratitude.  'I knew it, sir,' he said.  'I knew you
+would not refuse me.  I said so to Hannah.  I said, "I will go to that
+gentleman and ask him.  I will go to him and ask him for his advice."'
+
+"I said, 'His what?'
+
+"'His advice,' repeated Josiah, apparently surprised at my tone, 'on a
+little matter as I can't quite make up my mind about.'
+
+"I thought at first he was trying to be sarcastic, but he wasn't.  That
+man sat there, and wrestled with me for my advice as to whether he should
+invest a thousand dollars which Julia's father had offered to lend him,
+in the purchase of a laundry business or a bar.  He hadn't had enough of
+it (my advice, I mean); he wanted it again, and he spun me reasons why I
+should give it him.  The choice of a wife was a different thing
+altogether, he argued.  Perhaps he ought _not_ to have asked me for my
+opinion as to that.  But advice as to which of two trades a man would do
+best to select, surely any business man could give.  He said he had just
+been reading again my little book, _How to be Happy_, etc., and if the
+gentleman who wrote that could not decide between the respective merits
+of one particular laundry and one particular bar, both situate in the
+same city, well, then, all he had got to say was that knowledge and
+wisdom were clearly of no practical use in this world whatever.
+
+"Well, it did seem a simple thing to advise a man about.  Surely as to a
+matter of this kind, I, a professed business man, must be able to form a
+sounder judgment than this poor pumpkin-headed lamb.  It would be
+heartless to refuse to help him.  I promised to look into the matter, and
+let him know what I thought.
+
+"He rose and shook me by the hand.  He said he would not try to thank me;
+words would only seem weak.  He dashed away a tear and went out.
+
+"I brought an amount of thought to bear upon this thousand-dollar
+investment sufficient to have floated a bank.  I did not mean to make
+another Hannah job, if I could help it.  I studied the papers Josiah had
+left with me, but did not attempt to form any opinion from them.  I went
+down quietly to Josiah's city, and inspected both businesses on the spot.
+I instituted secret but searching inquiries in the neighbourhood.  I
+disguised myself as a simple-minded young man who had come into a little
+money, and wormed myself into the confidence of the servants.  I
+interviewed half the town upon the pretence that I was writing the
+commercial history of New England, and should like some particulars of
+their career, and I invariably ended my examination by asking them which
+was their favourite bar, and where they got their washing done.  I stayed
+a fortnight in the town.  Most of my spare time I spent at the bar.  In
+my leisure moments I dirtied my clothes so that they might be washed at
+the laundry.
+
+"As the result of my investigations I discovered that, so far as the two
+businesses themselves were concerned, there was not a pin to choose
+between them.  It became merely a question of which particular trade
+would best suit the Hacketts.
+
+"I reflected.  The keeper of a bar was exposed to much temptation.  A
+weak-minded man, mingling continually in the company of topers, might
+possibly end by giving way to drink.  Now, Josiah was an exceptionally
+weak-minded man.  It had also to be borne in mind that he had a shrewish
+wife, and that her whole family had come to live with him.  Clearly, to
+place Josiah in a position of easy access to unlimited liquor would be
+madness.
+
+"About a laundry, on the other hand, there was something soothing.  The
+working of a laundry needed many hands.  Hannah's relatives might be used
+up in a laundry, and made to earn their own living.  Hannah might expend
+her energy in flat-ironing, and Josiah could turn the mangle.  The idea
+conjured up quite a pleasant domestic picture.  I recommended the
+laundry.
+
+"On the following Monday, Josiah wrote to say that he had bought the
+laundry.  On Tuesday I read in the _Commercial Intelligence_ that one of
+the most remarkable features of the time was the marvellous rise taking
+place all over New England in the value of hotel and bar property.  On
+Thursday, in the list of failures, I came across no less than four
+laundry proprietors; and the paper added, in explanation, that the
+American washing industry, owing to the rapid growth of Chinese
+competition, was practically on its last legs.  I went out and got drunk.
+
+"My life became a curse to me.  All day long I thought of Josiah.  All
+night I dreamed of him.  Suppose that, not content with being the cause
+of his domestic misery, I had now deprived him of the means of earning a
+livelihood, and had rendered useless the generosity of that good old sea-
+captain.  I began to appear to myself as a malignant fiend, ever
+following this simple but worthy man to work evil upon him.
+
+"Time passed away, however; I heard nothing from or of him, and my burden
+at last fell from me.
+
+"Then at the end of about five years he came again.
+
+"He came behind me as I was opening the door with my latch-key, and laid
+an unsteady hand upon my arm.  It was a dark night, but a gas-lamp showed
+me his face.  I recognised it in spite of the red blotches and the bleary
+film that hid the eyes.  I caught him roughly by the arm, and hurried him
+inside and up into my study.
+
+"'Sit down,' I hissed, 'and tell me the worst first.'
+
+"He was about to select his favourite chair.  I felt that if I saw him
+and that particular chair in association for the third time, I should do
+something terrible to both.  I snatched it away from him, and he sat down
+heavily on the floor, and burst into tears.  I let him remain there, and,
+thickly, between hiccoughs, he told his tale.
+
+"The laundry had gone from bad to worse.  A new railway had come to the
+town, altering its whole topography.  The business and residential
+portion had gradually shifted northward.  The spot where the bar--the
+particular one which I had rejected for the laundry--had formerly stood
+was now the commercial centre of the city.  The man who had purchased it
+in place of Josiah had sold out and made a fortune.  The southern area
+(where the laundry was situate) was, it had been discovered, built upon a
+swamp, and was in a highly unsanitary condition.  Careful housewives
+naturally objected to sending their washing into such a neighbourhood.
+
+"Other troubles had also come.  The baby--Josiah's pet, the one bright
+thing in his life--had fallen into the copper and been boiled.  Hannah's
+mother had been crushed in the mangle, and was now a helpless cripple,
+who had to be waited on day and night.
+
+"Under these accumulated misfortunes Josiah had sought consolation in
+drink, and had become a hopeless sot.  He felt his degradation keenly,
+and wept copiously.  He said he thought that in a cheerful place, such as
+a bar, he might have been strong and brave; but that there was something
+about the everlasting smell of damp clothes and suds, that seemed to sap
+his manhood.
+
+"I asked him what the captain had said to it all.  He burst into fresh
+tears, and replied that the captain was no more.  That, he added,
+reminded him of what he had come about.  The good-hearted old fellow had
+bequeathed him five thousand dollars.  He wanted my advice as to how to
+invest it.
+
+"My first impulse was to kill him on the spot.  I wish now that I had.  I
+restrained myself, however, and offered him the alternative of being
+thrown from the window or of leaving by the door without another word.
+
+"He answered that he was quite prepared to go by the window if I would
+first tell him whether to put his money in the Terra del Fuego Nitrate
+Company, Limited, or in the Union Pacific Bank.  Life had no further
+interest for him.  All he cared for was to feel that this little nest-egg
+was safely laid by for the benefit of his beloved ones after he was gone.
+
+"He pressed me to tell him what I thought of nitrates.  I replied that I
+declined to say anything whatever on the subject.  He assumed from my
+answer that I did not think much of nitrates, and announced his intention
+of investing the money, in consequence, in the Union Pacific Bank.
+
+"I told him by all means to do so, if he liked.
+
+"He paused, and seemed to be puzzling it out.  Then he smiled knowingly,
+and said he thought he understood what I meant.  It was very kind of me.
+He should put every dollar he possessed in the Terra del Fuego Nitrate
+Company.
+
+"He rose (with difficulty) to go.  I stopped him.  I knew, as certainly
+as I knew the sun would rise the next morning, that whichever company I
+advised him, or he persisted in thinking I had advised him (which was the
+same thing), to invest in, would, sooner or later, come to smash.  My
+grandmother had all her little fortune in the Terra del Fuego Nitrate
+Company.  I could not see her brought to penury in her old age.  As for
+Josiah, it could make no difference to him whatever.  He would lose his
+money in any event.  I advised him to invest in Union Pacific Bank
+Shares.  He went and did it.
+
+"The Union Pacific Bank held out for eighteen months.  Then it began to
+totter.  The financial world stood bewildered.  It had always been
+reckoned one of the safest banks in the country.  People asked what could
+be the cause.  I knew well enough, but I did not tell.
+
+"The Bank made a gallant fight, but the hand of fate was upon it.  At the
+end of another nine months the crash came.
+
+"(Nitrates, it need hardly be said, had all this time been going up by
+leaps and bounds.  My grandmother died worth a million dollars, and left
+the whole of it to a charity.  Had she known how I had saved her from
+ruin, she might have been more grateful.)
+
+"A few days after the failure of the Bank, Josiah arrived on my doorstep;
+and, this time, he brought his families with him.  There were sixteen of
+them in all.
+
+"What was I to do?  I had brought these people step by step to the verge
+of starvation.  I had laid waste alike their happiness and their
+prospects in life.  The least amends I could make was to see that at all
+events they did not want for the necessities of existence.
+
+"That was seventeen years ago.  I am still seeing that they do not want
+for the necessities of existence; and my conscience is growing easier by
+noticing that they seem contented with their lot.  There are twenty-two
+of them now, and we have hopes of another in the spring.
+
+"That is my story," he said.  "Perhaps you will now understand my sudden
+emotion when you asked for my advice.  As a matter of fact, I do not give
+advice now on any subject."
+
+* * * * *
+
+I told this tale to MacShaughnassy.  He agreed with me that it was
+instructive, and said he should remember it.  He said he should remember
+it so as to tell it to some fellows that he knew, to whom he thought the
+lesson should prove useful.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+I can't honestly say that we made much progress at our first meeting.  It
+was Brown's fault.  He would begin by telling us a story about a dog.  It
+was the old, old story of the dog who had been in the habit of going
+every morning to a certain baker's shop with a penny in his mouth, in
+exchange for which he always received a penny bun.  One day, the baker,
+thinking he would not know the difference, tried to palm off upon the
+poor animal a ha'penny bun, whereupon the dog walked straight outside and
+fetched in a policeman.  Brown had heard this chestnut for the first time
+that afternoon, and was full of it.  It is always a mystery to me where
+Brown has been for the last hundred years.  He stops you in the street
+with, "Oh, I must tell you!--such a capital story!"  And he thereupon
+proceeds to relate to you, with much spirit and gusto, one of Noah's best
+known jokes, or some story that Romulus must have originally told to
+Remus.  One of these days somebody will tell him the history of Adam and
+Eve, and he will think he has got hold of a new plot, and will work it up
+into a novel.
+
+He gives forth these hoary antiquities as personal reminiscences of his
+own, or, at furthest, as episodes in the life of his second cousin.  There
+are certain strange and moving catastrophes that would seem either to
+have occurred to, or to have been witnessed by, nearly every one you
+meet.  I never came across a man yet who had not seen some other man
+jerked off the top of an omnibus into a mud-cart.  Half London must, at
+one time or another, have been jerked off omnibuses into mud-carts, and
+have been fished out at the end of a shovel.
+
+Then there is the tale of the lady whose husband is taken suddenly ill
+one night at an hotel.  She rushes downstairs, and prepares a stiff
+mustard plaster to put on him, and runs up with it again.  In her
+excitement, however, she charges into the wrong room, and, rolling down
+the bedclothes, presses it lovingly upon the wrong man.  I have heard
+that story so often that I am quite nervous about going to bed in an
+hotel now.  Each man who has told it me has invariably slept in the room
+next door to that of the victim, and has been awakened by the man's yell
+as the plaster came down upon him.  That is how he (the story-teller)
+came to know all about it.
+
+Brown wanted us to believe that this prehistoric animal he had been
+telling us about had belonged to his brother-in-law, and was hurt when
+Jephson murmured, _sotto voce_, that that made the twenty-eighth man he
+had met whose brother-in-law had owned that dog--to say nothing of the
+hundred and seventeen who had owned it themselves.
+
+We tried to get to work afterwards, but Brown had unsettled us for the
+evening.  It is a wicked thing to start dog stories among a party of
+average sinful men.  Let one man tell a dog story, and every other man in
+the room feels he wants to tell a bigger one.
+
+There is a story going--I cannot vouch for its truth, it was told me by a
+judge--of a man who lay dying.  The pastor of the parish, a good and
+pious man, came to sit with him, and, thinking to cheer him up, told him
+an anecdote about a dog.  When the pastor had finished, the sick man sat
+up, and said, "I know a better story than that.  I had a dog once, a big,
+brown, lop-sided--"
+
+The effort had proved too much for his strength.  He fell back upon the
+pillows, and the doctor, stepping forward, saw that it was a question
+only of minutes.
+
+The good old pastor rose, and took the poor fellow's hand in his, and
+pressed it.  "We shall meet again," he gently said.
+
+The sick man turned towards him with a consoled and grateful look.
+
+"I'm glad to hear you say that," he feebly murmured.  "Remind me about
+that dog."
+
+Then he passed peacefully away, with a sweet smile upon his pale lips.
+
+Brown, who had had his dog story and was satisfied, wanted us to settle
+our heroine; but the rest of us did not feel equal to settling anybody
+just then.  We were thinking of all the true dog stories we had ever
+heard, and wondering which was the one least likely to be generally
+disbelieved.
+
+MacShaughnassy, in particular, was growing every moment more restless and
+moody.  Brown concluded a long discourse--to which nobody had listened--by
+remarking with some pride, "What more can you want?  The plot has never
+been used before, and the characters are entirely original!"
+
+Then MacShaughnassy gave way.  "Talking of plots," he said, hitching his
+chair a little nearer the table, "that puts me in mind.  Did I ever tell
+you about that dog we had when we lived in Norwood?"
+
+"It's not that one about the bull-dog, is it?" queried Jephson anxiously.
+
+"Well, it was a bull-dog," admitted MacShaughnassy, "but I don't think
+I've ever told it you before."
+
+We knew, by experience, that to argue the matter would only prolong the
+torture, so we let him go on.
+
+"A great many burglaries had lately taken place in our neighbourhood," he
+began, "and the pater came to the conclusion that it was time he laid
+down a dog.  He thought a bull-dog would be the best for his purpose, and
+he purchased the most savage and murderous-looking specimen that he could
+find.
+
+"My mother was alarmed when she saw the dog.  'Surely you're not going to
+let that brute loose about the house!' she exclaimed.  'He'll kill
+somebody.  I can see it in his face.'
+
+"'I want him to kill somebody,' replied my father; 'I want him to kill
+burglars.'
+
+"'I don't like to hear you talk like that, Thomas,' answered the mater;
+'it's not like you.  We've a right to protect our property, but we've no
+right to take a fellow human creature's life.'
+
+"'Our fellow human creatures will be all right--so long as they don't
+come into our kitchen when they've no business there,' retorted my
+father, somewhat testily.  'I'm going to fix up this dog in the scullery,
+and if a burglar comes fooling around--well, that's _his_ affair.'
+
+"The old folks quarrelled on and off for about a month over this dog.  The
+dad thought the mater absurdly sentimental, and the mater thought the dad
+unnecessarily vindictive.  Meanwhile the dog grew more ferocious-looking
+every day.
+
+"One night my mother woke my father up with: 'Thomas, there's a burglar
+downstairs, I'm positive.  I distinctly heard the kitchen door open.'
+
+"'Oh, well, the dog's got him by now, then,' murmured my father, who had
+heard nothing, and was sleepy.
+
+"'Thomas,' replied my mother severely, 'I'm not going to lie here while a
+fellow-creature is being murdered by a savage beast.  If you won't go
+down and save that man's life, I will.'
+
+"'Oh, bother,' said my father, preparing to get up.  'You're always
+fancying you hear noises.  I believe that's all you women come to bed
+for--to sit up and listen for burglars.'  Just to satisfy her, however,
+he pulled on his trousers and socks, and went down.
+
+"Well, sure enough, my mother was right, this time.  There _was_ a
+burglar in the house.  The pantry window stood open, and a light was
+shining in the kitchen.  My father crept softly forward, and peeped
+through the partly open door.  There sat the burglar, eating cold beef
+and pickles, and there, beside him, on the floor, gazing up into his face
+with a blood-curdling smile of affection, sat that idiot of a dog,
+wagging his tail.
+
+"My father was so taken aback that he forgot to keep silent.
+
+"'Well, I'm--,' and he used a word that I should not care to repeat to
+you fellows.
+
+"The burglar, hearing him, made a dash, and got clear off by the window;
+and the dog seemed vexed with my father for having driven him away.
+
+"Next morning we took the dog back to the trainer from whom we had bought
+it.
+
+"'What do you think I wanted this dog for?' asked my father, trying to
+speak calmly.
+
+"'Well,' replied the trainer, 'you said you wanted a good house dog.'
+
+"'Exactly so,' answered the dad.  'I didn't ask for a burglar's
+companion, did I?  I didn't say I wanted a dog who'd chum on with a
+burglar the first time he ever came to the house, and sit with him while
+he had supper, in case he might feel lonesome, did I?'  And my father
+recounted the incidents of the previous night.
+
+"The man agreed that there was cause for complaint.  'I'll tell you what
+it is, sir,' he said.  'It was my boy Jim as trained this 'ere dawg, and
+I guess the young beggar's taught 'im more about tackling rats than
+burglars.  You leave 'im with me for a week, sir; I'll put that all
+right.'
+
+"We did so, and at the end of the time the trainer brought him back
+again.
+
+"'You'll find 'im game enough now, sir,' said the man.  ''E ain't what I
+call an intellectual dawg, but I think I've knocked the right idea into
+'im.'
+
+"My father thought he'd like to test the matter, so we hired a man for a
+shilling to break in through the kitchen window while the trainer held
+the dog by a chain.  The dog remained perfectly quiet until the man was
+fairly inside.  Then he made one savage spring at him, and if the chain
+had not been stout the fellow would have earned his shilling dearly.
+
+"The dad was satisfied now that he could go to bed in peace; and the
+mater's alarm for the safety of the local burglars was proportionately
+increased.
+
+"Months passed uneventfully by, and then another burglar sampled our
+house.  This time there could be no doubt that the dog was doing
+something for his living.  The din in the basement was terrific.  The
+house shook with the concussion of falling bodies.
+
+"My father snatched up his revolver and rushed downstairs, and I followed
+him.  The kitchen was in confusion.  Tables and chairs were overturned,
+and on the floor lay a man gurgling for help.  The dog was standing over
+him, choking him.
+
+"The pater held his revolver to the man's ear, while I, by superhuman
+effort, dragged our preserver away, and chained him up to the sink, after
+which I lit the gas.
+
+"Then we perceived that the gentleman on the floor was a police
+constable.
+
+"'Good heavens!' exclaimed my father, dropping the revolver, 'however did
+you come here?'
+
+"''Ow did _I_ come 'ere?' retorted the man, sitting up and speaking in a
+tone of bitter, but not unnatural, indignation.  'Why, in the course of
+my dooty, that's 'ow _I_ come 'ere.  I see a burglar getting in through
+the window, so I just follows and slips in after 'im.'
+
+"'Did you catch him?' asked my father.
+
+"'Did I catch 'im!' almost shrieked the man.  ''Ow could I catch 'im with
+that blasted dog of yours 'olding me down by the throat, while 'e lights
+'is pipe and walks out by the back door?'
+
+"The dog was for sale the next day.  The mater, who had grown to like
+him, because he let the baby pull his tail, wanted us to keep him.  The
+mistake, she said, was not the animal's fault.  Two men broke into the
+house almost at the same time.  The dog could not go for both of them.  He
+did his best, and went for one.  That his selection should have fallen
+upon the policeman instead of upon the burglar was unfortunate.  But
+still it was a thing that might have happened to any dog.
+
+"My father, however, had become prejudiced against the poor creature, and
+that same week he inserted an advertisement in _The Field_, in which the
+animal was recommended as an investment likely to prove useful to any
+enterprising member of the criminal classes."
+
+MacShaughnassy having had his innings, Jephson took a turn, and told us a
+pathetic story about an unfortunate mongrel that was run over in the
+Strand one day and its leg broken.  A medical student, who was passing at
+the time, picked it up and carried it to the Charing Cross Hospital,
+where its leg was set, and where it was kept and tended until it was
+quite itself again, when it was sent home.
+
+The poor thing had quite understood what was being done for it, and had
+been the most grateful patient they had ever had in the hospital.  The
+whole staff were quite sorry when it left.
+
+One morning, a week or two later, the house-surgeon, looking out of the
+window, saw the dog coming down the street.  When it came near he noticed
+that it had a penny in its mouth.  A cat's-meat barrow was standing by
+the kerb, and for a moment, as he passed it, the dog hesitated.
+
+But his nobler nature asserted itself, and, walking straight up to the
+hospital railings, and raising himself upon his hind legs, he dropped his
+penny into the contribution box.
+
+MacShaughnassy was much affected by this story.  He said it showed such a
+beautiful trait in the dog's character.  The animal was a poor outcast,
+vagrant thing, that had perhaps never possessed a penny before in all its
+life, and might never have another.  He said that dog's penny seemed to
+him to be a greater gift than the biggest cheque that the wealthiest
+patron ever signed.
+
+The other three were very eager now to get to work on the novel, but I
+did not quite see the fairness of this.  I had one or two dog stories of
+my own.
+
+I knew a black-and-tan terrier years ago.  He lodged in the same house
+with me.  He did not belong to any one.  He had discharged his owner (if,
+indeed, he had ever permitted himself to possess one, which is doubtful,
+having regard to his aggressively independent character), and was now
+running himself entirely on his own account.  He appropriated the front
+hall for his sleeping-apartment, and took his meals with the other
+lodgers--whenever they happened to be having meals.
+
+At five o'clock he would take an early morning snack with young Hollis,
+an engineer's pupil, who had to get up at half-past four and make his own
+coffee, so as to be down at the works by six.  At eight-thirty he would
+breakfast in a more sensible fashion with Mr. Blair, on the first floor,
+and on occasions would join Jack Gadbut, who was a late riser, in a
+devilled kidney at eleven.
+
+From then till about five, when I generally had a cup of tea and a chop,
+he regularly disappeared.  Where he went and what he did between those
+hours nobody ever knew.  Gadbut swore that twice he had met him coming
+out of a stockbroker's office in Threadneedle Street, and, improbable
+though the statement at first appeared, some colour of credibility began
+to attach to it when we reflected upon the dog's inordinate passion for
+acquiring and hoarding coppers.
+
+This craving of his for wealth was really quite remarkable.  He was an
+elderly dog, with a great sense of his own dignity; yet, on the promise
+of a penny, I have seen him run round after his own tail until he didn't
+know one end of himself from the other.
+
+He used to teach himself tricks, and go from room to room in the evening,
+performing them, and when he had completed his programme he would sit up
+and beg.  All the fellows used to humour him.  He must have made pounds
+in the course of the year.
+
+Once, just outside our door, I saw him standing in a crowd, watching a
+performing poodle attached to a hurdy-gurdy.  The poodle stood on his
+head, and then, with his hind legs in the air, walked round on his front
+paws.  The people laughed very much, and, when afterwards he came amongst
+them with his wooden saucer in his mouth, they gave freely.
+
+Our dog came in and immediately commenced to study.  In three days _he_
+could stand on his head and walk round on his front legs, and the first
+evening he did so he made sixpence.  It must have been terribly hard work
+for him at his age, and subject to rheumatism as he was; but he would do
+anything for money.  I believe he would have sold himself to the devil
+for eightpence down.
+
+He knew the value of money.  If you held out to him a penny in one hand
+and a threepenny-bit in the other, he would snatch at the threepence, and
+then break his heart because he could not get the penny in as well.  You
+might safely have left him in the room with a leg of mutton, but it would
+not have been wise to leave your purse about.
+
+Now and then he spent a little, but not often.  He was desperately fond
+of sponge-cakes, and occasionally, when he had had a good week, he would
+indulge himself to the extent of one or two.  But he hated paying for
+them, and always made a frantic and frequently successful effort to get
+off with the cake and the penny also.  His plan of operations was simple.
+He would walk into the shop with his penny in his mouth, well displayed,
+and a sweet and lamblike expression in his eyes.  Taking his stand as
+near to the cakes as he could get, and fixing his eyes affectionately
+upon them, he would begin to whine, and the shopkeeper, thinking he was
+dealing with an honest dog, would throw him one.
+
+To get the cake he was obliged, of course, to drop the penny, and then
+began a struggle between him and the shopkeeper for the possession of the
+coin.  The man would try to pick it up.  The dog would put his foot upon
+it, and growl savagely.  If he could finish the cake before the contest
+was over, he would snap up the penny and bolt.  I have known him to come
+home gorged with sponge-cakes, the original penny still in his mouth.
+
+So notorious throughout the neighbourhood did this dishonest practice of
+his become, that, after a time, the majority of the local tradespeople
+refused to serve him at all.  Only the exceptionally quick and
+able-bodied would attempt to do business with him.
+
+Then he took his custom further afield, into districts where his
+reputation had not yet penetrated.  And he would pick out shops kept by
+nervous females or rheumatic old men.
+
+They say that the love of money is the root of all evil.  It seemed to
+have robbed him of every shred of principle.
+
+It robbed him of his life in the end, and that came about in this way.  He
+had been performing one evening in Gadbut's room, where a few of us were
+sitting smoking and talking; and young Hollis, being in a generous mood,
+had thrown him, as he thought, a sixpence.  The dog grabbed it, and
+retired under the sofa.  This was an odd thing for him to do, and we
+commented upon it.  Suddenly a thought occurred to Hollis, and he took
+out his money and began counting it.
+
+"By Jove," he exclaimed, "I've given that little beast
+half-a-sovereign--here, Tiny!"
+
+But Tiny only backed further underneath the sofa, and no mere verbal
+invitation would induce him to stir.  So we adopted a more pressing plan,
+and coaxed him out by the scruff of his neck.
+
+He came, an inch at a time, growling viciously, and holding Hollis's half-
+sovereign tight between his teeth.  We tried sweet reasonableness at
+first.  We offered him a sixpence in exchange; he looked insulted, and
+evidently considered the proposal as tantamount to our calling him a
+fool.  We made it a shilling, then half-a-crown--he seemed only bored by
+our persistence.
+
+"I don't think you'll ever see this half-sovereign again, Hollis," said
+Gadbut, laughing.  We all, with the exception of young Hollis, thought
+the affair a very good joke.  He, on the contrary, seemed annoyed, and,
+taking the dog from Gadbut, made an attempt to pull the coin out of its
+mouth.
+
+Tiny, true to his life-long principle of never parting if he could
+possibly help it, held on like grim death, until, feeling that his little
+earnings were slowly but surely going from him, he made one final
+desperate snatch, and swallowed the money.  It stuck in his throat, and
+he began to choke.
+
+Then we became seriously alarmed for the dog.  He was an amusing chap,
+and we did not want any accident to happen to him.  Hollis rushed into
+his room and procured a long pair of pincers, and the rest of us held the
+little miser while Hollis tried to relieve him of the cause of his
+suffering.
+
+But poor Tiny did not understand our intentions.  He still thought we
+were seeking to rob him of his night's takings, and resisted vehemently.
+His struggles fixed the coin firmer, and, in spite of our efforts, he
+died--one more victim, among many, to the fierce fever for gold.
+
+* * * * *
+
+I dreamt a very curious dream about riches once, that made a great
+impression upon me.  I thought that I and a friend--a very dear
+friend--were living together in a strange old house.  I don't think
+anybody else dwelt in the house but just we two.  One day, wandering
+about this strange old rambling place, I discovered the hidden door of a
+secret room, and in this room were many iron-bound chests, and when I
+raised the heavy lids I saw that each chest was full of gold.
+
+And, when I saw this, I stole out softly and closed the hidden door, and
+drew the worn tapestries in front of it again, and crept back along the
+dim corridor, looking behind me, fearfully.
+
+And the friend that I had loved came towards me, and we walked together
+with our hands clasped.  But I hated him.
+
+And all day long I kept beside him, or followed him unseen, lest by
+chance he should learn the secret of that hidden door; and at night I lay
+awake watching him.
+
+But one night I sleep, and, when I open my eyes, he is no longer near me.
+I run swiftly up the narrow stairs and along the silent corridor.  The
+tapestry is drawn aside, and the hidden door stands open, and in the room
+beyond the friend that I loved is kneeling before an open chest, and the
+glint of the gold is in my eyes.
+
+His back is towards me, and I crawl forward inch by inch.  I have a knife
+in my hand, with a strong, curved blade; and when I am near enough I kill
+him as he kneels there.
+
+His body falls against the door, and it shuts to with a clang, and I try
+to open it, and cannot.  I beat my hands against its iron nails, and
+scream, and the dead man grins at me.  The light streams in through the
+chink beneath the massive door, and fades, and comes again, and fades
+again, and I gnaw at the oaken lids of the iron-bound chests, for the
+madness of hunger is climbing into my brain.
+
+Then I awake, and find that I really am hungry, and remember that in
+consequence of a headache I did not eat any dinner.  So I slip on a few
+clothes, and go down to the kitchen on a foraging expedition.
+
+It is said that dreams are momentary conglomerations of thought, centring
+round the incident that awakens us, and, as with most scientific facts,
+this is occasionally true.  There is one dream that, with slight
+variations, is continually recurring to me.  Over and over again I dream
+that I am suddenly called upon to act an important part in some piece at
+the Lyceum.  That poor Mr. Irving should invariably be the victim seems
+unfair, but really it is entirely his own fault.  It is he who persuades
+and urges me.  I myself would much prefer to remain quietly in bed, and I
+tell him so.  But he insists on my getting up at once and coming down to
+the theatre.  I explain to him that I can't act a bit.  He seems to
+consider this unimportant, and says, "Oh, that will be all right."  We
+argue for a while, but he makes the matter quite a personal one, and to
+oblige him and get him out of the bedroom I consent, though much against
+my own judgment.  I generally dress the character in my nightshirt,
+though on one occasion, for Banquo, I wore pyjamas, and I never remember
+a single word of what I ought to say.  How I get through I do not know.
+Irving comes up afterwards and congratulates me, but whether upon the
+brilliancy of my performance, or upon my luck in getting off the stage
+before a brickbat is thrown at me, I cannot say.
+
+Whenever I dream this incident I invariably wake up to find that the
+bedclothes are on the floor, and that I am shivering with cold; and it is
+this shivering, I suppose, that causes me to dream I am wandering about
+the Lyceum stage in nothing but my nightshirt.  But still I do not
+understand why it should always be the Lyceum.
+
+Another dream which I fancy I have dreamt more than once--or, if not, I
+have dreamt that I dreamt it before, a thing one sometimes does--is one
+in which I am walking down a very wide and very long road in the East End
+of London.  It is a curious road to find there.  Omnibuses and trams pass
+up and down, and it is crowded with stalls and barrows, beside which men
+in greasy caps stand shouting; yet on each side it is bordered by a strip
+of tropical forest.  The road, in fact, combines the advantages of Kew
+and Whitechapel.
+
+Some one is with me, but I cannot see him, and we walk through the
+forest, pushing our way among the tangled vines that cling about our
+feet, and every now and then, between the giant tree-trunks, we catch
+glimpses of the noisy street.
+
+At the end of this road there is a narrow turning, and when I come to it
+I am afraid, though I do not know why I am afraid.  It leads to a house
+that I once lived in when a child, and now there is some one waiting
+there who has something to tell me.
+
+I turn to run away.  A Blackwall 'bus is passing, and I try to overtake
+it.  But the horses turn into skeletons and gallop away from me, and my
+feet are like lead, and the thing that is with me, and that I cannot see,
+seizes me by the arm and drags me back.
+
+It forces me along, and into the house, and the door slams to behind us,
+and the sound echoes through the lifeless rooms.  I recognise the rooms;
+I laughed and cried in them long ago.  Nothing is changed.  The chairs
+stand in their places, empty.  My mother's knitting lies upon the
+hearthrug, where the kitten, I remember, dragged it, somewhere back in
+the sixties.
+
+I go up into my own little attic.  My cot stands in the corner, and my
+bricks lie tumbled out upon the floor (I was always an untidy child).  An
+old man enters--an old, bent, withered man--holding a lamp above his
+head, and I look at his face, and it is my own face.  And another enters,
+and he also is myself.  Then more and more, till the room is thronged
+with faces, and the stair-way beyond, and all the silent house.  Some of
+the faces are old and others young, and some are fair and smile at me,
+and many are foul and leer at me.  And every face is my own face, but no
+two of them are alike.
+
+I do not know why the sight of myself should alarm me so, but I rush from
+the house in terror, and the faces follow me; and I run faster and
+faster, but I know that I shall never leave them behind me.
+
+* * * * *
+
+As a rule one is the hero of one's own dreams, but at times I have dreamt
+a dream entirely in the third person--a dream with the incidents of which
+I have had no connection whatever, except as an unseen and impotent
+spectator.  One of these I have often thought about since, wondering if
+it could not be worked up into a story.  But, perhaps, it would be too
+painful a theme.
+
+I dreamt I saw a woman's face among a throng.  It is an evil face, but
+there is a strange beauty in it.  The flickering gleams thrown by street
+lamps flash down upon it, showing the wonder of its evil fairness.  Then
+the lights go out.
+
+I see it next in a place that is very far away, and it is even more
+beautiful than before, for the evil has gone out of it.  Another face is
+looking down into it, a bright, pure face.  The faces meet and kiss, and,
+as his lips touch hers, the blood mounts to her cheeks and brow.  I see
+the two faces again.  But I cannot tell where they are or how long a time
+has passed.  The man's face has grown a little older, but it is still
+young and fair, and when the woman's eyes rest upon it there comes a
+glory into her face so that it is like the face of an angel.  But at
+times the woman is alone, and then I see the old evil look struggling
+back.
+
+Then I see clearer.  I see the room in which they live.  It is very poor.
+An old-fashioned piano stands in one corner, and beside it is a table on
+which lie scattered a tumbled mass of papers round an ink-stand.  An
+empty chair waits before the table.  The woman sits by the open window.
+
+From far below there rises the sound of a great city.  Its lights throw
+up faint beams into the dark room.  The smell of its streets is in the
+woman's nostrils.
+
+Every now and again she looks towards the door and listens: then turns to
+the open window.  And I notice that each time she looks towards the door
+the evil in her face shrinks back; but each time she turns to the window
+it grows more fierce and sullen.
+
+Suddenly she starts up, and there is a terror in her eyes that frightens
+me as I dream, and I see great beads of sweat upon her brow.  Then, very
+slowly, her face changes, and I see again the evil creature of the night.
+She wraps around her an old cloak, and creeps out.  I hear her footsteps
+going down the stairs.  They grow fainter and fainter.  I hear a door
+open.  The roar of the streets rushes up into the house, and the woman's
+footsteps are swallowed up.
+
+Time drifts onward through my dream.  Scenes change, take shape, and
+fade; but all is vague and undefined, until, out of the dimness, there
+fashions itself a long, deserted street.  The lights make glistening
+circles on the wet pavement.  A figure, dressed in gaudy rags, slinks by,
+keeping close against the wall.  Its back is towards me, and I do not see
+its face.  Another figure glides from out the shadows.  I look upon its
+face, and I see it is the face that the woman's eyes gazed up into and
+worshipped long ago, when my dream was just begun.  But the fairness and
+the purity are gone from it, and it is old and evil, as the woman's when
+I looked upon her last.  The figure in the gaudy rags moves slowly on.
+The second figure follows it, and overtakes it.  The two pause, and speak
+to one another as they draw near.  The street is very dark where they
+have met, and the figure in the gaudy rags keeps its face still turned
+aside.  They walk together in silence, till they come to where a flaring
+gas-lamp hangs before a tavern; and there the woman turns, and I see that
+it is the woman of my dream.  And she and the man look into each other's
+eyes once more.
+
+* * * * *
+
+In another dream that I remember, an angel (or a devil, I am not quite
+sure which) has come to a man and told him that so long as he loves no
+living human thing--so long as he never suffers himself to feel one touch
+of tenderness towards wife or child, towards kith or kin, towards
+stranger or towards friend, so long will he succeed and prosper in his
+dealings--so long will all this world's affairs go well with him; and he
+will grow each day richer and greater and more powerful.  But if ever he
+let one kindly thought for living thing come into his heart, in that
+moment all his plans and schemes will topple down about his ears; and
+from that hour his name will be despised by men, and then forgotten.
+
+And the man treasures up these words, for he is an ambitious man, and
+wealth and fame and power are the sweetest things in all the world to
+him.  A woman loves him and dies, thirsting for a loving look from him;
+children's footsteps creep into his life and steal away again, old faces
+fade and new ones come and go.
+
+But never a kindly touch of his hand rests on any living thing; never a
+kindly word comes from his lips; never a kindly thought springs from his
+heart.  And in all his doings fortune favours him.
+
+The years pass by, and at last there is left to him only one thing that
+he need fear--a child's small, wistful face.  The child loves him, as the
+woman, long ago, had loved him, and her eyes follow him with a hungry,
+beseeching look.  But he sets his teeth, and turns away from her.
+
+The little face grows thin, and one day they come to him where he sits
+before the keyboard of his many enterprises, and tell him she is dying.
+He comes and stands beside the bed, and the child's eyes open and turn
+towards him; and, as he draws nearer, her little arms stretch out towards
+him, pleading dumbly.  But the man's face never changes, and the little
+arms fall feebly back upon the tumbled coverlet, and the wistful eyes
+grow still, and a woman steps softly forward, and draws the lids down
+over them; then the man goes back to his plans and schemes.
+
+But in the night, when the great house is silent, he steals up to the
+room where the child still lies, and pushes back the white, uneven sheet.
+
+"Dead--dead," he mutters.  Then he takes the tiny corpse up in his arms,
+and holds it tight against his breast, and kisses the cold lips, and the
+cold cheeks, and the little, cold, stiff hands.
+
+And at that point my story becomes impossible, for I dream that the dead
+child lies always beneath the sheet in that quiet room, and that the
+little face never changes, nor the limbs decay.
+
+I puzzle about this for an instant, but soon forget to wonder; for when
+the Dream Fairy tells us tales we are only as little children, sitting
+round with open eyes, believing all, though marvelling that such things
+should be.
+
+Each night, when all else in the house sleeps, the door of that room
+opens noiselessly, and the man enters and closes it behind him.  Each
+night he draws away the white sheet, and takes the small dead body in his
+arms; and through the dark hours he paces softly to and fro, holding it
+close against his breast, kissing it and crooning to it, like a mother to
+her sleeping baby.
+
+When the first ray of dawn peeps into the room, he lays the dead child
+back again, and smooths the sheet above her, and steals away.
+
+And he succeeds and prospers in all things, and each day he grows richer
+and greater and more powerful.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+We had much trouble with our heroine.  Brown wanted her ugly.  Brown's
+chief ambition in life is to be original, and his method of obtaining the
+original is to take the unoriginal and turn it upside down.
+
+If Brown were given a little planet of his own to do as he liked with, he
+would call day, night, and summer, winter.  He would make all his men and
+women walk on their heads and shake hands with their feet, his trees
+would grow with their roots in the air, and the old cock would lay all
+the eggs while the hens sat on the fence and crowed.  Then he would step
+back and say, "See what an original world I have created, entirely my own
+idea!"
+
+There are many other people besides Brown whose notion of originality
+would seem to be precisely similar.
+
+I know a little girl, the descendant of a long line of politicians.  The
+hereditary instinct is so strongly developed in her that she is almost
+incapable of thinking for herself.  Instead, she copies in everything her
+elder sister, who takes more after the mother.  If her sister has two
+helpings of rice pudding for supper, then she has two helpings of rice
+pudding.  If her sister isn't hungry and doesn't want any supper at all,
+then she goes to bed without any supper.
+
+This lack of character in the child troubles her mother, who is not an
+admirer of the political virtues, and one evening, taking the little one
+on her lap, she talked seriously to her.
+
+"Do try to think for yourself," said she.  "Don't always do just what
+Jessie does, that's silly.  Have an idea of your own now and then.  Be a
+little original."
+
+The child promised she'd try, and went to bed thoughtful.
+
+Next morning, for breakfast, a dish of kippers and a dish of kidneys were
+placed on the table, side by side.  Now the child loved kippers with an
+affection that amounted almost to passion, while she loathed kidneys
+worse than powders.  It was the one subject on which she did know her own
+mind.
+
+"A kidney or a kipper for you, Jessie?" asked the mother, addressing the
+elder child first.
+
+Jessie hesitated for a moment, while her sister sat regarding her in an
+agony of suspense.
+
+"Kipper, please, ma," Jessie answered at last, and the younger child
+turned her head away to hide the tears.
+
+"You'll have a kipper, of course, Trixy?" said the mother, who had
+noticed nothing.
+
+"No, thank you, ma," said the small heroine, stifling a sob, and speaking
+in a dry, tremulous voice, "I'll have a kidney."
+
+"But I thought you couldn't bear kidneys," exclaimed her mother,
+surprised.
+
+"No, ma, I don't like 'em much."
+
+"And you're so fond of kippers!"
+
+"Yes, ma."
+
+"Well, then, why on earth don't you have one?"
+
+"'Cos Jessie's going to have one, and you told me to be original," and
+here the poor mite, reflecting upon the price her originality was going
+to cost her, burst into tears.
+
+* * * * *
+
+The other three of us refused to sacrifice ourselves upon the altar of
+Brown's originality.  We decided to be content with the customary
+beautiful girl.
+
+"Good or bad?" queried Brown.
+
+"Bad," responded MacShaughnassy emphatically.  "What do you say,
+Jephson?"
+
+"Well," replied Jephson, taking the pipe from between his lips, and
+speaking in that soothingly melancholy tone of voice that he never
+varies, whether telling a joke about a wedding or an anecdote relating to
+a funeral, "not altogether bad.  Bad, with good instincts, the good
+instincts well under control."
+
+"I wonder why it is," murmured MacShaughnassy reflectively, "that bad
+people are so much more interesting than good."
+
+"I don't think the reason is very difficult to find," answered Jephson.
+"There's more uncertainty about them.  They keep you more on the alert.
+It's like the difference between riding a well-broken, steady-going hack
+and a lively young colt with ideas of his own.  The one is comfortable to
+travel on, but the other provides you with more exercise.  If you start
+off with a thoroughly good woman for your heroine you give your story
+away in the first chapter.  Everybody knows precisely how she will behave
+under every conceivable combination of circumstances in which you can
+place her.  On every occasion she will do the same thing--that is the
+right thing.
+
+"With a bad heroine, on the other hand, you can never be quite sure what
+is going to happen.  Out of the fifty or so courses open to her, she may
+take the right one, or she may take one of the forty-nine wrong ones, and
+you watch her with curiosity to see which it will be."
+
+"But surely there are plenty of good heroines who are interesting," I
+said.
+
+"At intervals--when they do something wrong," answered Jephson.  "A
+consistently irreproachable heroine is as irritating as Socrates must
+have been to Xantippe, or as the model boy at school is to all the other
+lads.  Take the stock heroine of the eighteenth-century romance.  She
+never met her lover except for the purpose of telling him that she could
+not be his, and she generally wept steadily throughout the interview.  She
+never forgot to turn pale at the sight of blood, nor to faint in his arms
+at the most inconvenient moment possible.  She was determined never to
+marry without her father's consent, and was equally resolved never to
+marry anybody but the one particular person she was convinced he would
+never agree to her marrying.  She was an excellent young woman, and
+nearly as uninteresting as a celebrity at home."
+
+"Ah, but you're not talking about good women now," I observed.  "You're
+talking about some silly person's idea of a good woman."
+
+"I quite admit it," replied Jephson.  "Nor, indeed, am I prepared to say
+what is a good woman.  I consider the subject too deep and too
+complicated for any mere human being to give judgment upon.  But I _am_
+talking of the women who conformed to the popular idea of maidenly
+goodness in the age when these books were written.  You must remember
+goodness is not a known quantity.  It varies with every age and every
+locality, and it is, generally speaking, your 'silly persons' who are
+responsible for its varying standards.  In Japan, a 'good' girl would be
+a girl who would sell her honour in order to afford little luxuries to
+her aged parents.  In certain hospitable islands of the torrid zone the
+'good' wife goes to lengths that we should deem altogether unnecessary in
+making her husband's guest feel himself at home.  In ancient Hebraic
+days, Jael was accounted a good woman for murdering a sleeping man, and
+Sarai stood in no danger of losing the respect of her little world when
+she led Hagar unto Abraham.  In eighteenth-century England, supernatural
+stupidity and dulness of a degree that must have been difficult to
+attain, were held to be feminine virtues--indeed, they are so still--and
+authors, who are always among the most servile followers of public
+opinion, fashioned their puppets accordingly.  Nowadays 'slumming' is the
+most applauded virtue, and so all our best heroines go slumming, and are
+'good to the poor.'"
+
+"How useful 'the poor' are," remarked MacShaughnassy, somewhat abruptly,
+placing his feet on the mantelpiece, and tilting his chair back till it
+stood at an angle that caused us to rivet our attention upon it with
+hopeful interest.  "I don't think we scribbling fellows ever fully grasp
+how much we owe to 'the poor.'  Where would our angelic heroines and our
+noble-hearted heroes be if it were not for 'the poor'?  We want to show
+that the dear girl is as good as she is beautiful.  What do we do?  We
+put a basket full of chickens and bottles of wine on her arm, a fetching
+little sun-bonnet on her head, and send her round among the poor.  How do
+we prove that our apparent scamp of a hero is really a noble young man at
+heart?  Why, by explaining that he is good to the poor.
+
+"They are as useful in real life as they are in Bookland.  What is it
+consoles the tradesman when the actor, earning eighty pounds a week,
+cannot pay his debts?  Why, reading in the theatrical newspapers gushing
+accounts of the dear fellow's invariable generosity to the poor.  What is
+it stills the small but irritating voice of conscience when we have
+successfully accomplished some extra big feat of swindling?  Why, the
+noble resolve to give ten per cent of the net profits to the poor.
+
+"What does a man do when he finds himself growing old, and feels that it
+is time for him to think seriously about securing his position in the
+next world?  Why, he becomes suddenly good to the poor.  If the poor were
+not there for him to be good to, what could he do?  He would be unable to
+reform at all.  It's a great comfort to think that the poor will always
+be with us.  They are the ladder by which we climb into heaven."
+
+There was silence for a few moments, while MacShaughnassy puffed away
+vigorously, and almost savagely, at his pipe, and then Brown said: "I can
+tell you rather a quaint incident, bearing very aptly on the subject.  A
+cousin of mine was a land-agent in a small country town, and among the
+houses on his list was a fine old mansion that had remained vacant for
+many years.  He had despaired of ever selling it, when one day an elderly
+lady, very richly dressed, drove up to the office and made inquiries
+about it.  She said she had come across it accidentally while travelling
+through that part of the country the previous autumn, and had been much
+struck by its beauty and picturesqueness.  She added she was looking out
+for some quiet spot where she could settle down and peacefully pass the
+remainder of her days, and thought this place might possibly prove to be
+the very thing for her.
+
+"My cousin, delighted with the chance of a purchaser, at once drove her
+across to the estate, which was about eight miles distant from the town,
+and they went over it together.  My cousin waxed eloquent upon the
+subject of its advantages.  He dwelt upon its quiet and seclusion, its
+proximity--but not too close proximity--to the church, its convenient
+distance from the village.
+
+"Everything pointed to a satisfactory conclusion of the business.  The
+lady was charmed with the situation and the surroundings, and delighted
+with the house and grounds.  She considered the price moderate.
+
+"'And now, Mr. Brown,' said she, as they stood by the lodge gate, 'tell
+me, what class of poor have you got round about?'
+
+"'Poor?' answered my cousin; 'there are no poor.'
+
+"'No poor!' exclaimed the lady.  'No poor people in the village, or
+anywhere near?'
+
+"'You won't find a poor person within five miles of the estate,' he
+replied proudly.  'You see, my dear madam, this is a thinly populated and
+exceedingly prosperous county: this particular district especially so.
+There is not a family in it that is not, comparatively speaking, well-to-
+do.'
+
+"'I'm sorry to hear that,' said the lady, in a tone of disappointment.
+'The place would have suited me so admirably but for that.'
+
+"'But surely, madam,' cried my cousin, to whom a demand for poor persons
+was an entirely new idea, 'you don't mean to say that you _want_ poor
+people!  Why, we've always considered it one of the chief attractions of
+the property--nothing to shock the eye or wound the susceptibilities of
+the most tender-hearted occupant.'
+
+"'My dear Mr. Brown,' replied the lady, 'I will be perfectly frank with
+you.  I am becoming an old woman, and my past life has not, perhaps, been
+altogether too well spent.  It is my desire to atone for the--er--follies
+of my youth by an old age of well-doing, and to that end it is essential
+that I should be surrounded by a certain number of deserving poor.  I had
+hoped to find in this charming neighbourhood of yours the customary
+proportion of poverty and misery, in which case I should have taken the
+house without hesitation.  As it is, I must seek elsewhere.'
+
+"My cousin was perplexed, and sad.  'There are plenty of poor people in
+the town,' he said, 'many of them most interesting cases, and you could
+have the entire care of them all.  There'd be no opposition whatever, I'm
+positive.'
+
+"'Thank you,' replied the lady, 'but I really couldn't go as far as the
+town.  They must be within easy driving distance or they are no good.'
+
+"My cousin cudgelled his brains again.  He did not intend to let a
+purchaser slip through his fingers if he could help it.  At last a bright
+thought flashed into his mind.  'I'll tell you what we could do,' he
+said.  'There's a piece of waste land the other end of the village that
+we've never been able to do much with, in consequence of its being so
+swampy.  If you liked, we could run you up a dozen cottages on that,
+cheap--it would be all the better their being a bit ramshackle and
+unhealthy--and get some poor people for you, and put into them.'
+
+"The lady reflected upon the idea, and it struck her as a good one.
+
+"'You see,' continued my cousin, pushing his advantage, 'by adopting this
+method you would be able to select your own poor.  We would get you some
+nice, clean, grateful poor, and make the thing pleasant for you.'
+
+"It ended in the lady's accepting my cousin's offer, and giving him a
+list of the poor people she would like to have.  She selected one
+bedridden old woman (Church of England preferred); one paralytic old man;
+one blind girl who would want to be read aloud to; one poor atheist,
+willing to be converted; two cripples; one drunken father who would
+consent to be talked to seriously; one disagreeable old fellow, needing
+much patience; two large families, and four ordinary assorted couples.
+
+"My cousin experienced some difficulty in securing the drunken father.
+Most of the drunken fathers he interviewed upon the subject had a rooted
+objection to being talked to at all.  After a long search, however, he
+discovered a mild little man, who, upon the lady's requirements and
+charitable intentions being explained to him, undertook to qualify
+himself for the vacancy by getting intoxicated at least once a week.  He
+said he could not promise more than once a week at first, he
+unfortunately possessing a strong natural distaste for all alcoholic
+liquors, which it would be necessary for him to overcome.  As he got more
+used to them, he would do better.
+
+"Over the disagreeable old man, my cousin also had trouble.  It was hard
+to hit the right degree of disagreeableness.  Some of them were so very
+unpleasant.  He eventually made choice of a decayed cab-driver with
+advanced Radical opinions, who insisted on a three years' contract.
+
+"The plan worked exceedingly well, and does so, my cousin tells me, to
+this day.  The drunken father has completely conquered his dislike to
+strong drink.  He has not been sober now for over three weeks, and has
+lately taken to knocking his wife about.  The disagreeable fellow is most
+conscientious in fulfilling his part of the bargain, and makes himself a
+perfect curse to the whole village.  The others have dropped into their
+respective positions and are working well.  The lady visits them all
+every afternoon, and is most charitable.  They call her Lady Bountiful,
+and everybody blesses her."
+
+Brown rose as he finished speaking, and mixed himself a glass of whisky
+and water with the self-satisfied air of a benevolent man about to reward
+somebody for having done a good deed; and MacShaughnassy lifted up his
+voice and talked.
+
+"I know a story bearing on the subject, too," he said.  "It happened in a
+tiny Yorkshire village--a peaceful, respectable spot, where folks found
+life a bit slow.  One day, however, a new curate arrived, and that woke
+things up considerably.  He was a nice young man, and, having a large
+private income of his own, was altogether a most desirable catch.  Every
+unmarried female in the place went for him with one accord.
+
+"But ordinary feminine blandishments appeared to have no effect upon him.
+He was a seriously inclined young man, and once, in the course of a
+casual conversation upon the subject of love, he was heard to say that he
+himself should never be attracted by mere beauty and charm.  What would
+appeal to him, he said, would be a woman's goodness--her charity and
+kindliness to the poor.
+
+"Well, that set the petticoats all thinking.  They saw that in studying
+fashion plates and practising expressions they had been going upon the
+wrong tack.  The card for them to play was 'the poor.'  But here a
+serious difficulty arose.  There was only one poor person in the whole
+parish, a cantankerous old fellow who lived in a tumble-down cottage at
+the back of the church, and fifteen able-bodied women (eleven girls,
+three old maids, and a widow) wanted to be 'good' to him.
+
+"Miss Simmonds, one of the old maids, got hold of him first, and
+commenced feeding him twice a day with beef-tea; and then the widow
+boarded him with port wine and oysters.  Later in the week others of the
+party drifted in upon him, and wanted to cram him with jelly and
+chickens.
+
+"The old man couldn't understand it.  He was accustomed to a small sack
+of coals now and then, accompanied by a long lecture on his sins, and an
+occasional bottle of dandelion tea.  This sudden spurt on the part of
+Providence puzzled him.  He said nothing, however, but continued to take
+in as much of everything as he could hold.  At the end of a month he was
+too fat to get through his own back door.
+
+"The competition among the women-folk grew keener every day, and at last
+the old man began to give himself airs, and to make the place hard for
+them.  He made them clean his cottage out, and cook his meals, and when
+he was tired of having them about the house, he set them to work in the
+garden.
+
+"They grumbled a good deal, and there was a talk at one time of a sort of
+a strike, but what could they do?  He was the only pauper for miles
+round, and knew it.  He had the monopoly, and, like all monopolises, he
+abused his position.
+
+"He made them run errands.  He sent them out to buy his 'baccy,' at their
+own expense.  On one occasion he sent Miss Simmonds out with a jug to get
+his supper beer.  She indignantly refused at first, but he told her that
+if she gave him any of her stuck-up airs out she would go, and never come
+into his house again.  If she wouldn't do it there were plenty of others
+who would.  She knew it and went.
+
+"They had been in the habit of reading to him--good books with an
+elevating tendency.  But now he put his foot down upon that sort of
+thing.  He said he didn't want Sunday-school rubbish at his time of life.
+What he liked was something spicy.  And he made them read him French
+novels and seafaring tales, containing realistic language.  And they
+didn't have to skip anything either, or he'd know the reason why.
+
+"He said he liked music, so a few of them clubbed together and bought him
+a harmonium.  Their idea was that they would sing hymns and play high-
+class melodies, but it wasn't his.  His idea was--'Keeping up the old
+girl's birthday' and 'She winked the other eye,' with chorus and skirt
+dance, and that's what they sang.
+
+"To what lengths his tyranny would have gone it is difficult to say, had
+not an event happened that brought his power to a premature collapse.
+This was the curate's sudden and somewhat unexpected marriage with a very
+beautiful burlesque actress who had lately been performing in a
+neighbouring town.  He gave up the Church on his engagement, in
+consequence of his _fiancee's_ objection to becoming a minister's wife.
+She said she could never 'tumble to' the district visiting.
+
+"With the curate's wedding the old pauper's brief career of prosperity
+ended.  They packed him off to the workhouse after that, and made him
+break stones."
+
+* * * * *
+
+At the end of the telling of his tale, MacShaughnassy lifted his feet off
+the mantelpiece, and set to work to wake up his legs; and Jephson took a
+hand, and began to spin us stories.
+
+But none of us felt inclined to laugh at Jephson's stories, for they
+dealt not with the goodness of the rich to the poor, which is a virtue
+yielding quick and highly satisfactory returns, but with the goodness of
+the poor to the poor, a somewhat less remunerative investment and a
+different matter altogether.
+
+For the poor themselves--I do not mean the noisy professional poor, but
+the silent, fighting poor--one is bound to feel a genuine respect.  One
+honours them, as one honours a wounded soldier.
+
+In the perpetual warfare between Humanity and Nature, the poor stand
+always in the van.  They die in the ditches, and we march over their
+bodies with the flags flying and the drums playing.
+
+One cannot think of them without an uncomfortable feeling that one ought
+to be a little bit ashamed of living in security and ease, leaving them
+to take all the hard blows.  It is as if one were always skulking in the
+tents, while one's comrades were fighting and dying in the front.
+
+They bleed and fall in silence there.  Nature with her terrible club,
+"Survival of the Fittest"; and Civilisation with her cruel sword, "Supply
+and Demand," beat them back, and they give way inch by inch, fighting to
+the end.  But it is in a dumb, sullen way, that is not sufficiently
+picturesque to be heroic.
+
+I remember seeing an old bull-dog, one Saturday night, lying on the
+doorstep of a small shop in the New Cut.  He lay there very quiet, and
+seemed a bit sleepy; and, as he looked savage, nobody disturbed him.
+People stepped in and out over him, and occasionally in doing so, one
+would accidentally kick him, and then he would breathe a little harder
+and quicker.
+
+At last a passer-by, feeling something wet beneath his feet, looked down,
+and found that he was standing in a pool of blood, and, looking to see
+where it came from, found that it flowed in a thick, dark stream from the
+step on which the dog was lying.
+
+Then he stooped down and examined the dog, and the dog opened its eyes
+sleepily and looked at him, gave a grin which may have implied pleasure,
+or may have implied irritation at being disturbed, and died.
+
+A crowd collected, and they turned the dead body of the dog over on its
+side, and saw a fearful gash in the groin, out of which oozed blood, and
+other things.  The proprietor of the shop said the animal had been there
+for over an hour.
+
+I have known the poor to die in that same grim, silent way--not the poor
+that you, my delicately-gloved Lady Bountiful and my very excellent Sir
+Simon DoGood, know, or that you would care to know; not the poor who
+march in processions with banners and collection-boxes; not the poor that
+clamour round your soup kitchens and sing hymns at your tea meetings; but
+the poor that you don't know are poor until the tale is told at the
+coroner's inquest--the silent, proud poor who wake each morning to
+wrestle with Death till night-time, and who, when at last he overcomes
+them, and, forcing them down on the rotting floor of the dim attic,
+strangles them, still die with their teeth tight shut.
+
+There was a boy I came to know when I was living in the East End of
+London.  He was not a nice boy by any means.  He was not quite so clean
+as are the good boys in the religious magazines, and I have known a
+sailor to stop him in the street and reprove him for using indelicate
+language.
+
+He and his mother and the baby, a sickly infant of about five months old,
+lived in a cellar down a turning off Three Colt Street.  I am not quite
+sure what had become of the father.  I rather think he had been
+"converted," and had gone off round the country on a preaching tour.  The
+lad earned six shillings a week as an errand-boy; and the mother stitched
+trousers, and on days when she was feeling strong and energetic would
+often make as much as tenpence, or even a shilling.  Unfortunately, there
+were days when the four bare walls would chase each other round and
+round, and the candle seem a faint speck of light, a very long way off;
+and the frequency of these caused the family income for the week to
+occasionally fall somewhat low.
+
+One night the walls danced round quicker and quicker till they danced
+away altogether, and the candle shot up through the ceiling and became a
+star and the woman knew that it was time to put away her sewing.
+
+"Jim," she said: she spoke very low, and the boy had to bend over her to
+hear, "if you poke about in the middle of the mattress you'll find a
+couple of pounds.  I saved them up a long while ago.  That will pay for
+burying me.  And, Jim, you'll take care of the kid.  You won't let it go
+to the parish."
+
+Jim promised.
+
+"Say 'S'welp me Gawd,' Jim."
+
+"S'welp me Gawd, mother."
+
+Then the woman, having arranged her worldly affairs, lay back ready, and
+Death struck.
+
+Jim kept his oath.  He found the money, and buried his mother; and then,
+putting his household goods on a barrow, moved into cheaper
+apartments--half an old shed, for which he paid two shillings a week.
+
+For eighteen months he and the baby lived there.  He left the child at a
+nursery every morning, fetching it away each evening on his return from
+work, and for that he paid fourpence a day, which included a limited
+supply of milk.  How he managed to keep himself and more than half keep
+the child on the remaining two shillings I cannot say.  I only know that
+he did it, and that not a soul ever helped him or knew that there was
+help wanted.  He nursed the child, often pacing the room with it for
+hours, washed it, occasionally, and took it out for an airing every
+Sunday.
+
+Notwithstanding all which care, the little beggar, at the end of the time
+above mentioned, "pegged out," to use Jimmy's own words.
+
+The coroner was very severe on Jim.  "If you had taken proper steps," he
+said, "this child's life might have been preserved."  (He seemed to think
+it would have been better if the child's life had been preserved.
+Coroners have quaint ideas!)  "Why didn't you apply to the relieving
+officer?"
+
+"'Cos I didn't want no relief," replied Jim sullenly.  "I promised my
+mother it should never go on the parish, and it didn't."
+
+The incident occurred, very luckily, during the dead season, and the
+evening papers took the case up, and made rather a good thing out of it.
+Jim became quite a hero, I remember.  Kind-hearted people wrote, urging
+that somebody--the ground landlord, or the Government, or some one of
+that sort--ought to do something for him.  And everybody abused the local
+vestry.  I really think some benefit to Jim might have come out of it all
+if only the excitement had lasted a little longer.  Unfortunately,
+however, just at its height a spicy divorce case cropped up, and Jim was
+crowded out and forgotten.
+
+I told the boys this story of mine, after Jephson had done telling his,
+and, when I had finished, we found it was nearly one o'clock.  So, of
+course, it was too late to do any more work to the novel that evening.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+We held our next business meeting on my houseboat.  Brown was opposed at
+first to my going down to this houseboat at all.  He thought that none of
+us should leave town while the novel was still on hand.
+
+MacShaughnassy, on the contrary, was of opinion that we should work
+better on a houseboat.  Speaking for himself, he said he never felt more
+like writing a really great work than when lying in a hammock among
+whispering leaves, with the deep blue sky above him, and a tumbler of
+iced claret cup within easy reach of his hand.  Failing a hammock, he
+found a deck chair a great incentive to mental labour.  In the interests
+of the novel, he strongly recommended me to take down with me at least
+one comfortable deck chair, and plenty of lemons.
+
+I could not myself see any reason why we should not be able to think as
+well on a houseboat as anywhere else, and accordingly it was settled that
+I should go down and establish myself upon the thing, and that the others
+should visit me there from time to time, when we would sit round and
+toil.
+
+This houseboat was Ethelbertha's idea.  We had spent a day, the summer
+before, on one belonging to a friend of mine, and she had been enraptured
+with the life.  Everything was on such a delightfully tiny scale.  You
+lived in a tiny little room; you slept on a tiny little bed, in a tiny,
+tiny little bedroom; and you cooked your little dinner by a tiny little
+fire, in the tiniest little kitchen that ever you did see.  "Oh, it must
+be lovely, living on a houseboat," said Ethelbertha, with a gasp of
+ecstasy; "it must be like living in a doll's house."
+
+Ethelbertha was very young--ridiculously young, as I think I have
+mentioned before--in those days of which I am writing, and the love of
+dolls, and of the gorgeous dresses that dolls wear, and of the
+many-windowed but inconveniently arranged houses that dolls inhabit--or
+are supposed to inhabit, for as a rule they seem to prefer sitting on the
+roof with their legs dangling down over the front door, which has always
+appeared to me to be unladylike: but then, of course, I am no authority
+on doll etiquette--had not yet, I think, quite departed from her.  Nay,
+am I not sure that it had not?  Do I not remember, years later, peeping
+into a certain room, the walls of which are covered with works of art of
+a character calculated to send any aesthetic person mad, and seeing her,
+sitting on the floor, before a red brick mansion, containing two rooms
+and a kitchen; and are not her hands trembling with delight as she
+arranges the three real tin plates upon the dresser?  And does she not
+knock at the real brass knocker upon the real front door until it comes
+off, and I have to sit down beside her on the floor and screw it on
+again?
+
+Perhaps, however, it is unwise for me to recall these things, and bring
+them forward thus in evidence against her, for cannot she in turn laugh
+at me?  Did not I also assist in the arrangement and appointment of that
+house beautiful?  We differed on the matter of the drawing-room carpet, I
+recollect.  Ethelbertha fancied a dark blue velvet, but I felt sure,
+taking the wall-paper into consideration, that some shade of terra-cotta
+would harmonise best.  She agreed with me in the end, and we manufactured
+one out of an old chest protector.  It had a really charming effect, and
+gave a delightfully warm tone to the room.  The blue velvet we put in the
+kitchen.  I deemed this extravagance, but Ethelbertha said that servants
+thought a lot of a good carpet, and that it paid to humour them in little
+things, when practicable.
+
+The bedroom had one big bed and a cot in it; but I could not see where
+the girl was going to sleep.  The architect had overlooked her
+altogether: that is so like an architect.  The house also suffered from
+the inconvenience common to residences of its class, of possessing no
+stairs, so that to move from one room to another it was necessary to
+burst your way up through the ceiling, or else to come outside and climb
+in through a window; either of which methods must be fatiguing when you
+come to do it often.
+
+Apart from these drawbacks, however, the house was one that any doll
+agent would have been justified in describing as a "most desirable family
+residence"; and it had been furnished with a lavishness that bordered on
+positive ostentation.  In the bedroom there was a washing-stand, and on
+the washing-stand there stood a jug and basin, and in the jug there was
+real water.  But all this was as nothing.  I have known mere ordinary,
+middle-class dolls' houses in which you might find washing-stands and
+jugs and basins and real water--ay, and even soap.  But in this abode of
+luxury there was a real towel; so that a body could not only wash
+himself, but wipe himself afterwards, and that is a sensation that, as
+all dolls know, can be enjoyed only in the very first-class
+establishments.
+
+Then, in the drawing-room, there was a clock, which would tick just so
+long as you continued to shake it (it never seemed to get tired); also a
+picture and a piano, and a book upon the table, and a vase of flowers
+that would upset the moment you touched it, just like a real vase of
+flowers.  Oh, there was style about this room, I can tell you.
+
+But the glory of the house was its kitchen.  There were all things that
+heart could desire in this kitchen, saucepans with lids that took on and
+off, a flat-iron and a rolling-pin.  A dinner service for three occupied
+about half the room, and what space was left was filled up by the stove--a
+_real_ stove!  Think of it, oh ye owners of dolls' houses, a stove in
+which you could burn real bits of coal, and on which you could boil real
+bits of potato for dinner--except when people said you mustn't, because
+it was dangerous, and took the grate away from you, and blew out the
+fire, a thing that hampers a cook.
+
+I never saw a house more complete in all its details.  Nothing had been
+overlooked, not even the family.  It lay on its back, just outside the
+front door, proud but calm, waiting to be put into possession.  It was
+not an extensive family.  It consisted of four--papa, and mamma, and
+baby, and the hired girl; just the family for a beginner.
+
+It was a well-dressed family too--not merely with grand clothes outside,
+covering a shameful condition of things beneath, such as, alas! is too
+often the case in doll society, but with every article necessary and
+proper to a lady or gentleman, down to items that I could not mention.
+And all these garments, you must know, could be unfastened and taken off.
+I have known dolls--stylish enough dolls, to look at, some of them--who
+have been content to go about with their clothes gummed on to them, and,
+in some cases, nailed on with tacks, which I take to be a slovenly and
+unhealthy habit.  But this family could be undressed in five minutes,
+without the aid of either hot water or a chisel.
+
+Not that it was advisable from an artistic point of view that any of them
+should.  They had not the figure that looks well in its natural
+state--none of them.  There was a want of fulness about them all.
+Besides, without their clothes, it might have been difficult to
+distinguish the baby from the papa, or the maid from the mistress, and
+thus domestic complications might have arisen.
+
+When all was ready for their reception we established them in their home.
+We put as much of the baby to bed as the cot would hold, and made the
+papa and mamma comfortable in the drawing-room, where they sat on the
+floor and stared thoughtfully at each other across the table.  (They had
+to sit on the floor because the chairs were not big enough.)  The girl we
+placed in the kitchen, where she leant against the dresser in an attitude
+suggestive of drink, embracing the broom we had given her with maudlin
+affection.  Then we lifted up the house with care, and carried it
+cautiously into another room, and with the deftness of experienced
+conspirators placed it at the foot of a small bed, on the south-west
+corner of which an absurdly small somebody had hung an absurdly small
+stocking.
+
+To return to our own doll's house, Ethelbertha and I, discussing the
+subject during our return journey in the train, resolved that, next year,
+we ourselves would possess a houseboat, a smaller houseboat, if possible,
+than even the one we had just seen.  It should have art-muslin curtains
+and a flag, and the flowers about it should be wild roses and forget-me-
+nots.  I could work all the morning on the roof, with an awning over me
+to keep off the sun, while Ethelbertha trimmed the roses and made cakes
+for tea; and in the evenings we would sit out on the little deck, and
+Ethelbertha would play the guitar (she would begin learning it at once),
+or we could sit quiet and listen to the nightingales.
+
+For, when you are very, very young you dream that the summer is all sunny
+days and moonlight nights, that the wind blows always softly from the
+west, and that roses will thrive anywhere.  But, as you grow older, you
+grow tired of waiting for the gray sky to break.  So you close the door
+and come in, and crouch over the fire, wondering why the winds blow ever
+from the east: and you have given up trying to rear roses.
+
+I knew a little cottage girl who saved up her money for months and months
+so as to buy a new frock in which to go to a flower-show.  But the day of
+the flower-show was a wet day, so she wore an old frock instead.  And all
+the fete days for quite a long while were wet days, and she feared she
+would never have a chance of wearing her pretty white dress.  But at last
+there came a fete day morning that was bright and sunny, and then the
+little girl clapped her hands and ran upstairs, and took her new frock
+(which had been her "new frock" for so long a time that it was now the
+oldest frock she had) from the box where it lay neatly folded between
+lavender and thyme, and held it up, and laughed to think how nice she
+would look in it.
+
+But when she went to put it on, she found that she had out-grown it, and
+that it was too small for her every way.  So she had to wear a common old
+frock after all.
+
+Things happen that way, you know, in this world.  There were a boy and
+girl once who loved each other very dearly.  But they were both poor, so
+they agreed to wait till he had made enough money for them to live
+comfortably upon, and then they would marry and be happy.  It took him a
+long while to make, because making money is very slow work, and he
+wanted, while he was about it, to make enough for them to be very happy
+upon indeed.  He accomplished the task eventually, however, and came back
+home a wealthy man.
+
+Then they met again in the poorly-furnished parlour where they had
+parted.  But they did not sit as near to each other as of old.  For she
+had lived alone so long that she had grown old-maidish, and she was
+feeling vexed with him for having dirtied the carpet with his muddy
+boots.  And he had worked so long earning money that he had grown hard
+and cold like the money itself, and was trying to think of something
+affectionate to say to her.
+
+So for a while they sat, one each side of the paper "fire-stove
+ornament," both wondering why they had shed such scalding tears on that
+day they had kissed each other good-bye; then said "good-bye" again, and
+were glad.
+
+There is another tale with much the same moral that I learnt at school
+out of a copy-book.  If I remember rightly, it runs somewhat like this:--
+
+Once upon a time there lived a wise grasshopper and a foolish ant.  All
+through the pleasant summer weather the grasshopper sported and played,
+gambolling with his fellows in and out among the sun-beams, dining
+sumptuously each day on leaves and dew-drops, never troubling about the
+morrow, singing ever his one peaceful, droning song.
+
+But there came the cruel winter, and the grasshopper, looking around, saw
+that his friends, the flowers, lay dead, and knew thereby that his own
+little span was drawing near its close.
+
+Then he felt glad that he had been so happy, and had not wasted his life.
+"It has been very short," said he to himself; "but it has been very
+pleasant, and I think I have made the best use of it.  I have drunk in
+the sunshine, I have lain on the soft, warm air, I have played merry
+games in the waving grass, I have tasted the juice of the sweet green
+leaves.  I have done what I could.  I have spread my wings, I have sung
+my song.  Now I will thank God for the sunny days that are passed, and
+die."
+
+Saying which, he crawled under a brown leaf, and met his fate in the way
+that all brave grasshoppers should; and a little bird that was passing by
+picked him up tenderly and buried him.
+
+Now when the foolish ant saw this, she was greatly puffed up with
+Pharisaical conceit.  "How thankful I ought to be," said she, "that I am
+industrious and prudent, and not like this poor grasshopper.  While he
+was flitting about from flower to flower, enjoying himself, I was hard at
+work, putting by against the winter.  Now he is dead, while I am about to
+make myself cosy in my warm home, and eat all the good things that I have
+been saving up."
+
+But, as she spoke, the gardener came along with his spade, and levelled
+the hill where she dwelt to the ground, and left her lying dead amidst
+the ruins.
+
+Then the same kind little bird that had buried the grasshopper came and
+picked her out and buried her also; and afterwards he composed and sang a
+song, the burthen of which was, "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may."  It
+was a very pretty song, and a very wise song, and a man who lived in
+those days, and to whom the birds, loving him and feeling that he was
+almost one of themselves, had taught their language, fortunately
+overheard it and wrote it down, so that all may read it to this day.
+
+Unhappily for us, however, Fate is a harsh governess, who has no sympathy
+with our desire for rosebuds.  "Don't stop to pick flowers now, my dear,"
+she cries, in her sharp, cross tones, as she seizes our arm and jerks us
+back into the roadway; "we haven't time to-day.  We will come back again
+to-morrow, and you shall pick them then."
+
+And we have to follow her, knowing, if we are experienced children, that
+the chances are that we shall never come that way to-morrow; or that, if
+we do, the roses will be dead.
+
+Fate would not hear of our having a houseboat that summer,--which was an
+exceptionally fine summer,--but promised us that if we were good and
+saved up our money, we should have one next year; and Ethelbertha and I,
+being simple-minded, inexperienced children, were content with the
+promise, and had faith in its satisfactory fulfilment.
+
+As soon as we reached home we informed Amenda of our plan.  The moment
+the girl opened the door, Ethelbertha burst out with:--"Oh! can you swim,
+Amenda?"
+
+"No, mum," answered Amenda, with entire absence of curiosity as to why
+such a question had been addressed to her, "I never knew but one girl as
+could, and she got drowned."
+
+"Well, you'll have to make haste and learn, then," continued Ethelbertha,
+"because you won't be able to walk out with your young man, you'll have
+to swim out.  We're not going to live in a house any more.  We're going
+to live on a boat in the middle of the river."
+
+Ethelbertha's chief object in life at this period was to surprise and
+shock Amenda, and her chief sorrow that she had never succeeded in doing
+so.  She had hoped great things from this announcement, but the girl
+remained unmoved.  "Oh, are you, mum," she replied; and went on to speak
+of other matters.
+
+I believe the result would have been the same if we had told her we were
+going to live in a balloon.
+
+I do not know how it was, I am sure.  Amenda was always most respectful
+in her manner.  But she had a knack of making Ethelbertha and myself feel
+that we were a couple of children, playing at being grown up and married,
+and that she was humouring us.
+
+Amenda stayed with us for nearly five years--until the milkman, having
+saved up sufficient to buy a "walk" of his own, had become
+practicable--but her attitude towards us never changed.  Even when we
+came to be really important married people, the proprietors of a
+"family," it was evident that she merely considered we had gone a step
+further in the game, and were playing now at being fathers and mothers.
+
+By some subtle process she contrived to imbue the baby also with this
+idea.  The child never seemed to me to take either of us quite seriously.
+She would play with us, or join with us in light conversation; but when
+it came to the serious affairs of life, such as bathing or feeding, she
+preferred her nurse.
+
+Ethelbertha attempted to take her out in the perambulator one morning,
+but the child would not hear of it for a moment.
+
+"It's all right, baby dear," explained Ethelbertha soothingly.  "Baby's
+going out with mamma this morning."
+
+"Oh no, baby ain't," was baby's rejoinder, in effect if not in words.
+"Baby don't take a hand in experiments--not this baby.  I don't want to
+be upset or run over."
+
+Poor Ethel!  I shall never forget how heart-broken she was.  It was the
+want of confidence that wounded her.
+
+But these are reminiscences of other days, having no connection with the
+days of which I am--or should be--writing; and to wander from one matter
+to another is, in a teller of tales, a grievous sin, and a growing custom
+much to be condemned.  Therefore I will close my eyes to all other
+memories, and endeavour to see only that little white and green houseboat
+by the ferry, which was the scene of our future collaborations.
+
+Houseboats then were not built to the scale of Mississippi steamers, but
+this boat was a small one, even for that primitive age.  The man from
+whom we hired it described it as "compact."  The man to whom, at the end
+of the first month, we tried to sub-let it, characterised it as "poky."
+In our letters we traversed this definition.  In our hearts we agreed
+with it.
+
+At first, however, its size--or, rather, its lack of size--was one of its
+chief charms in Ethelbertha's eyes.  The fact that if you got out of bed
+carelessly you were certain to knock your head against the ceiling, and
+that it was utterly impossible for any man to put on his trousers except
+in the saloon, she regarded as a capital joke.
+
+That she herself had to take a looking-glass and go upon the roof to do
+her back hair, she thought less amusing.
+
+Amenda accepted her new surroundings with her usual philosophic
+indifference.  On being informed that what she had mistaken for a linen-
+press was her bedroom, she remarked that there was one advantage about
+it, and that was, that she could not tumble out of bed, seeing there was
+nowhere to tumble; and, on being shown the kitchen, she observed that she
+should like it for two things--one was that she could sit in the middle
+and reach everything without getting up; the other, that nobody else
+could come into the apartment while she was there.
+
+"You see, Amenda," explained Ethelbertha apologetically, "we shall really
+live outside."
+
+"Yes, mum," answered Amenda, "I should say that would be the best place
+to do it."
+
+If only we could have lived more outside, the life might have been
+pleasant enough, but the weather rendered it impossible, six days out of
+the seven, for us to do more than look out of the window and feel
+thankful that we had a roof over our heads.
+
+I have known wet summers before and since.  I have learnt by many bitter
+experiences the danger and foolishness of leaving the shelter of London
+any time between the first of May and the thirty-first of October.
+Indeed, the country is always associate in my mind with recollections of
+long, weary days passed in the pitiless rain, and sad evenings spent in
+other people's clothes.  But never have I known, and never, I pray night
+and morning, may I know again, such a summer as the one we lived through
+(though none of us expected to) on that confounded houseboat.
+
+In the morning we would be awakened by the rain's forcing its way through
+the window and wetting the bed, and would get up and mop out the saloon.
+After breakfast I would try to work, but the beating of the hail upon the
+roof just over my head would drive every idea out of my brain, and, after
+a wasted hour or two, I would fling down my pen and hunt up Ethelbertha,
+and we would put on our mackintoshes and take our umbrellas and go out
+for a row.  At mid-day we would return and put on some dry clothes, and
+sit down to dinner.
+
+In the afternoon the storm generally freshened up a bit, and we were kept
+pretty busy rushing about with towels and cloths, trying to prevent the
+water from coming into the rooms and swamping us.  During tea-time the
+saloon was usually illuminated by forked lightning.  The evenings we
+spent in baling out the boat, after which we took it in turns to go into
+the kitchen and warm ourselves.  At eight we supped, and from then until
+it was time to go to bed we sat wrapped up in rugs, listening to the
+roaring of the thunder, and the howling of the wind, and the lashing of
+the waves, and wondering whether the boat would hold out through the
+night.
+
+Friends would come down to spend the day with us--elderly, irritable
+people, fond of warmth and comfort; people who did not, as a rule, hanker
+after jaunts, even under the most favourable conditions; but who had been
+persuaded by our silly talk that a day on the river would be to them like
+a Saturday to Monday in Paradise.
+
+They would arrive soaked; and we would shut them up in different bunks,
+and leave them to strip themselves and put on things of Ethelbertha's or
+of mine.  But Ethel and I, in those days, were slim, so that stout,
+middle-aged people in our clothes neither looked well nor felt happy.
+
+Upon their emerging we would take them into the saloon and try to
+entertain them by telling them what we had intended to do with them had
+the day been fine.  But their answers were short, and occasionally
+snappy, and after a while the conversation would flag, and we would sit
+round reading last week's newspapers and coughing.
+
+The moment their own clothes were dry (we lived in a perpetual atmosphere
+of steaming clothes) they would insist upon leaving us, which seemed to
+me discourteous after all that we had done for them, and would dress
+themselves once more and start off home, and get wet again before they
+got there.
+
+We would generally receive a letter a few days afterwards, written by
+some relative, informing us that both patients were doing as well as
+could be expected, and promising to send us a card for the funeral in
+case of a relapse.
+
+Our chief recreation, our sole consolation, during the long weeks of our
+imprisonment, was to watch from our windows the pleasure-seekers passing
+by in small open boats, and to reflect what an awful day they had had, or
+were going to have, as the case might be.
+
+In the forenoon they would head up stream--young men with their
+sweethearts; nephews taking out their rich old aunts; husbands and wives
+(some of them pairs, some of them odd ones); stylish-looking girls with
+cousins; energetic-looking men with dogs; high-class silent parties; low-
+class noisy parties; quarrelsome family parties--boatload after boatload
+they went by, wet, but still hopeful, pointing out bits of blue sky to
+each other.
+
+In the evening they would return, drenched and gloomy, saying
+disagreeable things to one another.
+
+One couple, and one couple only, out of the many hundreds that passed
+under our review, came back from the ordeal with pleasant faces.  He was
+rowing hard and singing, with a handkerchief tied round his head to keep
+his hat on, and she was laughing at him, while trying to hold up an
+umbrella with one hand and steer with the other.
+
+There are but two explanations to account for people being jolly on the
+river in the rain.  The one I dismissed as being both uncharitable and
+improbable.  The other was creditable to the human race, and, adopting
+it, I took off my cap to this damp but cheerful pair as they went by.
+They answered with a wave of the hand, and I stood looking after them
+till they disappeared in the mist.
+
+I am inclined to think that those young people, if they be still alive,
+are happy.  Maybe, fortune has been kind to them, or maybe she has not,
+but in either event they are, I am inclined to think, happier than are
+most people.
+
+Now and again, the daily tornado would rage with such fury as to defeat
+its own purpose by prematurely exhausting itself.  On these rare
+occasions we would sit out on the deck, and enjoy the unwonted luxury of
+fresh air.
+
+I remember well those few pleasant evenings: the river, luminous with the
+drowned light, the dark banks where the night lurked, the storm-tossed
+sky, jewelled here and there with stars.
+
+It was delightful not to hear for an hour or so the sullen thrashing of
+the rain; but to listen to the leaping of the fishes, the soft swirl
+raised by some water-rat, swimming stealthily among the rushes, the
+restless twitterings of the few still wakeful birds.
+
+An old corncrake lived near to us, and the way he used to disturb all the
+other birds, and keep them from going to sleep, was shameful.  Amenda,
+who was town-bred, mistook him at first for one of those cheap alarm
+clocks, and wondered who was winding him up, and why they went on doing
+it all night; and, above all, why they didn't oil him.
+
+He would begin his unhallowed performance about dusk, just as every
+respectable bird was preparing to settle down for the night.  A family of
+thrushes had their nest a few yards from his stand, and they used to get
+perfectly furious with him.
+
+"There's that fool at it again," the female thrush would say; "why can't
+he do it in the daytime if he must do it at all?"  (She spoke, of course,
+in twitters, but I am confident the above is a correct translation.)
+
+After a while, the young thrushes would wake up and begin chirping, and
+then the mother would get madder than ever.
+
+"Can't you say something to him?" she would cry indignantly to her
+husband.  "How do you think the children can get to sleep, poor things,
+with that hideous row going on all night?  Might just as well be living
+in a saw-mill."
+
+Thus adjured, the male thrush would put his head over the nest, and call
+out in a nervous, apologetic manner:--
+
+"I say, you know, you there, I wish you wouldn't mind being quiet a bit.
+My wife says she can't get the children to sleep.  It's too bad, you
+know, 'pon my word it is."
+
+"Gor on," the corncrake would answer surlily.  "You keep your wife
+herself quiet; that's enough for you to do."  And on he would go again
+worse than before.
+
+Then a mother blackbird, from a little further off, would join in the
+fray.
+
+"Ah, it's a good hiding he wants, not a talking to.  And if I was a cock,
+I'd give it him."  (This remark would be made in a tone of withering
+contempt, and would appear to bear reference to some previous
+discussion.)
+
+"You're quite right, ma'am," Mrs. Thrush would reply.  "That's what I
+tell my husband, but" (with rising inflection, so that every lady in the
+plantation might hear) "_he_ wouldn't move himself, bless you--no, not if
+I and the children were to die before his eyes for want of sleep."
+
+"Ah, he ain't the only one, my dear," the blackbird would pipe back,
+"they're all alike"; then, in a voice more of sorrow than of anger:--"but
+there, it ain't their fault, I suppose, poor things.  If you ain't got
+the spirit of a bird you can't help yourself."
+
+I would strain my ears at this point to hear if the male blackbird was
+moved at all by these taunts, but the only sound I could ever detect
+coming from his neighbourhood was that of palpably exaggerated snoring.
+
+By this time the whole glade would be awake, expressing views concerning
+that corncrake that would have wounded a less callous nature.
+
+"Blow me tight, Bill," some vulgar little hedge-sparrow would chirp out,
+in the midst of the hubbub, "if I don't believe the gent thinks 'e's a-
+singing."
+
+"'Tain't 'is fault," Bill would reply, with mock sympathy.  "Somebody's
+put a penny in the slot, and 'e can't stop 'isself."
+
+Irritated by the laugh that this would call forth from the younger birds,
+the corncrake would exert himself to be more objectionable than ever,
+and, as a means to this end, would commence giving his marvellous
+imitation of the sharpening of a rusty saw by a steel file.
+
+But at this an old crow, not to be trifled with, would cry out angrily:--
+
+"Stop that, now.  If I come down to you I'll peck your cranky head off, I
+will."
+
+And then would follow silence for a quarter of an hour, after which the
+whole thing would begin again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Brown and MacShaughnassy came down together on the Saturday afternoon;
+and, as soon as they had dried themselves, and had had some tea, we
+settled down to work.
+
+Jephson had written that he would not be able to be with us until late in
+the evening, and Brown proposed that we should occupy ourselves until his
+arrival with plots.
+
+"Let each of us," said he, "sketch out a plot.  Afterwards we can compare
+them, and select the best."
+
+This we proceeded to do.  The plots themselves I forget, but I remember
+that at the subsequent judging each man selected his own, and became so
+indignant at the bitter criticism to which it was subjected by the other
+two, that he tore it up; and, for the next half-hour, we sat and smoked
+in silence.
+
+When I was very young I yearned to know other people's opinion of me and
+all my works; now, my chief aim is to avoid hearing it.  In those days,
+had any one told me there was half a line about myself in a newspaper, I
+should have tramped London to obtain that publication.  Now, when I see a
+column headed with my name, I hurriedly fold up the paper and put it away
+from me, subduing my natural curiosity to read it by saying to myself,
+"Why should you?  It will only upset you for the day."
+
+In my cubhood I possessed a friend.  Other friends have come into my life
+since--very dear and precious friends--but they have none of them been to
+me quite what this friend was.  Because he was my first friend, and we
+lived together in a world that was much bigger than this world--more full
+of joy and of grief; and, in that world, we loved and hated deeper than
+we love and hate in this smaller world that I have come to dwell in
+since.
+
+He also had the very young man's craving to be criticised, and we made it
+our custom to oblige each other.  We did not know then that what we
+meant, when we asked for "criticism," was encouragement.  We thought that
+we were strong--one does at the beginning of the battle, and that we
+could bear to hear the truth.
+
+Accordingly, each one pointed out to the other one his errors, and this
+task kept us both so busy that we had never time to say a word of praise
+to one another.  That we each had a high opinion of the other's talents I
+am convinced, but our heads were full of silly saws.  We said to
+ourselves: "There are many who will praise a man; it is only his friend
+who will tell him of his faults."  Also, we said: "No man sees his own
+shortcomings, but when these are pointed out to him by another he is
+grateful, and proceeds to mend them."
+
+As we came to know the world better, we learnt the fallacy of these
+ideas.  But then it was too late, for the mischief had been done.
+
+When one of us had written anything, he would read it to the other, and
+when he had finished he would say, "Now, tell me what you think of
+it--frankly and as a friend."
+
+Those were his words.  But his thoughts, though he may not have known
+them, were:--
+
+"Tell me it is clever and good, my friend, even if you do not think so.
+The world is very cruel to those that have not yet conquered it, and,
+though we keep a careless face, our young hearts are scored with
+wrinkles.  Often we grow weary and faint-hearted.  Is it not so, my
+friend?  No one has faith in us, and in our dark hours we doubt
+ourselves.  You are my comrade.  You know what of myself I have put into
+this thing that to others will be but an idle half-hour's reading.  Tell
+me it is good, my friend.  Put a little heart into me, I pray you."
+
+But the other, full of the lust of criticism, which is civilisation's
+substitute for cruelty, would answer more in frankness than in
+friendship.  Then he who had written would flush angrily, and scornful
+words would pass.
+
+One evening, he read me a play he had written.  There was much that was
+good in it, but there were also faults (there are in some plays), and
+these I seized upon and made merry over.  I could hardly have dealt out
+to the piece more unnecessary bitterness had I been a professional
+critic.
+
+As soon as I paused from my sport he rose, and, taking his manuscript
+from the table, tore it in two, and flung it in the fire--he was but a
+very young man, you must remember--and then, standing before me with a
+white face, told me, unsolicited, his opinion of me and of my art.  After
+which double event, it is perhaps needless to say that we parted in hot
+anger.
+
+I did not see him again for years.  The streets of life are very crowded,
+and if we loose each other's hands we are soon hustled far apart.  When I
+did next meet him it was by accident.
+
+I had left the Whitehall Rooms after a public dinner, and, glad of the
+cool night air, was strolling home by the Embankment.  A man, slouching
+along under the trees, paused as I overtook him.
+
+"You couldn't oblige me with a light, could you, guv'nor?" he said.  The
+voice sounded strange, coming from the figure that it did.
+
+I struck a match, and held it out to him, shaded by my hands.  As the
+faint light illumined his face, I started back, and let the match fall:--
+
+"Harry!"
+
+He answered with a short dry laugh.  "I didn't know it was you," he said,
+"or I shouldn't have stopped you."
+
+"How has it come to this, old fellow?" I asked, laying my hand upon his
+shoulder.  His coat was unpleasantly greasy, and I drew my hand away
+again as quickly as I could, and tried to wipe it covertly upon my
+handkerchief.
+
+"Oh, it's a long, story," he answered carelessly, "and too conventional
+to be worth telling.  Some of us go up, you know.  Some of us go down.
+You're doing pretty well, I hear."
+
+"I suppose so," I replied; "I've climbed a few feet up a greasy pole, and
+am trying to stick there.  But it is of you I want to talk.  Can't I do
+anything for you?"
+
+We were passing under a gas-lamp at the moment.  He thrust his face
+forward close to mine, and the light fell full and pitilessly upon it.
+
+"Do I look like a man you could do anything for?" he said.
+
+We walked on in silence side by side, I casting about for words that
+might seize hold of him.
+
+"You needn't worry about me," he continued after a while, "I'm
+comfortable enough.  We take life easily down here where I am.  We've no
+disappointments."
+
+"Why did you give up like a weak coward?" I burst out angrily.  "You had
+talent.  You would have won with ordinary perseverance."
+
+"Maybe," he replied, in the same even tone of indifference.  "I suppose I
+hadn't the grit.  I think if somebody had believed in me it might have
+helped me.  But nobody did, and at last I lost belief in myself.  And
+when a man loses that, he's like a balloon with the gas let out."
+
+I listened to his words in indignation and astonishment.  "Nobody
+believed in you!" I repeated.  "Why, _I_ always believed in you, you know
+that I--"
+
+Then I paused, remembering our "candid criticism" of one another.
+
+"Did you?" he replied quietly, "I never heard you say so.  Good-night."
+
+In the course of our Strandward walking we had come to the neighbourhood
+of the Savoy, and, as he spoke, he disappeared down one of the dark
+turnings thereabouts.
+
+I hastened after him, calling him by name, but though I heard his quick
+steps before me for a little way, they were soon swallowed up in the
+sound of other steps, and, when I reached the square in which the chapel
+stands, I had lost all trace of him.
+
+A policeman was standing by the churchyard railings, and of him I made
+inquiries.
+
+"What sort of a gent was he, sir?" questioned the man.
+
+"A tall thin gentleman, very shabbily dressed--might be mistaken for a
+tramp."
+
+"Ah, there's a good many of that sort living in this town," replied the
+man.  "I'm afraid you'll have some difficulty in finding him."
+
+Thus for a second time had I heard his footsteps die away, knowing I
+should never listen for their drawing near again.
+
+I wondered as I walked on--I have wondered before and since--whether Art,
+even with a capital A, is quite worth all the suffering that is inflicted
+in her behalf--whether she and we are better for all the scorning and the
+sneering, all the envying and the hating, that is done in her name.
+
+Jephson arrived about nine o'clock in the ferry-boat.  We were made
+acquainted with this fact by having our heads bumped against the sides of
+the saloon.
+
+Somebody or other always had their head bumped whenever the ferry-boat
+arrived.  It was a heavy and cumbersome machine, and the ferry-boy was
+not a good punter.  He admitted this frankly, which was creditable of
+him.  But he made no attempt to improve himself; that is, where he was
+wrong.  His method was to arrange the punt before starting in a line with
+the point towards which he wished to proceed, and then to push hard,
+without ever looking behind him, until something suddenly stopped him.
+This was sometimes the bank, sometimes another boat, occasionally a
+steamer, from six to a dozen times a day our riparian dwelling.  That he
+never succeeded in staving the houseboat in speaks highly for the man who
+built her.
+
+One day he came down upon us with a tremendous crash.  Amenda was walking
+along the passage at the moment, and the result to her was that she
+received a violent blow first on the left side of her head and then on
+the right.
+
+She was accustomed to accept one bump as a matter of course, and to
+regard it as an intimation from the boy that he had come; but this double
+knock annoyed her: so much "style" was out of place in a mere ferry-boy.
+Accordingly she went out to him in a state of high indignation.
+
+"What do you think you are?" she cried, balancing accounts by boxing his
+ears first on one side and then on the other, "a torpedo!  What are you
+doing here at all?  What do you want?"
+
+"I don't want nothin'," explained the boy, rubbing his head; "I've
+brought a gent down."
+
+"A gent?" said Amenda, looking round, but seeing no one.  "What gent?"
+
+"A stout gent in a straw 'at," answered the boy, staring round him
+bewilderedly.
+
+"Well, where is he?" asked Amenda.
+
+"I dunno," replied the boy, in an awed voice; "'e was a-standin' there,
+at the other end of the punt, a-smokin' a cigar."
+
+Just then a head appeared above the water, and a spent but infuriated
+swimmer struggled up between the houseboat and the bank.
+
+"Oh, there 'e is!" cried the boy delightedly, evidently much relieved at
+this satisfactory solution of the mystery; "'e must ha' tumbled off the
+punt."
+
+"You're quite right, my lad, that's just what he did do, and there's your
+fee for assisting him to do it."  Saying which, my dripping friend, who
+had now scrambled upon deck, leant over, and following Amenda's excellent
+example, expressed his feelings upon the boy's head.
+
+There was one comforting reflection about the transaction as a whole, and
+that was that the ferry-boy had at last received a fit and proper reward
+for his services.  I had often felt inclined to give him something
+myself.  I think he was, without exception, the most clumsy and stupid
+boy I have ever come across; and that is saying a good deal.
+
+His mother undertook that for three-and-sixpence a week he should "make
+himself generally useful" to us for a couple of hours every morning.
+
+Those were the old lady's very words, and I repeated them to Amenda when
+I introduced the boy to her.
+
+"This is James, Amenda," I said; "he will come down here every morning at
+seven, and bring us our milk and the letters, and from then till nine he
+will make himself generally useful."
+
+Amenda took stock of him.
+
+"It will be a change of occupation for him, sir, I should say, by the
+look of him," she remarked.
+
+After that, whenever some more than usually stirring crash or
+blood-curdling bump would cause us to leap from our seats and cry: "What
+on earth has happened?"  Amenda would reply: "Oh, it's only James, mum,
+making himself generally useful."
+
+Whatever he lifted he let fall; whatever he touched he upset; whatever he
+came near--that was not a fixture--he knocked over; if it was a fixture,
+it knocked _him_ over.  This was not carelessness: it seemed to be a
+natural gift.  Never in his life, I am convinced, had he carried a
+bucketful of anything anywhere without tumbling over it before he got
+there.  One of his duties was to water the flowers on the roof.
+Fortunately--for the flowers--Nature, that summer, stood drinks with a
+lavishness sufficient to satisfy the most confirmed vegetable toper:
+otherwise every plant on our boat would have died from drought.  Never
+one drop of water did they receive from him.  He was for ever taking them
+water, but he never arrived there with it.  As a rule he upset the pail
+before he got it on to the boat at all, and this was the best thing that
+could happen, because then the water simply went back into the river, and
+did no harm to any one.  Sometimes, however, he would succeed in landing
+it, and then the chances were he would spill it over the deck or into the
+passage.  Now and again, he would get half-way up the ladder before the
+accident occurred.  Twice he nearly reached the top; and once he actually
+did gain the roof.  What happened there on that memorable occasion will
+never be known.  The boy himself, when picked up, could explain nothing.
+It is supposed that he lost his head with the pride of the achievement,
+and essayed feats that neither his previous training nor his natural
+abilities justified him in attempting.  However that may be, the fact
+remains that the main body of the water came down the kitchen chimney;
+and that the boy and the empty pail arrived together on deck before they
+knew they had started.
+
+When he could find nothing else to damage, he would go out of his way to
+upset himself.  He could not be sure of stepping from his own punt on to
+the boat with safety.  As often as not, he would catch his foot in the
+chain or the punt-pole, and arrive on his chest.
+
+Amenda used to condole with him.  "Your mother ought to be ashamed of
+herself," I heard her telling him one morning; "she could never have
+taught you to walk.  What you want is a go-cart."
+
+He was a willing lad, but his stupidity was super-natural.  A comet
+appeared in the sky that year, and everybody was talking about it.  One
+day he said to me:--
+
+"There's a comet coming, ain't there, sir?"  He talked about it as though
+it were a circus.
+
+"Coming!" I answered, "it's come.  Haven't you seen it?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"Oh, well, you have a look for it to-night.  It's worth seeing."
+
+"Yees, sir, I should like to see it.  It's got a tail, ain't it, sir?"
+
+"Yes, a very fine tail."
+
+"Yees, sir, they said it 'ad a tail.  Where do you go to see it, sir?"
+
+"Go!  You don't want to go anywhere.  You'll see it in your own garden at
+ten o'clock."
+
+He thanked me, and, tumbling over a sack of potatoes, plunged head
+foremost into his punt and departed.
+
+Next morning, I asked him if he had seen the comet.
+
+"No, sir, I couldn't see it anywhere."
+
+"Did you look?"
+
+"Yees, sir.  I looked a long time."
+
+"How on earth did you manage to miss it then?" I exclaimed.  "It was a
+clear enough night.  Where did you look?"
+
+"In our garden, sir.  Where you told me."
+
+"Whereabouts in the garden?" chimed in Amenda, who happened to be
+standing by; "under the gooseberry bushes?"
+
+"Yees--everywhere."
+
+That is what he had done: he had taken the stable lantern and searched
+the garden for it.
+
+But the day when he broke even his own record for foolishness happened
+about three weeks later.  MacShaughnassy was staying with us at the time,
+and on the Friday evening he mixed us a salad, according to a recipe
+given him by his aunt.  On the Saturday morning, everybody was, of
+course, very ill.  Everybody always is very ill after partaking of any
+dish prepared by MacShaughnassy.  Some people attempt to explain this
+fact by talking glibly of "cause and effect."  MacShaughnassy maintains
+that it is simply coincidence.
+
+"How do you know," he says, "that you wouldn't have been ill if you
+hadn't eaten any?  You're queer enough now, any one can see, and I'm very
+sorry for you; but, for all that you can tell, if you hadn't eaten any of
+that stuff you might have been very much worse--perhaps dead.  In all
+probability, it has saved your life."  And for the rest of the day, he
+assumes towards you the attitude of a man who has dragged you from the
+grave.
+
+The moment Jimmy arrived I seized hold of him.
+
+"Jimmy," I said, "you must rush off to the chemist's immediately.  Don't
+stop for anything.  Tell him to give you something for colic--the result
+of vegetable poisoning.  It must be something very strong, and enough for
+four.  Don't forget, something to counteract the effects of vegetable
+poisoning.  Hurry up, or it may be too late."
+
+My excitement communicated itself to the boy.  He tumbled back into his
+punt, and pushed off vigorously.  I watched him land, and disappear in
+the direction of the village.
+
+Half an hour passed, but Jimmy did not return.  No one felt sufficiently
+energetic to go after him.  We had only just strength enough to sit still
+and feebly abuse him.  At the end of an hour we were all feeling very
+much better.  At the end of an hour and a half we were glad he had not
+returned when he ought to have, and were only curious as to what had
+become of him.
+
+In the evening, strolling through the village, we saw him sitting by the
+open door of his mother's cottage, with a shawl wrapped round him.  He
+was looking worn and ill.
+
+"Why, Jimmy," I said, "what's the matter?  Why didn't you come back this
+morning?"
+
+"I couldn't, sir," Jimmy answered, "I was so queer.  Mother made me go to
+bed."
+
+"You seemed all right in the morning," I said; "what's made you queer?"
+
+"What Mr. Jones give me, sir: it upset me awful."
+
+A light broke in upon me.
+
+"What did you say, Jimmy, when you got to Mr. Jones's shop?" I asked.
+
+"I told 'im what you said, sir, that 'e was to give me something to
+counteract the effects of vegetable poisoning.  And that it was to be
+very strong, and enough for four."
+
+"And what did he say?"
+
+"'E said that was only your nonsense, sir, and that I'd better have
+enough for one to begin with; and then 'e asked me if I'd been eating
+green apples again."
+
+"And you told him?"
+
+"Yees, sir, I told 'im I'd 'ad a few, and 'e said it served me right, and
+that 'e 'oped it would be a warning to me.  And then 'e put something
+fizzy in a glass and told me to drink it."
+
+"And you drank it?"
+
+"Yees, sir."
+
+"It never occurred to you, Jimmy, that there was nothing the matter with
+you--that you were never feeling better in your life, and that you did
+not require any medicine?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"Did one single scintilla of thought of any kind occur to you in
+connection with the matter, Jimmy, from beginning to end?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+People who never met Jimmy disbelieve this story.  They argue that its
+premises are in disaccord with the known laws governing human nature,
+that its details do not square with the average of probability.  People
+who have seen and conversed with Jimmy accept it with simple faith.
+
+The advent of Jephson--which I trust the reader has not entirely
+forgotten--cheered us up considerably.  Jephson was always at his best
+when all other things were at their worst.  It was not that he struggled
+in Mark Tapley fashion to appear most cheerful when most depressed; it
+was that petty misfortunes and mishaps genuinely amused and inspirited
+him.  Most of us can recall our unpleasant experiences with amused
+affection; Jephson possessed the robuster philosophy that enabled him to
+enjoy his during their actual progress.  He arrived drenched to the skin,
+chuckling hugely at the idea of having come down on a visit to a
+houseboat in such weather.
+
+Under his warming influence, the hard lines on our faces thawed, and by
+supper time we were, as all Englishmen and women who wish to enjoy life
+should be, independent of the weather.
+
+Later on, as if disheartened by our indifference, the rain ceased, and we
+took our chairs out on the deck, and sat watching the lightning, which
+still played incessantly.  Then, not unnaturally, the talk drifted into a
+sombre channel, and we began recounting stories, dealing with the gloomy
+and mysterious side of life.
+
+Some of these were worth remembering, and some were not.  The one that
+left the strongest impression on my mind was a tale that Jephson told us.
+
+I had been relating a somewhat curious experience of my own.  I met a man
+in the Strand one day that I knew very well, as I thought, though I had
+not seen him for years.  We walked together to Charing Cross, and there
+we shook hands and parted.  Next morning, I spoke of this meeting to a
+mutual friend, and then I learnt, for the first time, that the man had
+died six months before.
+
+The natural inference was that I had mistaken one man for another, an
+error that, not having a good memory for faces, I frequently fall into.
+What was remarkable about the matter, however, was that throughout our
+walk I had conversed with the man under the impression that he was that
+other dead man, and, whether by coincidence or not, his replies had never
+once suggested to me my mistake.
+
+As soon as I finished, Jephson, who had been listening very thoughtfully,
+asked me if I believed in spiritualism "to its fullest extent."
+
+"That is rather a large question," I answered.  "What do you mean by
+'spiritualism to its fullest extent'?"
+
+"Well, do you believe that the spirits of the dead have not only the
+power of revisiting this earth at their will, but that, when here, they
+have the power of action, or rather, of exciting to action?  Let me put a
+definite case.  A spiritualist friend of mine, a sensible and by no means
+imaginative man, once told me that a table, through the medium of which
+the spirit of a friend had been in the habit of communicating with him,
+came slowly across the room towards him, of its own accord, one night as
+he sat alone, and pinioned him against the wall.  Now can any of you
+believe that, or can't you?"
+
+"I could," Brown took it upon himself to reply; "but, before doing so, I
+should wish for an introduction to the friend who told you the story.
+Speaking generally," he continued, "it seems to me that the difference
+between what we call the natural and the supernatural is merely the
+difference between frequency and rarity of occurrence.  Having regard to
+the phenomena we are compelled to admit, I think it illogical to
+disbelieve anything we are unable to disprove."
+
+"For my part," remarked MacShaughnassy, "I can believe in the ability of
+our spirit friends to give the quaint entertainments credited to them
+much easier than I can in their desire to do so."
+
+"You mean," added Jephson, "that you cannot understand why a spirit, not
+compelled as we are by the exigencies of society, should care to spend
+its evenings carrying on a laboured and childish conversation with a room
+full of abnormally uninteresting people."
+
+"That is precisely what I cannot understand," MacShaughnassy agreed.
+
+"Nor I, either," said Jephson.  "But I was thinking of something very
+different altogether.  Suppose a man died with the dearest wish of his
+heart unfulfilled, do you believe that his spirit might have power to
+return to earth and complete the interrupted work?"
+
+"Well," answered MacShaughnassy, "if one admits the possibility of
+spirits retaining any interest in the affairs of this world at all, it is
+certainly more reasonable to imagine them engaged upon a task such as you
+suggest, than to believe that they occupy themselves with the performance
+of mere drawing-room tricks.  But what are you leading up to?"
+
+"Why, to this," replied Jephson, seating himself straddle-legged across
+his chair, and leaning his arms upon the back.  "I was told a story this
+morning at the hospital by an old French doctor.  The actual facts are
+few and simple; all that is known can be read in the Paris police records
+of sixty-two years ago.
+
+"The most important part of the case, however, is the part that is not
+known, and that never will be known.
+
+"The story begins with a great wrong done by one man unto another man.
+What the wrong was I do not know.  I am inclined to think, however, it
+was connected with a woman.  I think that, because he who had been
+wronged hated him who had wronged him with a hate such as does not often
+burn in a man's brain, unless it be fanned by the memory of a woman's
+breath.
+
+"Still that is only conjecture, and the point is immaterial.  The man who
+had done the wrong fled, and the other man followed him.  It became a
+point-to-point race, the first man having the advantage of a day's start.
+The course was the whole world, and the stakes were the first man's life.
+
+"Travellers were few and far between in those days, and this made the
+trail easy to follow.  The first man, never knowing how far or how near
+the other was behind him, and hoping now and again that he might have
+baffled him, would rest for a while.  The second man, knowing always just
+how far the first one was before him, never paused, and thus each day the
+man who was spurred by Hate drew nearer to the man who was spurred by
+Fear.
+
+"At this town the answer to the never-varied question would be:--
+
+"'At seven o'clock last evening, M'sieur.'
+
+"'Seven--ah; eighteen hours.  Give me something to eat, quick, while the
+horses are being put to.'
+
+"At the next the calculation would be sixteen hours.
+
+"Passing a lonely chalet, Monsieur puts his head out of the window:--
+
+"'How long since a carriage passed this way, with a tall, fair man
+inside?'
+
+"'Such a one passed early this morning, M'sieur.'
+
+"'Thanks, drive on, a hundred francs apiece if you are through the pass
+before daybreak.'
+
+"'And what for dead horses, M'sieur?'
+
+"'Twice their value when living.'
+
+"One day the man who was ridden by Fear looked up, and saw before him the
+open door of a cathedral, and, passing in, knelt down and prayed.  He
+prayed long and fervently, for men, when they are in sore straits, clutch
+eagerly at the straws of faith.  He prayed that he might be forgiven his
+sin, and, more important still, that he might be pardoned the
+consequences of his sin, and be delivered from his adversary; and a few
+chairs from him, facing him, knelt his enemy, praying also.
+
+"But the second man's prayer, being a thanksgiving merely, was short, so
+that when the first man raised his eyes, he saw the face of his enemy
+gazing at him across the chair-tops, with a mocking smile upon it.
+
+"He made no attempt to rise, but remained kneeling, fascinated by the
+look of joy that shone out of the other man's eyes.  And the other man
+moved the high-backed chairs one by one, and came towards him softly.
+
+"Then, just as the man who had been wronged stood beside the man who had
+wronged him, full of gladness that his opportunity had come, there burst
+from the cathedral tower a sudden clash of bells, and the man, whose
+opportunity had come, broke his heart and fell back dead, with that
+mocking smile still playing round his mouth.
+
+"And so he lay there.
+
+"Then the man who had done the wrong rose up and passed out, praising
+God.
+
+"What became of the body of the other man is not known.  It was the body
+of a stranger who had died suddenly in the cathedral.  There was none to
+identify it, none to claim it.
+
+"Years passed away, and the survivor in the tragedy became a worthy and
+useful citizen, and a noted man of science.
+
+"In his laboratory were many objects necessary to him in his researches,
+and, prominent among them, stood in a certain corner a human skeleton.  It
+was a very old and much-mended skeleton, and one day the long-expected
+end arrived, and it tumbled to pieces.
+
+"Thus it became necessary to purchase another.
+
+"The man of science visited a dealer he well knew--a little parchment-
+faced old man who kept a dingy shop, where nothing was ever sold, within
+the shadow of the towers of Notre Dame.
+
+"The little parchment-faced old man had just the very thing that Monsieur
+wanted--a singularly fine and well-proportioned 'study.'  It should be
+sent round and set up in Monsieur's laboratory that very afternoon.
+
+"The dealer was as good as his word.  When Monsieur entered his
+laboratory that evening, the thing was in its place.
+
+"Monsieur seated himself in his high-backed chair, and tried to collect
+his thoughts.  But Monsieur's thoughts were unruly, and inclined to
+wander, and to wander always in one direction.
+
+"Monsieur opened a large volume and commenced to read.  He read of a man
+who had wronged another and fled from him, the other man following.
+Finding himself reading this, he closed the book angrily, and went and
+stood by the window and looked out.  He saw before him the sun-pierced
+nave of a great cathedral, and on the stones lay a dead man with a
+mocking smile upon his face.
+
+"Cursing himself for a fool, he turned away with a laugh.  But his laugh
+was short-lived, for it seemed to him that something else in the room was
+laughing also.  Struck suddenly still, with his feet glued to the ground,
+he stood listening for a while: then sought with starting eyes the corner
+from where the sound had seemed to come.  But the white thing standing
+there was only grinning.
+
+"Monsieur wiped the damp sweat from his head and hands, and stole out.
+
+"For a couple of days he did not enter the room again.  On the third,
+telling himself that his fears were those of a hysterical girl, he opened
+the door and went in.  To shame himself, he took his lamp in his hand,
+and crossing over to the far corner where the skeleton stood, examined
+it.  A set of bones bought for three hundred francs.  Was he a child, to
+be scared by such a bogey!
+
+"He held his lamp up in front of the thing's grinning head.  The flame of
+the lamp flickered as though a faint breath had passed over it.
+
+"The man explained this to himself by saying that the walls of the house
+were old and cracked, and that the wind might creep in anywhere.  He
+repeated this explanation to himself as he recrossed the room, walking
+backwards, with his eyes fixed on the thing.  When he reached his desk,
+he sat down and gripped the arms of his chair till his fingers turned
+white.
+
+"He tried to work, but the empty sockets in that grinning head seemed to
+be drawing him towards them.  He rose and battled with his inclination to
+fly screaming from the room.  Glancing fearfully about him, his eye fell
+upon a high screen, standing before the door.  He dragged it forward, and
+placed it between himself and the thing, so that he could not see it--nor
+it see him.  Then he sat down again to his work.  For a while he forced
+himself to look at the book in front of him, but at last, unable to
+control himself any longer, he suffered his eyes to follow their own
+bent.
+
+"It may have been an hallucination.  He may have accidentally placed the
+screen so as to favour such an illusion.  But what he saw was a bony hand
+coming round the corner of the screen, and, with a cry, he fell to the
+floor in a swoon.
+
+"The people of the house came running in, and lifting him up, carried him
+out, and laid him upon his bed.  As soon as he recovered, his first
+question was, where had they found the thing--where was it when they
+entered the room? and when they told him they had seen it standing where
+it always stood, and had gone down into the room to look again, because
+of his frenzied entreaties, and returned trying to hide their smiles, he
+listened to their talk about overwork, and the necessity for change and
+rest, and said they might do with him as they would.
+
+"So for many months the laboratory door remained locked.  Then there came
+a chill autumn evening when the man of science opened it again, and
+closed it behind him.
+
+"He lighted his lamp, and gathered his instruments and books around him,
+and sat down before them in his high-backed chair.  And the old terror
+returned to him.
+
+"But this time he meant to conquer himself.  His nerves were stronger
+now, and his brain clearer; he would fight his unreasoning fear.  He
+crossed to the door and locked himself in, and flung the key to the other
+end of the room, where it fell among jars and bottles with an echoing
+clatter.
+
+"Later on, his old housekeeper, going her final round, tapped at his door
+and wished him good-night, as was her custom.  She received no response,
+at first, and, growing nervous, tapped louder and called again; and at
+length an answering 'good-night' came back to her.
+
+"She thought little about it at the time, but afterwards she remembered
+that the voice that had replied to her had been strangely grating and
+mechanical.  Trying to describe it, she likened it to such a voice as she
+would imagine coming from a statue.
+
+"Next morning his door remained still locked.  It was no unusual thing
+for him to work all night and far into the next day, so no one thought to
+be surprised.  When, however, evening came, and yet he did not appear,
+his servants gathered outside the room and whispered, remembering what
+had happened once before.
+
+"They listened, but could hear no sound.  They shook the door and called
+to him, then beat with their fists upon the wooden panels.  But still no
+sound came from the room.
+
+"Becoming alarmed, they decided to burst open the door, and, after many
+blows, it gave way, and they crowded in.
+
+"He sat bolt upright in his high-backed chair.  They thought at first he
+had died in his sleep.  But when they drew nearer and the light fell upon
+him, they saw the livid marks of bony fingers round his throat; and in
+his eyes there was a terror such as is not often seen in human eyes."
+
+* * * * *
+
+Brown was the first to break the silence that followed.  He asked me if I
+had any brandy on board.  He said he felt he should like just a nip of
+brandy before going to bed.  That is one of the chief charms of Jephson's
+stories: they always make you feel you want a little brandy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+"Cats," remarked Jephson to me, one afternoon, as we sat in the punt
+discussing the plot of our novel, "cats are animals for whom I entertain
+a very great respect.  Cats and Nonconformists seem to me the only things
+in this world possessed of a practicable working conscience.  Watch a cat
+doing something mean and wrong--if ever one gives you the chance; notice
+how anxious she is that nobody should see her doing it; and how prompt,
+if detected, to pretend that she was not doing it--that she was not even
+thinking of doing it--that, as a matter of fact, she was just about to do
+something else, quite different.  You might almost think they had a soul.
+
+"Only this morning I was watching that tortoise-shell of yours on the
+houseboat.  She was creeping along the roof, behind the flower-boxes,
+stalking a young thrush that had perched upon a coil of rope.  Murder
+gleamed from her eye, assassination lurked in every twitching muscle of
+her body.  As she crouched to spring, Fate, for once favouring the weak,
+directed her attention to myself, and she became, for the first time,
+aware of my presence.  It acted upon her as a heavenly vision upon a
+Biblical criminal.  In an instant she was a changed being.  The wicked
+beast, going about seeking whom it might devour, had vanished.  In its
+place sat a long-tailed, furry angel, gazing up into the sky with an
+expression that was one-third innocence and two-thirds admiration of the
+beauties of nature.  What was she doing there, did I want to know?  Why,
+could I not see, playing with a bit of earth.  Surely I was not so evil-
+minded as to imagine she wanted to kill that dear little bird--God bless
+it.
+
+"Then note an old Tom, slinking home in the early morning, after a night
+spent on a roof of bad repute.  Can you picture to yourself a living
+creature less eager to attract attention?  'Dear me,' you can all but
+hear it saying to itself, 'I'd no idea it was so late; how time does go
+when one is enjoying oneself.  I do hope I shan't meet any one I
+know--very awkward, it's being so light.'
+
+"In the distance it sees a policeman, and stops suddenly within the
+shelter of a shadow.  'Now what's he doing there,' it says, 'and close to
+our door too?  I can't go in while he's hanging about.  He's sure to see
+and recognise me; and he's just the sort of man to talk to the servants.'
+
+"It hides itself behind a post and waits, peeping cautiously round the
+corner from time to time.  The policeman, however, seems to have taken up
+his residence at that particular spot, and the cat becomes worried and
+excited.
+
+"'What's the matter with the fool?' it mutters indignantly; 'is he dead?
+Why don't he move on, he's always telling other people to.  Stupid ass.'
+
+"Just then a far-off cry of 'milk' is heard, and the cat starts up in an
+agony of alarm.  'Great Scott, hark at that!  Why, everybody will be down
+before I get in.  Well, I can't help it.  I must chance it.'
+
+"He glances round at himself, and hesitates.  'I wouldn't mind if I
+didn't look so dirty and untidy,' he muses; 'people are so prone to think
+evil in this world.'
+
+"'Ah, well,' he adds, giving himself a shake, 'there's nothing else for
+it, I must put my trust in Providence, it's pulled me through before:
+here goes.'
+
+"He assumes an aspect of chastened sorrow, and trots along with a demure
+and saddened step.  It is evident he wishes to convey the idea that he
+has been out all night on work connected with the Vigilance Association,
+and is now returning home sick at heart because of the sights that he has
+seen.
+
+"He squirms in, unnoticed, through a window, and has just time to give
+himself a hurried lick down before he hears the cook's step on the
+stairs.  When she enters the kitchen he is curled up on the hearthrug,
+fast asleep.  The opening of the shutters awakes him.  He rises and comes
+forward, yawning and stretching himself.
+
+"'Dear me, is it morning, then?' he says drowsily.  'Heigh-ho!  I've had
+such a lovely sleep, cook; and such a beautiful dream about poor mother.'
+
+"Cats! do you call them?  Why, they are Christians in everything except
+the number of legs."
+
+"They certainly are," I responded, "wonderfully cunning little animals,
+and it is not by their moral and religious instincts alone that they are
+so closely linked to man; the marvellous ability they display in taking
+care of 'number one' is worthy of the human race itself.  Some friends of
+mine had a cat, a big black Tom: they have got half of him still.  They
+had reared him from a kitten, and, in their homely, undemonstrative way,
+they liked him.  There was nothing, however, approaching passion on
+either side.
+
+"One day a Chinchilla came to live in the neighbourhood, under the charge
+of an elderly spinster, and the two cats met at a garden wall party.
+
+"'What sort of diggings have you got?' asked the Chinchilla.
+
+"'Oh, pretty fair.'
+
+"'Nice people?'
+
+"'Yes, nice enough--as people go.'
+
+"'Pretty willing?  Look after you well, and all that sort of thing?'
+
+"'Yes--oh yes.  I've no fault to find with them.'
+
+"'What's the victuals like?'
+
+"'Oh, the usual thing, you know, bones and scraps, and a bit of
+dog-biscuit now and then for a change.'
+
+"'Bones and dog-biscuits!  Do you mean to say you eat bones?'
+
+"'Yes, when I can get 'em.  Why, what's wrong about them?'
+
+"'Shade of Egyptian Isis, bones and dog-biscuits!  Don't you ever get any
+spring chickens, or a sardine, or a lamb cutlet?'
+
+"'Chickens!  Sardines!  What are you talking about?  What are sardines?'
+
+"'What are sardines!  Oh, my dear child (the Chinchilla was a lady cat,
+and always called gentlemen friends a little older than herself 'dear
+child'), these people of yours are treating you just shamefully.  Come,
+sit down and tell me all about it.  What do they give you to sleep on?'
+
+"'The floor.'
+
+"'I thought so; and skim milk and water to drink, I suppose?'
+
+"'It _is_ a bit thin.'
+
+"'I can quite imagine it.  You must leave these people, my dear, at
+once.'
+
+"'But where am I to go to?'
+
+"'Anywhere.'
+
+"'But who'll take me in?'
+
+"'Anybody, if you go the right way to work.  How many times do you think
+I've changed my people?  Seven!--and bettered myself on each occasion.
+Why, do you know where I was born?  In a pig-sty.  There were three of
+us, mother and I and my little brother.  Mother would leave us every
+evening, returning generally just as it was getting light.  One morning
+she did not come back.  We waited and waited, but the day passed on and
+she did not return, and we grew hungrier and hungrier, and at last we lay
+down, side by side, and cried ourselves to sleep.
+
+"'In the evening, peeping through a hole in the door, we saw her coming
+across the field.  She was crawling very slowly, with her body close down
+against the ground.  We called to her, and she answered with a low
+"crroo"; but she did not hasten her pace.
+
+"'She crept in and rolled over on her side, and we ran to her, for we
+were almost starving.  We lay long upon her breasts, and she licked us
+over and over.
+
+"'I dropped asleep upon her, and in the night I awoke, feeling cold.  I
+crept closer to her, but that only made me colder still, and she was wet
+and clammy with a dark moisture that was oozing from her side.  I did not
+know what it was at that time, but I have learnt since.
+
+"'That was when I could hardly have been four weeks old, and from that
+day to this I've looked after myself: you've got to do that in this
+world, my dear.  For a while, I and my brother lived on in that sty and
+kept ourselves.  It was a grim struggle at first, two babies fighting for
+life; but we pulled through.  At the end of about three months, wandering
+farther from home than usual, I came upon a cottage, standing in the
+fields.  It looked warm and cosy through the open door, and I went in: I
+have always been blessed with plenty of nerve.  Some children were
+playing round the fire, and they welcomed me and made much of me.  It was
+a new sensation to me, and I stayed there.  I thought the place a palace
+at the time.
+
+"'I might have gone on thinking so if it had not been that, passing
+through the village one day, I happened to catch sight of a room behind a
+shop.  There was a carpet on the floor, and a rug before the fire.  I had
+never known till then that there were such luxuries in the world.  I
+determined to make that shop my home, and I did so.'
+
+"'How did you manage it?' asked the black cat, who was growing
+interested.
+
+"'By the simple process of walking in and sitting down.  My dear child,
+cheek's the "Open sesame" to every door.  The cat that works hard dies of
+starvation, the cat that has brains is kicked downstairs for a fool, and
+the cat that has virtue is drowned for a scamp; but the cat that has
+cheek sleeps on a velvet cushion and dines on cream and horseflesh.  I
+marched straight in and rubbed myself against the old man's legs.  He and
+his wife were quite taken with what they called my "trustfulness," and
+adopted me with enthusiasm.  Strolling about the fields of an evening I
+often used to hear the children of the cottage calling my name.  It was
+weeks before they gave up seeking for me.  One of them, the youngest,
+would sob herself to sleep of a night, thinking that I was dead: they
+were affectionate children.
+
+"'I boarded with my shopkeeping friends for nearly a year, and from them
+I went to some new people who had lately come to the neighbourhood, and
+who possessed a really excellent cook.  I think I could have been very
+satisfied with these people, but, unfortunately, they came down in the
+world, and had to give up the big house and the cook, and take a cottage,
+and I did not care to go back to that sort of life.
+
+"'Accordingly I looked about for a fresh opening.  There was a curious
+old fellow who lived not far off.  People said he was rich, but nobody
+liked him.  He was shaped differently from other men.  I turned the
+matter over in my mind for a day or two, and then determined to give him
+a trial.  Being a lonely sort of man, he might make a fuss over me, and
+if not I could go.
+
+"'My surmise proved correct.  I have never been more petted than I was by
+"Toady," as the village boys had dubbed him.  My present guardian is
+foolish enough over me, goodness knows, but she has other ties, while
+"Toady" had nothing else to love, not even himself.  He could hardly
+believe his eyes at first when I jumped up on his knees and rubbed myself
+against his ugly face.  "Why, Kitty," he said, "do you know you're the
+first living thing that has ever come to me of its own accord."  There
+were tears in his funny little red eyes as he said that.
+
+"'I remained two years with "Toady," and was very happy indeed.  Then he
+fell ill, and strange people came to the house, and I was neglected.
+"Toady" liked me to come up and lie upon the bed, where he could stroke
+me with his long, thin hand, and at first I used to do this.  But a sick
+man is not the best of company, as you can imagine, and the atmosphere of
+a sick room not too healthy, so, all things considered, I felt it was
+time for me to make a fresh move.
+
+"'I had some difficulty in getting away.  "Toady" was always asking for
+me, and they tried to keep me with him: he seemed to lie easier when I
+was there.  I succeeded at length, however, and, once outside the door, I
+put sufficient distance between myself and the house to ensure my not
+being captured, for I knew "Toady" so long as he lived would never cease
+hoping to get me back.
+
+"'Where to go, I did not know.  Two or three homes were offered me, but
+none of them quite suited me.  At one place, where I put up for a day,
+just to see how I liked it, there was a dog; and at another, which would
+otherwise have done admirably, they kept a baby.  Whatever you do, never
+stop at a house where they keep a baby.  If a child pulls your tail or
+ties a paper bag round your head, you can give it one for itself and
+nobody blames you.  "Well, serve you right," they say to the yelling
+brat, "you shouldn't tease the poor thing."  But if you resent a baby's
+holding you by the throat and trying to gouge out your eye with a wooden
+ladle, you are called a spiteful beast, and "shoo'd" all round the
+garden.  If people keep babies, they don't keep me; that's my rule.
+
+"'After sampling some three or four families, I finally fixed upon a
+banker.  Offers more advantageous from a worldly point of view were open
+to me.  I could have gone to a public-house, where the victuals were
+simply unlimited, and where the back door was left open all night.  But
+about the banker's (he was also a churchwarden, and his wife never smiled
+at anything less than a joke by the bishop) there was an atmosphere of
+solid respectability that I felt would be comforting to my nature.  My
+dear child, you will come across cynics who will sneer at respectability:
+don't you listen to them.  Respectability is its own reward--and a very
+real and practical reward.  It may not bring you dainty dishes and soft
+beds, but it brings you something better and more lasting.  It brings you
+the consciousness that you are living the right life, that you are doing
+the right thing, that, so far as earthly ingenuity can fix it, you are
+going to the right place, and that other folks ain't.  Don't you ever let
+any one set you against respectability.  It's the most satisfying thing I
+know of in this world--and about the cheapest.
+
+"'I was nearly three years with this family, and was sorry when I had to
+go.  I should never have left if I could have helped it, but one day
+something happened at the bank which necessitated the banker's taking a
+sudden journey to Spain, and, after that, the house became a somewhat
+unpleasant place to live in.  Noisy, disagreeable people were continually
+knocking at the door and making rows in the passage; and at night folks
+threw bricks at the windows.
+
+"'I was in a delicate state of health at the time, and my nerves could
+not stand it.  I said good-bye to the town, and making my way back into
+the country, put up with a county family.
+
+"'They were great swells, but I should have preferred them had they been
+more homely.  I am of an affectionate disposition, and I like every one
+about me to love me.  They were good enough to me in their distant way,
+but they did not take much notice of me, and I soon got tired of
+lavishing attentions on people that neither valued nor responded to them.
+
+"'From these people I went to a retired potato merchant.  It was a social
+descent, but a rise so far as comfort and appreciation were concerned.
+They appeared to be an exceedingly nice family, and to be extremely fond
+of me.  I say they "appeared" to be these things, because the sequel
+proved that they were neither.  Six months after I had come to them they
+went away and left me.  They never asked me to accompany them.  They made
+no arrangements for me to stay behind.  They evidently did not care what
+became of me.  Such egotistical indifference to the claims of friendship
+I had never before met with.  It shook my faith--never too robust--in
+human nature.  I determined that, in future, no one should have the
+opportunity of disappointing my trust in them.  I selected my present
+mistress on the recommendation of a gentleman friend of mine who had
+formerly lived with her.  He said she was an excellent caterer.  The only
+reason he had left her was that she expected him to be in at ten each
+night, and that hour didn't fit in with his other arrangements.  It made
+no difference to me--as a matter of fact, I do not care for these
+midnight _reunions_ that are so popular amongst us.  There are always too
+many cats for one properly to enjoy oneself, and sooner or later a rowdy
+element is sure to creep in.  I offered myself to her, and she accepted
+me gratefully.  But I have never liked her, and never shall.  She is a
+silly old woman, and bores me.  She is, however, devoted to me, and,
+unless something extra attractive turns up, I shall stick to her.
+
+"'That, my dear, is the story of my life, so far as it has gone.  I tell
+it you to show you how easy it is to be "taken in."  Fix on your house,
+and mew piteously at the back door.  When it is opened run in and rub
+yourself against the first leg you come across.  Rub hard, and look up
+confidingly.  Nothing gets round human beings, I have noticed, quicker
+than confidence.  They don't get much of it, and it pleases them.  Always
+be confiding.  At the same time be prepared for emergencies.  If you are
+still doubtful as to your reception, try and get yourself slightly wet.
+Why people should prefer a wet cat to a dry one I have never been able to
+understand; but that a wet cat is practically sure of being taken in and
+gushed over, while a dry cat is liable to have the garden hose turned
+upon it, is an undoubted fact.  Also, if you can possibly manage it, and
+it is offered you, eat a bit of dry bread.  The Human Race is always
+stirred to its deepest depths by the sight of a cat eating a bit of dry
+bread.'
+
+"My friend's black Tom profited by the Chinchilla's wisdom.  A catless
+couple had lately come to live next door.  He determined to adopt them on
+trial.  Accordingly, on the first rainy day, he went out soon after lunch
+and sat for four hours in an open field.  In the evening, soaked to the
+skin, and feeling pretty hungry, he went mewing to their door.  One of
+the maids opened it, he rushed under her skirts and rubbed himself
+against her legs.  She screamed, and down came the master and the
+mistress to know what was the matter.
+
+"'It's a stray cat, mum,' said the girl.
+
+"'Turn it out,' said the master.
+
+"'Oh no, don't,' said the mistress.
+
+"'Oh, poor thing, it's wet,' said the housemaid.
+
+"'Perhaps it's hungry,' said the cook.
+
+"'Try it with a bit of dry bread,' sneered the master, who wrote for the
+newspapers, and thought he knew everything.
+
+"A stale crust was proffered.  The cat ate it greedily, and afterwards
+rubbed himself gratefully against the man's light trousers.
+
+"This made the man ashamed of himself, likewise of his trousers. 'Oh,
+well, let it stop if it wants to,' he said.
+
+"So the cat was made comfortable, and stayed on.
+
+"Meanwhile its own family were seeking for it high and low.  They had not
+cared over much for it while they had had it; now it was gone, they were
+inconsolable.  In the light of its absence, it appeared to them the one
+thing that had made the place home.  The shadows of suspicion gathered
+round the case.  The cat's disappearance, at first regarded as a mystery,
+began to assume the shape of a crime.  The wife openly accused the
+husband of never having liked the animal, and more than hinted that he
+and the gardener between them could give a tolerably truthful account of
+its last moments; an insinuation that the husband repudiated with a
+warmth that only added credence to the original surmise.
+
+"The bull-terrier was had up and searchingly examined.  Fortunately for
+him, he had not had a single fight for two whole days.  Had any recent
+traces of blood been detected upon him, it would have gone hard with him.
+
+"The person who suffered most, however, was the youngest boy.  Three
+weeks before, he had dressed the cat in doll's clothes and taken it round
+the garden in the perambulator.  He himself had forgotten the incident,
+but Justice, though tardy, was on his track.  The misdeed was suddenly
+remembered at the very moment when unavailing regret for the loss of the
+favourite was at its deepest, so that to box his ears and send him, then
+and there, straight off to bed was felt to be a positive relief.
+
+"At the end of a fortnight, the cat, finding he had not, after all,
+bettered himself, came back.  The family were so surprised that at first
+they could not be sure whether he was flesh and blood, or a spirit come
+to comfort them.  After watching him eat half a pound of raw steak, they
+decided he was material, and caught him up and hugged him to their
+bosoms.  For a week they over-fed him and made much of him.  Then, the
+excitement cooling, he found himself dropping back into his old position,
+and didn't like it, and went next door again.
+
+"The next door people had also missed him, and they likewise greeted his
+return with extravagant ebullitions of joy.  This gave the cat an idea.
+He saw that his game was to play the two families off one against the
+other; which he did.  He spent an alternate fortnight with each, and
+lived like a fighting cock.  His return was always greeted with
+enthusiasm, and every means were adopted to induce him to stay.  His
+little whims were carefully studied, his favourite dishes kept in
+constant readiness.
+
+"The destination of his goings leaked out at length, and then the two
+families quarrelled about him over the fence.  My friend accused the
+newspaper man of having lured him away.  The newspaper man retorted that
+the poor creature had come to his door wet and starving, and added that
+he would be ashamed to keep an animal merely to ill-treat it.  They have
+a quarrel about him twice a week on the average.  It will probably come
+to blows one of these days."
+
+Jephson appeared much surprised by this story.  He remained thoughtful
+and silent.  I asked him if he would like to hear any more, and as he
+offered no active opposition I went on.  (Maybe he was asleep; that idea
+did not occur to me at the time.)
+
+I told him of my grandmother's cat, who, after living a blameless life
+for upwards of eleven years, and bringing up a family of something like
+sixty-six, not counting those that died in infancy and the water-butt,
+took to drink in her old age, and was run over while in a state of
+intoxication (oh, the justice of it! ) by a brewer's dray.  I have read
+in temperance tracts that no dumb animal will touch a drop of alcoholic
+liquor.  My advice is, if you wish to keep them respectable, don't give
+them a chance to get at it.  I knew a pony--But never mind him; we are
+talking about my grandmother's cat.
+
+A leaky beer-tap was the cause of her downfall.  A saucer used to be
+placed underneath it to catch the drippings.  One day the cat, coming in
+thirsty, and finding nothing else to drink, lapped up a little, liked it,
+and lapped a little more, went away for half an hour, and came back and
+finished the saucerful.  Then sat down beside it, and waited for it to
+fill again.
+
+From that day till the hour she died, I don't believe that cat was ever
+once quite sober.  Her days she passed in a drunken stupor before the
+kitchen fire.  Her nights she spent in the beer cellar.
+
+My grandmother, shocked and grieved beyond expression, gave up her barrel
+and adopted bottles.  The cat, thus condemned to enforced abstinence,
+meandered about the house for a day and a half in a disconsolate,
+quarrelsome mood.  Then she disappeared, returning at eleven o'clock as
+tight as a drum.
+
+Where she went, and how she managed to procure the drink, we never
+discovered; but the same programme was repeated every day.  Some time
+during the morning she would contrive to elude our vigilance and escape;
+and late every evening she would come reeling home across the fields in a
+condition that I will not sully my pen by attempting to describe.
+
+It was on Saturday night that she met the sad end to which I have before
+alluded.  She must have been very drunk, for the man told us that, in
+consequence of the darkness, and the fact that his horses were tired, he
+was proceeding at little more than a snail's pace.
+
+I think my grandmother was rather relieved than otherwise.  She had been
+very fond of the cat at one time, but its recent conduct had alienated
+her affection.  We children buried it in the garden under the mulberry
+tree, but the old lady insisted that there should be no tombstone, not
+even a mound raised.  So it lies there, unhonoured, in a drunkard's
+grave.
+
+I also told him of another cat our family had once possessed.  She was
+the most motherly thing I have ever known.  She was never happy without a
+family.  Indeed, I cannot remember her when she hadn't a family in one
+stage or another.  She was not very particular what sort of a family it
+was.  If she could not have kittens, then she would content herself with
+puppies or rats.  Anything that she could wash and feed seemed to satisfy
+her.  I believe she would have brought up chickens if we had entrusted
+them to her.
+
+All her brains must have run to motherliness, for she hadn't much sense.
+She could never tell the difference between her own children and other
+people's.  She thought everything young was a kitten.  We once mixed up a
+spaniel puppy that had lost its own mother among her progeny.  I shall
+never forget her astonishment when it first barked.  She boxed both its
+ears, and then sat looking down at it with an expression of indignant
+sorrow that was really touching.
+
+"You're going to be a credit to your mother," she seemed to be saying
+"you're a nice comfort to any one's old age, you are, making a row like
+that.  And look at your ears flopping all over your face.  I don't know
+where you pick up such ways."
+
+He was a good little dog.  He did try to mew, and he did try to wash his
+face with his paw, and to keep his tail still, but his success was not
+commensurate with his will.  I do not know which was the sadder to
+reflect upon, his efforts to become a creditable kitten, or his foster-
+mother's despair of ever making him one.
+
+Later on we gave her a baby squirrel to rear.  She was nursing a family
+of her own at the time, but she adopted him with enthusiasm, under the
+impression that he was another kitten, though she could not quite make
+out how she had come to overlook him.  He soon became her prime
+favourite.  She liked his colour, and took a mother's pride in his tail.
+What troubled her was that it would cock up over his head.  She would
+hold it down with one paw, and lick it by the half-hour together, trying
+to make it set properly.  But the moment she let it go up it would cock
+again.  I have heard her cry with vexation because of this.
+
+One day a neighbouring cat came to see her, and the squirrel was clearly
+the subject of their talk.
+
+"It's a good colour," said the friend, looking critically at the supposed
+kitten, who was sitting up on his haunches combing his whiskers, and
+saying the only truthfully pleasant thing about him that she could think
+of.
+
+"He's a lovely colour," exclaimed our cat proudly.
+
+"I don't like his legs much," remarked the friend.
+
+"No," responded his mother thoughtfully, "you're right there.  His legs
+are his weak point.  I can't say I think much of his legs myself."
+
+"Maybe they'll fill out later on," suggested the friend, kindly.
+
+"Oh, I hope so," replied the mother, regaining her momentarily dashed
+cheerfulness.  "Oh yes, they'll come all right in time.  And then look at
+his tail.  Now, honestly, did you ever see a kitten with a finer tail?"
+
+"Yes, it's a good tail," assented the other; "but why do you do it up
+over his head?"
+
+"I don't," answered our cat.  "It goes that way.  I can't make it out.  I
+suppose it will come straight as he gets older."
+
+"It will be awkward if it don't," said the friend.
+
+"Oh, but I'm sure it will," replied our cat.  "I must lick it more.  It's
+a tail that wants a good deal of licking, you can see that."
+
+And for hours that afternoon, after the other cat had gone, she sat
+trimming it; and, at the end, when she lifted her paw off it, and it flew
+back again like a steel spring over the squirrel's head, she sat and
+gazed at it with feelings that only those among my readers who have been
+mothers themselves will be able to comprehend.
+
+"What have I done," she seemed to say--"what have I done that this
+trouble should come upon me?"
+
+Jephson roused himself on my completion of this anecdote and sat up.
+
+"You and your friends appear to have been the possessors of some very
+remarkable cats," he observed.
+
+"Yes," I answered, "our family has been singularly fortunate in its
+cats."
+
+"Singularly so," agreed Jephson; "I have never met but one man from whom
+I have heard more wonderful cat talk than, at one time or another, I have
+from you."
+
+"Oh," I said, not, perhaps without a touch of jealousy in my voice, "and
+who was he?"
+
+"He was a seafaring man," replied Jephson.  "I met him on a Hampstead
+tram, and we discussed the subject of animal sagacity.
+
+"'Yes, sir,' he said, 'monkeys is cute.  I've come across monkeys as
+could give points to one or two lubbers I've sailed under; and elephants
+is pretty spry, if you can believe all that's told of 'em.  I've heard
+some tall tales about elephants.  And, of course, dogs has their heads
+screwed on all right: I don't say as they ain't.  But what I do say is:
+that for straightfor'ard, level-headed reasoning, give me cats.  You see,
+sir, a dog, he thinks a powerful deal of a man--never was such a cute
+thing as a man, in a dog's opinion; and he takes good care that everybody
+knows it.  Naturally enough, we says a dog is the most intellectual
+animal there is.  Now a cat, she's got her own opinion about human
+beings.  She don't say much, but you can tell enough to make you anxious
+not to hear the whole of it.  The consequence is, we says a cat's got no
+intelligence.  That's where we let our prejudice steer our judgment
+wrong.  In a matter of plain common sense, there ain't a cat living as
+couldn't take the lee side of a dog and fly round him.  Now, have you
+ever noticed a dog at the end of a chain, trying to kill a cat as is
+sitting washing her face three-quarters of an inch out of his reach?  Of
+course you have.  Well, who's got the sense out of those two?  The cat
+knows that it ain't in the nature of steel chains to stretch.  The dog,
+who ought, you'd think, to know a durned sight more about 'em than she
+does, is sure they will if you only bark loud enough.
+
+"'Then again, have you ever been made mad by cats screeching in the
+night, and jumped out of bed and opened the window and yelled at them?
+Did they ever budge an inch for that, though you shrieked loud enough to
+skeer the dead, and waved your arms about like a man in a play?  Not
+they.  They've turned and looked at you, that's all.  "Yell away, old
+man," they've said, "we like to hear you: the more the merrier."  Then
+what have you done?  Why, you've snatched up a hair-brush, or a boot, or
+a candlestick, and made as if you'd throw it at them.  They've seen your
+attitude, they've seen the thing in your hand, but they ain't moved a
+point.  They knew as you weren't going to chuck valuable property out of
+window with the chance of getting it lost or spoiled.  They've got sense
+themselves, and they give you credit for having some.  If you don't
+believe that's the reason, you try showing them a lump of coal, or half a
+brick, next time--something as they know you _will_ throw.  Before you're
+ready to heave it, there won't be a cat within aim.
+
+"'Then as to judgment and knowledge of the world, why dogs are babies to
+'em.  Have you ever tried telling a yarn before a cat, sir?'
+
+"I replied that cats had often been present during anecdotal recitals of
+mine, but that, hitherto, I had paid no particular attention to their
+demeanour.
+
+"'Ah, well, you take an opportunity of doing so one day, sir,' answered
+the old fellow; 'it's worth the experiment.  If you're telling a story
+before a cat, and she don't get uneasy during any part of the narrative,
+you can reckon you've got hold of a thing as it will be safe for you to
+tell to the Lord Chief Justice of England.
+
+"'I've got a messmate,' he continued; 'William Cooley is his name.  We
+call him Truthful Billy.  He's as good a seaman as ever trod
+quarter-deck; but when he gets spinning yarns he ain't the sort of man as
+I could advise you to rely upon.  Well, Billy, he's got a dog, and I've
+seen him sit and tell yarns before that dog that would make a cat squirm
+out of its skin, and that dog's taken 'em in and believed 'em.  One
+night, up at his old woman's, Bill told us a yarn by the side of which
+salt junk two voyages old would pass for spring chicken.  I watched the
+dog, to see how he would take it.  He listened to it from beginning to
+end with cocked ears, and never so much as blinked.  Every now and then
+he would look round with an expression of astonishment or delight that
+seemed to say: "Wonderful, isn't it!"  "Dear me, just think of it!"  "Did
+you ever!"  "Well, if that don't beat everything!"  He was a
+chuckle-headed dog; you could have told him anything.
+
+"'It irritated me that Bill should have such an animal about him to
+encourage him, and when he had finished I said to him, "I wish you'd tell
+that yarn round at my quarters one evening."
+
+"'Why?' said Bill.
+
+"'Oh, it's just a fancy of mine,' I says.  I didn't tell him I was
+wanting my old cat to hear it.
+
+"'Oh, all right,' says Bill, 'you remind me.'  He loved yarning, Billy
+did.
+
+"'Next night but one he slings himself up in my cabin, and I does so.
+Nothing loth, off he starts.  There was about half-a-dozen of us
+stretched round, and the cat was sitting before the fire fussing itself
+up.  Before Bill had got fairly under weigh, she stops washing and looks
+up at me, puzzled like, as much as to say, "What have we got here, a
+missionary?"  I signalled to her to keep quiet, and Bill went on with his
+yarn.  When he got to the part about the sharks, she turned deliberately
+round and looked at him.  I tell you there was an expression of disgust
+on that cat's face as might have made a travelling Cheap Jack feel
+ashamed of himself.  It was that human, I give you my word, sir, I forgot
+for the moment as the poor animal couldn't speak.  I could see the words
+that were on its lips: "Why don't you tell us you swallowed the anchor?"
+and I sat on tenter-hooks, fearing each instant that she would say them
+aloud.  It was a relief to me when she turned her back on Bill.
+
+"'For a few minutes she sat very still, and seemed to be wrestling with
+herself like.  I never saw a cat more set on controlling its feelings, or
+that seemed to suffer more in silence.  It made my heart ache to watch
+it.
+
+"'At last Bill came to the point where he and the captain between 'em
+hold the shark's mouth open while the cabin-boy dives in head foremost,
+and fetches up, undigested, the gold watch and chain as the bo'sun was a-
+wearing when he fell overboard; and at that the old cat giv'd a screech,
+and rolled over on her side with her legs in the air.
+
+"'I thought at first the poor thing was dead, but she rallied after a
+bit, and it seemed as though she had braced herself up to hear the thing
+out.
+
+"'But a little further on, Bill got too much for her again, and this time
+she owned herself beat.  She rose up and looked round at us: "You'll
+excuse me, gentlemen," she said--leastways that is what she said if looks
+go for anything--"maybe you're used to this sort of rubbish, and it don't
+get on your nerves.  With me it's different.  I guess I've heard as much
+of this fool's talk as my constitution will stand, and if it's all the
+same to you I'll get outside before I'm sick."
+
+"'With that she walked up to the door, and I opened it for her, and she
+went out.
+
+"'You can't fool a cat with talk same as you can a dog.'"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+Does man ever reform?  Balzac says he doesn't.  So far as my experience
+goes, it agrees with that of Balzac--a fact the admirers of that author
+are at liberty to make what use of they please.
+
+When I was young and accustomed to take my views of life from people who
+were older than myself, and who knew better, so they said, I used to
+believe that he did.  Examples of "reformed characters" were frequently
+pointed out to me--indeed, our village, situate a few miles from a small
+seaport town, seemed to be peculiarly rich in such.  They were, from all
+accounts, including their own, persons who had formerly behaved with
+quite unnecessary depravity, and who, at the time I knew them, appeared
+to be going to equally objectionable lengths in the opposite direction.
+They invariably belonged to one of two classes, the low-spirited or the
+aggressively unpleasant.  They said, and I believed, that they were
+happy; but I could not help reflecting how very sad they must have been
+before they were happy.
+
+One of them, a small, meek-eyed old man with a piping voice, had been
+exceptionally wild in his youth.  What had been his special villainy I
+could never discover.  People responded to my inquiries by saying that he
+had been "Oh, generally bad," and increased my longing for detail by
+adding that little boys ought not to want to know about such things.  From
+their tone and manner I assumed that he must have been a pirate at the
+very least, and regarded him with awe, not unmingled with secret
+admiration.
+
+Whatever it was, he had been saved from it by his wife, a bony lady of
+unprepossessing appearance, but irreproachable views.
+
+One day he called at our house for some purpose or other, and, being left
+alone with him for a few minutes, I took the opportunity of interviewing
+him personally on the subject.
+
+"You were very wicked once, weren't you?" I said, seeking by emphasis on
+the "once" to mitigate what I felt might be the disagreeable nature of
+the question.
+
+To my intense surprise, a gleam of shameful glory lit up his wizened
+face, and a sound which I tried to think a sigh, but which sounded like a
+chuckle, escaped his lips.
+
+"Ay," he replied; "I've been a bit of a spanker in my time."
+
+The term "spanker" in such connection puzzled me.  I had been hitherto
+led to regard a spanker as an eminently conscientious person, especially
+where the shortcomings of other people were concerned; a person who
+laboured for the good of others.  That the word could also be employed to
+designate a sinful party was a revelation to me.
+
+"But you are good now, aren't you?" I continued, dismissing further
+reflection upon the etymology of "spanker" to a more fitting occasion.
+
+"Ay, ay," he answered, his countenance resuming its customary aspect of
+resigned melancholy.  "I be a brand plucked from the burning, I be.  There
+beant much wrong wi' Deacon Sawyers, now."
+
+"And it was your wife that made you good, wasn't it?" I persisted,
+determined, now that I had started this investigation, to obtain
+confirmation at first hand on all points.
+
+At the mention of his wife his features became suddenly transformed.
+Glancing hurriedly round, to make sure, apparently, that no one but
+myself was within hearing, he leaned across and hissed these words into
+my ear--I have never forgotten them, there was a ring of such evident
+sincerity about them--
+
+"I'd like to skin her, I'd like to skin her alive."
+
+It struck me, even in the light of my then limited judgment, as an
+unregenerate wish; and thus early my faith in the possibility of man's
+reformation received the first of those many blows that have resulted in
+shattering it.
+
+Nature, whether human or otherwise, was not made to be reformed.  You can
+develop, you can check, but you cannot alter it.
+
+You can take a small tiger and train it to sit on a hearthrug, and to lap
+milk, and so long as you provide it with hearthrugs to lie on and
+sufficient milk to drink, it will purr and behave like an affectionate
+domestic pet.  But it is a tiger, with all a tiger's instincts, and its
+progeny to the end of all time will be tigers.
+
+In the same way, you can take an ape and develop it through a few
+thousand generations until it loses its tail and becomes an altogether
+superior ape.  You can go on developing it through still a few more
+thousands of generations until it gathers to itself out of the waste
+vapours of eternity an intellect and a soul, by the aid of which it is
+enabled to keep the original apish nature more or less under control.
+
+But the ape is still there, and always will be, and every now and again,
+when Constable Civilisation turns his back for a moment, as during
+"Spanish Furies," or "September massacres," or Western mob rule, it
+creeps out and bites and tears at quivering flesh, or plunges its hairy
+arms elbow deep in blood, or dances round a burning nigger.
+
+I knew a man once--or, rather, I knew of a man--who was a confirmed
+drunkard.  He became and continued a drunkard, not through weakness, but
+through will.  When his friends remonstrated with him, he told them to
+mind their own business, and to let him mind his.  If he saw any reason
+for not getting drunk he would give it up.  Meanwhile he liked getting
+drunk, and he meant to get drunk as often as possible.
+
+He went about it deliberately, and did it thoroughly.  For nearly ten
+years, so it was reported, he never went to bed sober.  This may be an
+exaggeration--it would be a singular report were it not--but it can be
+relied upon as sufficiently truthful for all practical purposes.
+
+Then there came a day when he did see a reason for not getting drunk.  He
+signed no pledge, he took no oath.  He said, "I will never touch another
+drop of drink," and for twenty-six years he kept his word.
+
+At the end of that time a combination of circumstances occurred that made
+life troublesome to him, so that he desired to be rid of it altogether.
+He was a man accustomed, when he desired a thing within his reach, to
+stretch out his hand and take it.  He reviewed the case calmly, and
+decided to commit suicide.
+
+If the thing were to be done at all, it would be best, for reasons that
+if set forth would make this a long story, that it should be done that
+very night, and, if possible, before eleven o'clock, which was the
+earliest hour a certain person could arrive from a certain place.
+
+It was then four in the afternoon.  He attended to some necessary
+business, and wrote some necessary letters.  This occupied him until
+seven.  He then called a cab and drove to a small hotel in the suburbs,
+engaged a private room, and ordered up materials for the making of the
+particular punch that had been the last beverage he had got drunk on, six-
+and-twenty years ago.
+
+For three hours he sat there drinking steadily, with his watch before
+him.  At half-past ten he rang the bell, paid his bill, came home, and
+cut his throat.
+
+For a quarter of a century people had been calling that man a "reformed
+character."  His character had not reformed one jot.  The craving for
+drink had never died.  For twenty-six years he had, being a great man,
+held it gripped by the throat.  When all things became a matter of
+indifference to him, he loosened his grasp, and the evil instinct rose up
+within him as strong on the day he died as on the day he forced it down.
+
+That is all a man can do, pray for strength to crush down the evil that
+is in him, and to keep it held down day after day.  I never hear washy
+talk about "changed characters" and "reformed natures" but I think of a
+sermon I once heard at a Wesleyan revivalist meeting in the Black
+Country.
+
+"Ah! my friends, we've all of us got the devil inside us.  I've got him,
+you've got him," cried the preacher--he was an old man, with long white
+hair and beard, and wild, fighting eyes.  Most of the preachers who came
+"reviving," as it was called, through that district, had those eyes.  Some
+of them needed "reviving" themselves, in quite another sense, before they
+got clear out of it.  I am speaking now of more than thirty years ago.
+
+"Ah! so us have--so us have," came the response.
+
+"And you carn't get rid of him," continued the speaker.
+
+"Not of oursel's," ejaculated a fervent voice at the end of the room,
+"but the Lord will help us."
+
+The old preacher turned on him almost fiercely:--
+
+"But th' Lord woan't," he shouted; "doan't 'ee reckon on that, lad.  Ye've
+got him an' ye've got ta keep him.  Ye carn't get rid of him.  Th' Lord
+doan't mean 'ee to."
+
+Here there broke forth murmurs of angry disapproval, but the old fellow
+went on, unheeding:--
+
+"It arn't good for 'ee to get rid of him.  Ye've just got to hug him
+tight.  Doan't let him go.  Hold him fast, and--LAM INTO HIM.  I tell 'ee
+it's good, healthy Christian exercise."
+
+We had been discussing the subject with reference to our hero.  It had
+been suggested by Brown as an unhackneyed idea, and one lending itself,
+therefore, to comparative freshness of treatment, that our hero should be
+a thorough-paced scamp.
+
+Jephson seconded the proposal, for the reason that it would the better
+enable us to accomplish artistic work.  He was of opinion that we should
+be more sure of our ground in drawing a villain than in attempting to
+portray a good man.
+
+MacShaughnassy thirded (if I may coin what has often appeared to me to be
+a much-needed word) the motion with ardour.  He was tired, he said, of
+the crystal-hearted, noble-thinking young man of fiction.  Besides, it
+made bad reading for the "young person."  It gave her false ideas, and
+made her dissatisfied with mankind as he really is.
+
+And, thereupon, he launched forth and sketched us his idea of a hero,
+with reference to whom I can only say that I should not like to meet him
+on a dark night.
+
+Brown, our one earnest member, begged us to be reasonable, and reminded
+us, not for the first time, and not, perhaps, altogether unnecessarily,
+that these meetings were for the purpose of discussing business, not of
+talking nonsense.
+
+Thus adjured, we attacked the subject conscientiously.
+
+Brown's idea was that the man should be an out-and-out blackguard, until
+about the middle of the book, when some event should transpire that would
+have the effect of completely reforming him.  This naturally brought the
+discussion down to the question with which I have commenced this chapter:
+Does man ever reform?  I argued in the negative, and gave the reasons for
+my disbelief much as I have set them forth here.  MacShaughnassy, on the
+other hand, contended that he did, and instanced the case of himself--a
+man who, in his early days, so he asserted, had been a scatterbrained,
+impracticable person, entirely without stability.
+
+I maintained that this was merely an example of enormous will-power
+enabling a man to overcome and rise superior to the defects of character
+with which nature had handicapped him.
+
+"My opinion of you," I said, "is that you are naturally a hopelessly
+irresponsible, well-meaning ass.  But," I continued quickly, seeing his
+hand reaching out towards a complete Shakespeare in one volume that lay
+upon the piano, "your mental capabilities are of such extraordinary power
+that you can disguise this fact, and make yourself appear a man of sense
+and wisdom."
+
+Brown agreed with me that in MacShaughnassy's case traces of the former
+disposition were clearly apparent, but pleaded that the illustration was
+an unfortunate one, and that it ought not to have weight in the
+discussion.
+
+"Seriously speaking," said he, "don't you think that there are some
+experiences great enough to break up and re-form a man's nature?"
+
+"To break up," I replied, "yes; but to re-form, no.  Passing through a
+great experience may shatter a man, or it may strengthen a man, just as
+passing through a furnace may melt or purify metal, but no furnace ever
+lit upon this earth can change a bar of gold into a bar of lead, or a bar
+of lead into one of gold."
+
+I asked Jephson what he thought.  He did not consider the bar of gold
+simile a good one.  He held that a man's character was not an immutable
+element.  He likened it to a drug--poison or elixir--compounded by each
+man for himself from the pharmacopoeia of all things known to life and
+time, and saw no impossibility, though some improbability, in the glass
+being flung aside and a fresh draught prepared with pain and labour.
+
+"Well," I said, "let us put the case practically; did you ever know a
+man's character to change?"
+
+"Yes," he answered, "I did know a man whose character seemed to me to be
+completely changed by an experience that happened to him.  It may, as you
+say, only have been that he was shattered, or that the lesson may have
+taught him to keep his natural disposition ever under control.  The
+result, in any case, was striking."
+
+We asked him to give us the history of the case, and he did so.
+
+"He was a friend of some cousins of mine," Jephson began, "people I used
+to see a good deal of in my undergraduate days.  When I met him first he
+was a young fellow of twenty-six, strong mentally and physically, and of
+a stern and stubborn nature that those who liked him called masterful,
+and that those who disliked him--a more numerous body--termed tyrannical.
+When I saw him three years later, he was an old man of twenty-nine,
+gentle and yielding beyond the border-line of weakness, mistrustful of
+himself and considerate of others to a degree that was often unwise.
+Formerly, his anger had been a thing very easily and frequently aroused.
+Since the change of which I speak, I have never known the shade of anger
+to cross his face but once.  In the course of a walk, one day, we came
+upon a young rough terrifying a small child by pretending to set a dog at
+her.  He seized the boy with a grip that almost choked him, and
+administered to him a punishment that seemed to me altogether out of
+proportion to the crime, brutal though it was.
+
+"I remonstrated with him when he rejoined me.
+
+"'Yes,' he replied apologetically; 'I suppose I'm a hard judge of some
+follies.'  And, knowing what his haunted eyes were looking at, I said no
+more.
+
+"He was junior partner in a large firm of tea brokers in the City.  There
+was not much for him to do in the London office, and when, therefore, as
+the result of some mortgage transactions, a South Indian tea plantation
+fell into the hands of the firm, it was suggested that he should go out
+and take the management of it.  The plan suited him admirably.  He was a
+man in every way qualified to lead a rough life; to face a by no means
+contemptible amount of difficulty and danger, to govern a small army of
+native workers more amenable to fear than to affection.  Such a life,
+demanding thought and action, would afford his strong nature greater
+interest and enjoyment than he could ever hope to obtain amid the cramped
+surroundings of civilisation.
+
+"Only one thing could in reason have been urged against the arrangement,
+that thing was his wife.  She was a fragile, delicate girl, whom he had
+married in obedience to that instinct of attraction towards the opposite
+which Nature, for the purpose of maintaining her average, has implanted
+in our breasts--a timid, meek-eyed creature, one of those women to whom
+death is less terrible than danger, and fate easier to face than fear.
+Such women have been known to run screaming from a mouse and to meet
+martyrdom with heroism.  They can no more keep their nerves from
+trembling than an aspen tree can stay the quivering of its leaves.
+
+"That she was totally unfitted for, and would be made wretched by the
+life to which his acceptance of the post would condemn her might have
+readily occurred to him, had he stopped to consider for a moment her
+feelings in the matter.  But to view a question from any other standpoint
+than his own was not his habit.  That he loved her passionately, in his
+way, as a thing belonging to himself, there can be no doubt, but it was
+with the love that such men have for the dog they will thrash, the horse
+they will spur to a broken back.  To consult her on the subject never
+entered his head.  He informed her one day of his decision and of the
+date of their sailing, and, handing her a handsome cheque, told her to
+purchase all things necessary to her, and to let him know if she needed
+more; and she, loving him with a dog-like devotion that was not good for
+him, opened her big eyes a little wider, but said nothing.  She thought
+much about the coming change to herself, however, and, when nobody was
+by, she would cry softly; then, hearing his footsteps, would hastily wipe
+away the traces of her tears, and go to meet him with a smile.
+
+"Now, her timidity and nervousness, which at home had been a butt for
+mere chaff, became, under the new circumstances of their life, a serious
+annoyance to the man.  A woman who seemed unable to repress a scream
+whenever she turned and saw in the gloom a pair of piercing eyes looking
+out at her from a dusky face, who was liable to drop off her horse with
+fear at the sound of a wild beast's roar a mile off, and who would turn
+white and limp with horror at the mere sight of a snake, was not a
+companionable person to live with in the neighbourhood of Indian jungles.
+
+"He himself was entirely without fear, and could not understand it.  To
+him it was pure affectation.  He had a muddled idea, common to men of his
+stamp, that women assume nervousness because they think it pretty and
+becoming to them, and that if one could only convince them of the folly
+of it they might be induced to lay it aside, in the same way that they
+lay aside mincing steps and simpering voices.  A man who prided himself,
+as he did, upon his knowledge of horses, might, one would think, have
+grasped a truer notion of the nature of nervousness, which is a mere
+matter of temperament.  But the man was a fool.
+
+"The thing that vexed him most was her horror of snakes.  He was
+unblessed--or uncursed, whichever you may prefer--with imagination of any
+kind.  There was no special enmity between him and the seed of the
+serpent.  A creature that crawled upon its belly was no more terrible to
+him than a creature that walked upon its legs; indeed, less so, for he
+knew that, as a rule, there was less danger to be apprehended from them.
+A reptile is only too eager at all times to escape from man.  Unless
+attacked or frightened, it will make no onset.  Most people are content
+to acquire their knowledge of this fact from the natural history books.
+He had proved it for himself.  His servant, an old sergeant of dragoons,
+has told me that he has seen him stop with his face six inches from the
+head of a hooded cobra, and stand watching it through his eye-glass as it
+crawled away from him, knowing that one touch of its fangs would mean
+death from which there could be no possible escape.  That any reasoning
+being should be inspired with terror--sickening, deadly terror--by such
+pitifully harmless things, seemed to him monstrous; and he determined to
+try and cure her of her fear of them.
+
+"He succeeded in doing this eventually somewhat more thoroughly than he
+had anticipated, but it left a terror in his own eyes that has not gone
+out of them to this day, and that never will.
+
+"One evening, riding home through a part of the jungle not far from his
+bungalow, he heard a soft, low hiss close to his ear, and, looking up,
+saw a python swing itself from the branch of a tree and make off through
+the long grass.  He had been out antelope-shooting, and his loaded rifle
+hung by his stirrup.  Springing from the frightened horse, he was just in
+time to get a shot at the creature before it disappeared.  He had hardly
+expected, under the circumstances, to even hit it.  By chance the bullet
+struck it at the junction of the vertebrae with the head, and killed it
+instantly.  It was a well-marked specimen, and, except for the small
+wound the bullet had made, quite uninjured.  He picked it up, and hung it
+across the saddle, intending to take it home and preserve it.
+
+"Galloping along, glancing down every now and again at the huge, hideous
+thing swaying and writhing in front of him almost as if still alive, a
+brilliant idea occurred to him.  He would use this dead reptile to cure
+his wife of her fear of living ones.  He would fix matters so that she
+should see it, and think it was alive, and be terrified by it; then he
+would show her that she had been frightened by a mere dead thing, and she
+would feel ashamed of herself, and be healed of her folly.  It was the
+sort of idea that would occur to a fool.
+
+"When he reached home, he took the dead snake into his smoking-room;
+then, locking the door, the idiot set out his prescription.  He arranged
+the monster in a very natural and life-like position.  It appeared to be
+crawling from the open window across the floor, and any one coming into
+the room suddenly could hardly avoid treading on it.  It was very
+cleverly done.
+
+"That finished, he picked out a book from the shelves, opened it, and
+laid it face downward upon the couch.  When he had completed all things
+to his satisfaction he unlocked the door and came out, very pleased with
+himself.
+
+"After dinner he lit a cigar and sat smoking a while in silence.
+
+"'Are you feeling tired?' he said to her at length, with a smile.
+
+"She laughed, and, calling him a lazy old thing, asked what it was he
+wanted.
+
+"'Only my novel that I was reading.  I left it in my den.  Do you mind?
+You will find it open on the couch.'
+
+"She sprang up and ran lightly to the door.
+
+"As she paused there for a moment to look back at him and ask the name of
+the book, he thought how pretty and how sweet she was; and for the first
+time a faint glimmer of the true nature of the thing he was doing forced
+itself into his brain.
+
+"'Never mind,' he said, half rising, 'I'll--'; then, enamoured of the
+brilliancy of his plan, checked himself; and she was gone.
+
+"He heard her footsteps passing along the matted passage, and smiled to
+himself.  He thought the affair was going to be rather amusing.  One
+finds it difficult to pity him even now when one thinks of it.
+
+"The smoking-room door opened and closed, and he still sat gazing
+dreamily at the ash of his cigar, and smiling.
+
+"One moment, perhaps two passed, but the time seemed much longer.  The
+man blew the gray cloud from before his eyes and waited.  Then he heard
+what he had been expecting to hear--a piercing shriek.  Then another,
+which, expecting to hear the clanging of the distant door and the
+scurrying back of her footsteps along the passage, puzzled him, so that
+the smile died away from his lips.
+
+"Then another, and another, and another, shriek after shriek.
+
+"The native servant, gliding noiselessly about the room, laid down the
+thing that was in his hand and moved instinctively towards the door.  The
+man started up and held him back.
+
+"'Keep where you are,' he said hoarsely.  'It is nothing.  Your mistress
+is frightened, that is all.  She must learn to get over this folly.'  Then
+he listened again, and the shrieks ended with what sounded curiously like
+a smothered laugh; and there came a sudden silence.
+
+"And out of that bottomless silence, Fear for the first time in his life
+came to the man, and he and the dusky servant looked at each other with
+eyes in which there was a strange likeness; and by a common instinct
+moved together towards the place where the silence came from.
+
+"When the man opened the door he saw three things: one was the dead
+python, lying where he had left it; the second was a live python, its
+comrade apparently, slowly crawling round it; the third a crushed, bloody
+heap in the middle of the floor.
+
+"He himself remembered nothing more until, weeks afterwards, he opened
+his eyes in a darkened, unfamiliar place, but the native servant, before
+he fled screaming from the house, saw his master fling himself upon the
+living serpent and grasp it with his hands, and when, later on, others
+burst into the room and caught him staggering in their arms, they found
+the second python with its head torn off.
+
+"That is the incident that changed the character of my man--if it be
+changed," concluded Jephson.  "He told it me one night as we sat on the
+deck of the steamer, returning from Bombay.  He did not spare himself.  He
+told me the story, much as I have told it to you, but in an even,
+monotonous tone, free from emotion of any kind.  I asked him, when he had
+finished, how he could bear to recall it.
+
+"'Recall it!' he replied, with a slight accent of surprise; 'it is always
+with me.'"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+One day we spoke of crime and criminals.  We had discussed the
+possibility of a novel without a villain, but had decided that it would
+be uninteresting.
+
+"It is a terribly sad reflection," remarked MacShaughnassy, musingly;
+"but what a desperately dull place this earth would be if it were not for
+our friends the bad people.  Do you know," he continued, "when I hear of
+folks going about the world trying to reform everybody and make them
+good, I get positively nervous.  Once do away with sin, and literature
+will become a thing of the past.  Without the criminal classes we authors
+would starve."
+
+"I shouldn't worry," replied Jephson, drily; "one half mankind has been
+'reforming' the other half pretty steadily ever since the Creation, yet
+there appears to be a fairly appreciable amount of human nature left in
+it, notwithstanding.  Suppressing sin is much the same sort of task that
+suppressing a volcano would be--plugging one vent merely opens another.
+Evil will last our time."
+
+"I cannot take your optimistic view of the case," answered
+MacShaughnassy.  "It seems to me that crime--at all events, interesting
+crime--is being slowly driven out of our existence.  Pirates and
+highwaymen have been practically abolished.  Dear old 'Smuggler Bill' has
+melted down his cutlass into a pint-can with a false bottom.  The
+pressgang that was always so ready to rescue our hero from his
+approaching marriage has been disbanded.  There's not a lugger fit for
+the purposes of abduction left upon the coast.  Men settle their 'affairs
+of honour' in the law courts, and return home wounded only in the pocket.
+Assaults on unprotected females are confined to the slums, where heroes
+do not dwell, and are avenged by the nearest magistrate.  Your modern
+burglar is generally an out-of-work green-grocer.  His 'swag' usually
+consists of an overcoat and a pair of boots, in attempting to make off
+with which he is captured by the servant-girl.  Suicides and murders are
+getting scarcer every season.  At the present rate of decrease, deaths by
+violence will be unheard of in another decade, and a murder story will be
+laughed at as too improbable to be interesting.  A certain section of
+busybodies are even crying out for the enforcement of the seventh
+commandment.  If they succeed authors will have to follow the advice
+generally given to them by the critics, and retire from business
+altogether.  I tell you our means of livelihood are being filched from us
+one by one.  Authors ought to form themselves into a society for the
+support and encouragement of crime."
+
+MacShaughnassy's leading intention in making these remarks was to shock
+and grieve Brown, and in this object he succeeded.  Brown is--or was, in
+those days--an earnest young man with an exalted--some were inclined to
+say an exaggerated--view of the importance and dignity of the literary
+profession.  Brown's notion of the scheme of Creation was that God made
+the universe so as to give the literary man something to write about.  I
+used at one time to credit Brown with originality for this idea; but as I
+have grown older I have learned that the theory is a very common and
+popular one in cultured circles.
+
+Brown expostulated with MacShaughnassy.  "You speak," he said, "as though
+literature were the parasite of evil."
+
+"And what else is she?" replied the MacShaughnassy, with enthusiasm.
+"What would become of literature without folly and sin?  What is the work
+of the literary man but raking a living for himself out of the dust-heap
+of human woe?  Imagine, if you can, a perfect world--a world where men
+and women never said foolish things and never did unwise ones; where
+small boys were never mischievous and children never made awkward
+remarks; where dogs never fought and cats never screeched; where wives
+never henpecked their husbands and mothers-in-law never nagged; where men
+never went to bed in their boots and sea-captains never swore; where
+plumbers understood their work and old maids never dressed as girls;
+where niggers never stole chickens and proud men were never sea-sick!
+where would be your humour and your wit?  Imagine a world where hearts
+were never bruised; where lips were never pressed with pain; where eyes
+were never dim; where feet were never weary; where stomachs were never
+empty! where would be your pathos?  Imagine a world where husbands never
+loved more wives than one, and that the right one; where wives were never
+kissed but by their husbands; where men's hearts were never black and
+women's thoughts never impure; where there was no hating and no envying;
+no desiring; no despairing! where would be your scenes of passion, your
+interesting complications, your subtle psychological analyses?  My dear
+Brown, we writers--novelists, dramatists, poets--we fatten on the misery
+of our fellow-creatures.  God created man and woman, and the woman
+created the literary man when she put her teeth into the apple.  We came
+into the world under the shadow of the serpent.  We are special
+correspondents with the Devil's army.  We report his victories in our
+three-volume novels, his occasional defeats in our five-act melodramas."
+
+"All of which is very true," remarked Jephson; "but you must remember it
+is not only the literary man who traffics in misfortune.  The doctor, the
+lawyer, the preacher, the newspaper proprietor, the weather prophet, will
+hardly, I should say, welcome the millennium.  I shall never forget an
+anecdote my uncle used to relate, dealing with the period when he was
+chaplain of the Lincolnshire county jail.  One morning there was to be a
+hanging; and the usual little crowd of witnesses, consisting of the
+sheriff, the governor, three or four reporters, a magistrate, and a
+couple of warders, was assembled in the prison.  The condemned man, a
+brutal ruffian who had been found guilty of murdering a young girl under
+exceptionally revolting circumstances, was being pinioned by the hangman
+and his assistant; and my uncle was employing the last few moments at his
+disposal in trying to break down the sullen indifference the fellow had
+throughout manifested towards both his crime and his fate.
+
+"My uncle failing to make any impression upon him, the governor ventured
+to add a few words of exhortation, upon which the man turned fiercely on
+the whole of them.
+
+"'Go to hell,' he cried, 'with your snivelling jaw.  Who are you, to
+preach at me?  _You're_ glad enough I'm here--all of you.  Why, I'm the
+only one of you as ain't going to make a bit over this job.  Where would
+you all be, I should like to know, you canting swine, if it wasn't for me
+and my sort?  Why, it's the likes of me as _keeps_ the likes of you,'
+with which he walked straight to the gallows and told the hangman to
+'hurry up' and not keep the gentlemen waiting."
+
+"There was some 'grit' in that man," said MacShaughnassy.
+
+"Yes," added Jephson, "and wholesome wit also."
+
+MacShaughnassy puffed a mouthful of smoke over a spider which was just
+about to kill a fly.  This caused the spider to fall into the river, from
+where a supper-hunting swallow quickly rescued him.
+
+"You remind me," he said, "of a scene I once witnessed in the office of
+_The Daily_--well, in the office of a certain daily newspaper.  It was
+the dead season, and things were somewhat slow.  An endeavour had been
+made to launch a discussion on the question 'Are Babies a Blessing?'  The
+youngest reporter on the staff, writing over the simple but touching
+signature of 'Mother of Six,' had led off with a scathing, though
+somewhat irrelevant, attack upon husbands, as a class; the Sporting
+Editor, signing himself 'Working Man,' and garnishing his contribution
+with painfully elaborated orthographical lapses, arranged to give an air
+of verisimilitude to the correspondence, while, at the same time, not to
+offend the susceptibilities of the democracy (from whom the paper derived
+its chief support), had replied, vindicating the British father, and
+giving what purported to be stirring midnight experiences of his own.  The
+Gallery Man, calling himself, with a burst of imagination, 'Gentleman and
+Christian,' wrote indignantly that he considered the agitation of the
+subject to be both impious and indelicate, and added he was surprised
+that a paper holding the exalted, and deservedly popular, position of
+_The_ --- should have opened its columns to the brainless vapourings of
+'Mother of Six' and 'Working Man.'
+
+"The topic had, however, fallen flat.  With the exception of one man who
+had invented a new feeding-bottle, and thought he was going to advertise
+it for nothing, the outside public did not respond, and over the
+editorial department gloom had settled down.
+
+"One evening, as two or three of us were mooning about the stairs,
+praying secretly for a war or a famine, Todhunter, the town reporter,
+rushed past us with a cheer, and burst into the Sub-editor's room.  We
+followed.  He was waving his notebook above his head, and clamouring,
+after the manner of people in French exercises, for pens, ink, and paper.
+
+"'What's up?' cried the Sub-editor, catching his enthusiasm; 'influenza
+again?'
+
+"'Better than that!' shouted Todhunter.  'Excursion steamer run down, a
+hundred and twenty-five lives lost--four good columns of heartrending
+scenes.'
+
+"'By Jove!' said the Sub, 'couldn't have happened at a better time
+either'--and then he sat down and dashed off a leaderette, in which he
+dwelt upon the pain and regret the paper felt at having to announce the
+disaster, and drew attention to the exceptionally harrowing account
+provided by the energy and talent of 'our special reporter.'"
+
+"It is the law of nature," said Jephson: "we are not the first party of
+young philosophers who have been struck with the fact that one man's
+misfortune is another man's opportunity."
+
+"Occasionally, another woman's," I observed.
+
+I was thinking of an incident told me by a nurse.  If a nurse in fair
+practice does not know more about human nature--does not see clearer into
+the souls of men and women than all the novelists in little Bookland put
+together--it must be because she is physically blind and deaf.  All the
+world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players; so long as we
+are in good health, we play our parts out bravely to the end, acting
+them, on the whole, artistically and with strenuousness, even to the
+extent of sometimes fancying ourselves the people we are pretending to
+be.  But with sickness comes forgetfulness of our part, and carelessness
+of the impression we are making upon the audience.  We are too weak to
+put the paint and powder on our faces, the stage finery lies unheeded by
+our side.  The heroic gestures, the virtuous sentiments are a weariness
+to us.  In the quiet, darkened room, where the foot-lights of the great
+stage no longer glare upon us, where our ears are no longer strained to
+catch the clapping or the hissing of the town, we are, for a brief space,
+ourselves.
+
+This nurse was a quiet, demure little woman, with a pair of dreamy, soft
+gray eyes that had a curious power of absorbing everything that passed
+before them without seeming to look at anything.  Gazing upon much life,
+laid bare, had given to them a slightly cynical expression, but there was
+a background of kindliness behind.
+
+During the evenings of my convalescence she would talk to me of her
+nursing experiences.  I have sometimes thought I would put down in
+writing the stories that she told me, but they would be sad reading.  The
+majority of them, I fear, would show only the tangled, seamy side of
+human nature, and God knows there is little need for us to point that out
+to each other, though so many nowadays seem to think it the only work
+worth doing.  A few of them were sweet, but I think they were the
+saddest; and over one or two a man might laugh, but it would not be a
+pleasant laugh.
+
+"I never enter the door of a house to which I have been summoned," she
+said to me one evening, "without wondering, as I step over the threshold,
+what the story is going to be.  I always feel inside a sick-room as if I
+were behind the scenes of life.  The people come and go about you, and
+you listen to them talking and laughing, and you look into your patient's
+eyes, and you just know that it's all a play."
+
+The incident that Jephson's remark had reminded me of, she told me one
+afternoon, as I sat propped up by the fire, trying to drink a glass of
+port wine, and feeling somewhat depressed at discovering I did not like
+it.
+
+"One of my first cases," she said, "was a surgical operation.  I was very
+young at the time, and I made rather an awkward mistake--I don't mean a
+professional mistake--but a mistake nevertheless that I ought to have had
+more sense than to make.
+
+"My patient was a good-looking, pleasant-spoken gentleman.  The wife was
+a pretty, dark little woman, but I never liked her from the first; she
+was one of those perfectly proper, frigid women, who always give me the
+idea that they were born in a church, and have never got over the chill.
+However, she seemed very fond of him, and he of her; and they talked very
+prettily to each other--too prettily for it to be quite genuine, I should
+have said, if I'd known as much of the world then as I do now.
+
+"The operation was a difficult and dangerous one.  When I came on duty in
+the evening I found him, as I expected, highly delirious.  I kept him as
+quiet as I could, but towards nine o'clock, as the delirium only
+increased, I began to get anxious.  I bent down close to him and listened
+to his ravings.  Over and over again I heard the name 'Louise.'  Why
+wouldn't 'Louise' come to him?  It was so unkind of her--they had dug a
+great pit, and were pushing him down into it--oh! why didn't she come and
+save him?  He should be saved if she would only come and take his hand.
+
+"His cries became so pitiful that I could bear them no longer.  His wife
+had gone to attend a prayer-meeting, but the church was only in the next
+street.  Fortunately, the day-nurse had not left the house: I called her
+in to watch him for a minute, and, slipping on my bonnet, ran across.  I
+told my errand to one of the vergers and he took me to her.  She was
+kneeling, but I could not wait.  I pushed open the pew door, and, bending
+down, whispered to her, 'Please come over at once; your husband is more
+delirious than I quite care about, and you may be able to calm him.'
+
+"She whispered back, without raising her head, 'I'll be over in a little
+while.  The meeting won't last much longer.'
+
+"Her answer surprised and nettled me.  'You'll be acting more like a
+Christian woman by coming home with me,' I said sharply, 'than by
+stopping here.  He keeps calling for you, and I can't get him to sleep.'
+
+"She raised her head from her hands: 'Calling for me?' she asked, with a
+slightly incredulous accent.
+
+"'Yes,' I replied, 'it has been his one cry for the last hour: Where's
+Louise, why doesn't Louise come to him.'
+
+"Her face was in shadow, but as she turned it away, and the faint light
+from one of the turned-down gas-jets fell across it, I fancied I saw a
+smile upon it, and I disliked her more than ever.
+
+"'I'll come back with you,' she said, rising and putting her books away,
+and we left the church together.
+
+"She asked me many questions on the way: Did patients, when they were
+delirious, know the people about them?  Did they remember actual facts,
+or was their talk mere incoherent rambling?  Could one guide their
+thoughts in any way?
+
+"The moment we were inside the door, she flung off her bonnet and cloak,
+and came upstairs quickly and softly.
+
+"She walked to the bedside, and stood looking down at him, but he was
+quite unconscious of her presence, and continued muttering.  I suggested
+that she should speak to him, but she said she was sure it would be
+useless, and drawing a chair back into the shadow, sat down beside him.
+
+"Seeing she was no good to him, I tried to persuade her to go to bed, but
+she said she would rather stop, and I, being little more than a girl
+then, and without much authority, let her.  All night long he tossed and
+raved, the one name on his lips being ever Louise--Louise--and all night
+long that woman sat there in the shadow, never moving, never speaking,
+with a set smile on her lips that made me long to take her by the
+shoulders and shake her.
+
+"At one time he imagined himself back in his courting days, and pleaded,
+'Say you love me, Louise.  I know you do.  I can read it in your eyes.
+What's the use of our pretending?  We _know_ each other.  Put your white
+arms about me.  Let me feel your breath upon my neck.  Ah!  I knew it, my
+darling, my love!'
+
+"The whole house was deadly still, and I could hear every word of his
+troubled ravings.  I almost felt as if I had no right to be there,
+listening to them, but my duty held me.  Later on, he fancied himself
+planning a holiday with her, so I concluded.  'I shall start on Monday
+evening,' he was saying, and you can join me in Dublin at Jackson's Hotel
+on the Wednesday, and we'll go straight on.'
+
+"His voice grew a little faint, and his wife moved forward on her chair,
+and bent her head closer to his lips.
+
+"'No, no,' he continued, after a pause, 'there's no danger whatever.  It's
+a lonely little place, right in the heart of the Galway
+Mountains--O'Mullen's Half-way House they call it--five miles from
+Ballynahinch.  We shan't meet a soul there.  We'll have three weeks of
+heaven all to ourselves, my goddess, my Mrs. Maddox from Boston--don't
+forget the name.'
+
+"He laughed in his delirium; and the woman, sitting by his side, laughed
+also; and then the truth flashed across me.
+
+"I ran up to her and caught her by the arm.  'Your name's not Louise,' I
+said, looking straight at her.  It was an impertinent interference, but I
+felt excited, and acted on impulse.
+
+"'No,' she replied, very quietly; 'but it's the name of a very dear
+school friend of mine.  I've got the clue to-night that I've been waiting
+two years to get.  Good-night, nurse, thanks for fetching me.'
+
+"She rose and went out, and I listened to her footsteps going down the
+stairs, and then drew up the blind and let in the dawn.
+
+"I've never told that incident to any one until this evening," my nurse
+concluded, as she took the empty port wine glass out of my hand, and
+stirred the fire.  "A nurse wouldn't get many engagements if she had the
+reputation for making blunders of that sort."
+
+Another story that she told me showed married life more lovelit, but
+then, as she added, with that cynical twinkle which glinted so oddly from
+her gentle, demure eyes, this couple had only very recently been wed--had,
+in fact, only just returned from their honeymoon.
+
+They had been travelling on the Continent, and there had both contracted
+typhoid fever, which showed itself immediately on their home-coming.
+
+"I was called in to them on the very day of their arrival," she said;
+"the husband was the first to take to his bed, and the wife followed suit
+twelve hours afterwards.  We placed them in adjoining rooms, and, as
+often as was possible, we left the door ajar so that they could call out
+to one another.
+
+"Poor things!  They were little else than boy and girl, and they worried
+more about each other than they thought about themselves.  The wife's
+only trouble was that she wouldn't be able to do anything for 'poor
+Jack.'  'Oh, nurse, you will be good to him, won't you?' she would cry,
+with her big childish eyes full of tears; and the moment I went in to him
+it would be: 'Oh, don't trouble about me, nurse, I'm all right.  Just
+look after the wifie, will you?'
+
+"I had a hard time between the two of them, for, with the help of her
+sister, I was nursing them both.  It was an unprofessional thing to do,
+but I could see they were not well off, and I assured the doctor that I
+could manage.  To me it was worth while going through the double work
+just to breathe the atmosphere of unselfishness that sweetened those two
+sick-rooms.  The average invalid is not the patient sufferer people
+imagine.  It is a fretful, querulous, self-pitying little world that we
+live in as a rule, and that we grow hard in.  It gave me a new heart,
+nursing these young people.
+
+"The man pulled through, and began steadily to recover, but the wife was
+a wee slip of a girl, and her strength--what there was of it--ebbed day
+by day.  As he got stronger he would call out more and more cheerfully to
+her through the open door, and ask her how she was getting on, and she
+would struggle to call back laughing answers.  It had been a mistake to
+put them next to each other, and I blamed myself for having done so, but
+it was too late to change then.  All we could do was to beg her not to
+exhaust herself, and to let us, when he called out, tell him she was
+asleep.  But the thought of not answering him or calling to him made her
+so wretched that it seemed safer to let her have her way.
+
+"Her one anxiety was that he should not know how weak she was.  'It will
+worry him so,' she would say; 'he is such an old fidget over me.  And I
+_am_ getting stronger, slowly; ain't I, nurse?'
+
+"One morning he called out to her, as usual, asking her how she was, and
+she answered, though she had to wait for a few seconds to gather strength
+to do so.  He seemed to detect the effort, for he called back anxiously,
+'Are you _sure_ you're all right, dear?'
+
+"'Yes,' she replied, 'getting on famously.  Why?'
+
+"'I thought your voice sounded a little weak, dear,' he answered; 'don't
+call out if it tries you.'
+
+"Then for the first time she began to worry about herself--not for her
+own sake, but because of him.
+
+"'Do you think I _am_ getting weaker, nurse?' she asked me, fixing her
+great eyes on me with a frightened look.
+
+"'You're making yourself weak by calling out,' I answered, a little
+sharply.  'I shall have to keep that door shut.'
+
+"'Oh, don't tell him'--that was all her thought--'don't let him know it.
+Tell him I'm strong, won't you, nurse?  It will kill him if he thinks I'm
+not getting well.'
+
+"I was glad when her sister came up, and I could get out of the room, for
+you're not much good at nursing when you feel, as I felt then, as though
+you had swallowed a tablespoon and it was sticking in your throat.
+
+"Later on, when I went in to him, he drew me to the bedside, and
+whispered me to tell him truly how she was.  If you are telling a lie at
+all, you may just as well make it a good one, so I told him she was
+really wonderfully well, only a little exhausted after the illness, as
+was natural, and that I expected to have her up before him.
+
+"Poor lad! that lie did him more good than a week's doctoring and
+nursing; and next morning he called out more cheerily than ever to her,
+and offered to bet her a new bonnet against a new hat that he would race
+her, and be up first.
+
+"She laughed back quite merrily (I was in his room at the time).  'All
+right,' she said, 'you'll lose.  I shall be well first, and I shall come
+and visit you.'
+
+"Her laugh was so bright, and her voice sounded so much stronger, that I
+really began to think she had taken a turn for the better, so that when
+on going in to her I found her pillow wet with tears, I could not
+understand it.
+
+"'Why, we were so cheerful just a minute ago,' I said; 'what's the
+matter?'
+
+"'Oh, poor Jack!' she moaned, as her little, wasted fingers opened and
+closed upon the counterpane.  'Poor Jack, it will break his heart.'
+
+"It was no good my saying anything.  There comes a moment when something
+tells your patient all that is to be known about the case, and the doctor
+and the nurse can keep their hopeful assurances for where they will be of
+more use.  The only thing that would have brought comfort to her then
+would have been to convince her that he would soon forget her and be
+happy without her.  I thought it at the time, and I tried to say
+something of the kind to her, but I couldn't get it out, and she wouldn't
+have believed me if I had.
+
+"So all I could do was to go back to the other room, and tell him that I
+wanted her to go to sleep, and that he must not call out to her until I
+told him.
+
+"She lay very still all day.  The doctor came at his usual hour and
+looked at her.  He patted her hand, and just glanced at the untouched
+food beside her.
+
+"'Yes,' he said, quietly.  'I shouldn't worry her, nurse.'  And I
+understood.
+
+"Towards evening she opened her eyes, and beckoned to her sister, who was
+standing by the bedside, to bend down.
+
+"'Jeanie,' she whispered, 'do you think it wrong to deceive any one when
+it's for their own good?'
+
+"'I don't know,' said the girl, in a dry voice; 'I shouldn't think so.
+Why do you ask?'
+
+"'Jeanie, your voice was always very much like mine--do you remember,
+they used to mistake us at home.  Jeanie, call out for me--just till--till
+he's a bit better; promise me.'
+
+"They had loved each other, those two, more than is common among sisters.
+Jeanie could not answer, but she pressed her sister closer in her arms,
+and the other was satisfied.
+
+"Then, drawing all her little stock of life together for one final
+effort, the child raised herself in her sister's arms.
+
+"'Good-night, Jack,' she called out, loud and clear enough to be heard
+through the closed door.
+
+"'Good-night, little wife,' he cried back, cheerily; 'are you all right?'
+
+"'Yes, dear.  Good-night.'
+
+"Her little, worn-out frame dropped back upon the bed, and the next thing
+I remember is snatching up a pillow, and holding it tight-pressed against
+Jeanie's face for fear the sound of her sobs should penetrate into the
+next room; and afterwards we both got out, somehow, by the other door,
+and rushed downstairs, and clung to each other in the back kitchen.
+
+"How we two women managed to keep up the deceit, as, for three whole
+days, we did, I shall never myself know.  Jeanie sat in the room where
+her dead sister, from its head to its sticking-up feet, lay outlined
+under the white sheet; and I stayed beside the living man, and told lies
+and acted lies, till I took a joy in them, and had to guard against the
+danger of over-elaborating them.
+
+"He wondered at what he thought my 'new merry mood,' and I told him it
+was because of my delight that his wife was out of danger; and then I
+went on for the pure devilment of the thing, and told him that a week
+ago, when we had let him think his wife was growing stronger, we had been
+deceiving him; that, as a matter of fact, she was at that time in great
+peril, and I had been in hourly alarm concerning her, but that now the
+strain was over, and she was safe; and I dropped down by the foot of the
+bed, and burst into a fit of laughter, and had to clutch hold of the
+bedstead to keep myself from rolling on the floor.
+
+"He had started up in bed with a wild white face when Jeanie had first
+answered him from the other room, though the sisters' voices had been so
+uncannily alike that I had never been able to distinguish one from the
+other at any time.  I told him the slight change was the result of the
+fever, that his own voice also was changed a little, and that such was
+always the case with a person recovering from a long illness.  To guide
+his thoughts away from the real clue, I told him Jeanie had broken down
+with the long work, and that, the need for her being past, I had packed
+her off into the country for a short rest.  That afternoon we concocted a
+letter to him, and I watched Jeanie's eyes with a towel in my hand while
+she wrote it, so that no tears should fall on it, and that night she
+travelled twenty miles down the Great Western line to post it, returning
+by the next up-train.
+
+"No suspicion of the truth ever occurred to him, and the doctor helped us
+out with our deception; yet his pulse, which day by day had been getting
+stronger, now beat feebler every hour.  In that part of the country where
+I was born and grew up, the folks say that wherever the dead lie, there
+round about them, whether the time be summer or winter, the air grows
+cold and colder, and that no fire, though you pile the logs half-way up
+the chimney, will ever make it warm.  A few months' hospital training
+generally cures one of all fanciful notions about death, but this idea I
+have never been able to get rid of.  My thermometer may show me sixty,
+and I may try to believe that the temperature _is_ sixty, but if the dead
+are beside me I feel cold to the marrow of my bones.  I could _see_ the
+chill from the dead room crawling underneath the door, and creeping up
+about his bed, and reaching out its hand to touch his heart.
+
+"Jeanie and I redoubled our efforts, for it seemed to us as if Death were
+waiting just outside in the passage, watching with his eye at the keyhole
+for either of us to make a blunder and let the truth slip out.  I hardly
+ever left his side except now and again to go into that next room, and
+poke an imaginary fire, and say a few chaffing words to an imaginary
+living woman on the bed where the dead one lay; and Jeanie sat close to
+the corpse, and called out saucy messages to him, or reassuring answers
+to his anxious questions.
+
+"At times, knowing that if we stopped another moment in these rooms we
+should scream, we would steal softly out and rush downstairs, and,
+shutting ourselves out of hearing in a cellar underneath the yard, laugh
+till we reeled against the dirty walls.  I think we were both getting a
+little mad.
+
+"One day--it was the third of that nightmare life, so I learned
+afterwards, though for all I could have told then it might have been the
+three hundredth, for Time seemed to have fled from that house as from a
+dream, so that all things were tangled--I made a slip that came near to
+ending the matter, then and there.
+
+"I had gone into that other room.  Jeanie had left her post for a moment,
+and the place was empty.
+
+"I did not think what I was doing.  I had not closed my eyes that I can
+remember since the wife had died, and my brain and my senses were losing
+their hold of one another.  I went through my usual performance of
+talking loudly to the thing underneath the white sheet, and noisily
+patting the pillows and rattling the bottles on the table.
+
+"On my return, he asked me how she was, and I answered, half in a dream,
+'Oh, bonny, she's trying to read a little,' and he raised himself on his
+elbow and called out to her, and for answer there came back silence--not
+the silence that _is_ silence, but the silence that is as a voice.  I do
+not know if you understand what I mean by that.  If you had lived among
+the dead as long as I have, you would know.
+
+"I darted to the door and pretended to look in.  'She's fallen asleep,' I
+whispered, closing it; and he said nothing, but his eyes looked queerly
+at me.
+
+"That night, Jeanie and I stood in the hall talking.  He had fallen to
+sleep early, and I had locked the door between the two rooms, and put the
+key in my pocket, and had stolen down to tell her what had happened, and
+to consult with her.
+
+"'What can we do!  God help us, what can we do!' was all that Jeanie
+could say.  We had thought that in a day or two he would be stronger, and
+that the truth might be broken to him.  But instead of that he had grown
+so weak, that to excite his suspicions now by moving him or her would be
+to kill him.
+
+"We stood looking blankly in each other's faces, wondering how the
+problem could be solved; and while we did so the problem solved itself.
+
+"The one woman-servant had gone out, and the house was very silent--so
+silent that I could hear the ticking of Jeanie's watch inside her dress.
+Suddenly, into the stillness there came a sound.  It was not a cry.  It
+came from no human voice.  I have heard the voice of human pain till I
+know its every note, and have grown careless to it; but I have prayed God
+on my knees that I may never hear that sound again, for it was the sob of
+a soul.
+
+"It wailed through the quiet house and passed away, and neither of us
+stirred.
+
+"At length, with the return of the blood to our veins, we went upstairs
+together.  He had crept from his own room along the passage into hers.  He
+had not had strength enough to pull the sheet off, though he had tried.
+He lay across the bed with one hand grasping hers."
+
+* * * * *
+
+My nurse sat for a while without speaking, a somewhat unusual thing for
+her to do.
+
+"You ought to write your experiences," I said.
+
+"Ah!" she said, giving the fire a contemplative poke, "if you'd seen as
+much sorrow in the world as I have, you wouldn't want to write a sad
+book."
+
+"I think," she added, after a long pause, with the poker still in her
+hand, "it can only be the people who have never _known_ suffering who can
+care to read of it.  If I could write a book, I should write a merry
+book--a book that would make people laugh."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+The discussion arose in this way.  I had proposed a match between our
+villain and the daughter of the local chemist, a singularly noble and
+pure-minded girl, the humble but worthy friend of the heroine.
+
+Brown had refused his consent on the ground of improbability.  "What in
+thunder would induce him to marry _her_?" he asked.
+
+"Love!" I replied; "love, that burns as brightly in the meanest villain's
+breast as in the proud heart of the good young man."
+
+"Are you trying to be light and amusing," returned Brown, severely, "or
+are you supposed to be discussing the matter seriously?  What attraction
+could such a girl have for such a man as Reuben Neil?"
+
+"Every attraction," I retorted.  "She is the exact moral contrast to
+himself.  She is beautiful (if she's not beautiful enough, we can touch
+her up a bit), and, when the father dies, there will be the shop."
+
+"Besides," I added, "it will make the thing seem more natural if
+everybody wonders what on earth could have been the reason for their
+marrying each other."
+
+Brown wasted no further words on me, but turned to MacShaughnassy.
+
+"Can _you_ imagine our friend Reuben seized with a burning desire to
+marry Mary Holme?" he asked, with a smile.
+
+"Of course I can," said MacShaughnassy; "I can imagine anything, and
+believe anything of anybody.  It is only in novels that people act
+reasonably and in accordance with what might be expected of them.  I knew
+an old sea-captain who used to read the _Young Ladies' Journal_ in bed,
+and cry over it.  I knew a bookmaker who always carried Browning's poems
+about with him in his pocket to study in the train.  I have known a
+Harley Street doctor to develop at forty-eight a sudden and overmastering
+passion for switchbacks, and to spend every hour he could spare from his
+practice at one or other of the exhibitions, having three-pen'orths one
+after the other.  I have known a book-reviewer give oranges (not poisoned
+ones) to children.  A man is not a character, he is a dozen characters,
+one of them prominent, the other eleven more or less undeveloped.  I knew
+a man once, two of whose characters were of equal value, and the
+consequences were peculiar."
+
+We begged him to relate the case to us, and he did so.
+
+"He was a Balliol man," said MacShaughnassy, "and his Christian name was
+Joseph.  He was a member of the 'Devonshire' at the time I knew him, and
+was, I think, the most superior person I have ever met.  He sneered at
+the _Saturday Review_ as the pet journal of the suburban literary club;
+and at the _Athenaeum_ as the trade organ of the unsuccessful writer.
+Thackeray, he considered, was fairly entitled to his position of
+favourite author to the cultured clerk; and Carlyle he regarded as the
+exponent of the earnest artisan.  Living authors he never read, but this
+did not prevent his criticising them contemptuously.  The only
+inhabitants of the nineteenth century that he ever praised were a few
+obscure French novelists, of whom nobody but himself had ever heard.  He
+had his own opinion about God Almighty, and objected to Heaven on account
+of the strong Clapham contingent likely to be found in residence there.
+Humour made him sad, and sentiment made him ill.  Art irritated him and
+science bored him.  He despised his own family and disliked everybody
+else.  For exercise he yawned, and his conversation was mainly confined
+to an occasional shrug.
+
+"Nobody liked him, but everybody respected him.  One felt grateful to him
+for his condescension in living at all.
+
+"One summer, I was fishing over the Norfolk Broads, and on the Bank
+Holiday, thinking I would like to see the London 'Arry in his glory, I
+ran over to Yarmouth.  Walking along the sea-front in the evening, I
+suddenly found myself confronted by four remarkably choice specimens of
+the class.  They were urging on their wild and erratic career arm-in-arm.
+The one nearest the road was playing an unusually wheezy concertina, and
+the other three were bawling out the chorus of a music-hall song, the
+heroine of which appeared to be 'Hemmer.'
+
+"They spread themselves right across the pavement, compelling all the
+women and children they met to step into the roadway.  I stood my ground
+on the kerb, and as they brushed by me something in the face of the one
+with the concertina struck me as familiar.
+
+"I turned and followed them.  They were evidently enjoying themselves
+immensely.  To every girl they passed they yelled out, 'Oh, you little
+jam tart!' and every old lady they addressed as 'Mar.'  The noisiest and
+the most vulgar of the four was the one with the concertina.
+
+"I followed them on to the pier, and then, hurrying past, waited for them
+under a gas-lamp.  When the man with the concertina came into the light
+and I saw him clearly I started.  From the face I could have sworn it was
+Joseph; but everything else about him rendered such an assumption
+impossible.  Putting aside the time and the place, and forgetting his
+behaviour, his companions, and his instrument, what remained was
+sufficient to make the suggestion absurd.  Joseph was always clean
+shaven; this youth had a smudgy moustache and a pair of incipient red
+whiskers.  He was dressed in the loudest check suit I have ever seen, off
+the stage.  He wore patent-leather boots with mother-of-pearl buttons,
+and a necktie that in an earlier age would have called down lightning out
+of Heaven.  He had a low-crowned billycock hat on his head, and a big
+evil-smelling cigar between his lips.
+
+"Argue as I would, however, the face was the face of Joseph; and, moved
+by a curiosity I could not control, I kept near him, watching him.
+
+"Once, for a little while, I missed him; but there was not much fear of
+losing that suit for long, and after a little looking about I struck it
+again.  He was sitting at the end of the pier, where it was less crowded,
+with his arm round a girl's waist.  I crept close.  She was a jolly, red-
+faced girl, good-looking enough, but common to the last degree.  Her hat
+lay on the seat beside her, and her head was resting on his shoulder.  She
+appeared to be fond of him, but he was evidently bored.
+
+"'Don'tcher like me, Joe?' I heard her murmur.
+
+"'Yas,' he replied, somewhat unconvincingly, 'o' course I likes yer.'
+
+"She gave him an affectionate slap, but he did not respond, and a few
+minutes afterwards, muttering some excuse, he rose and left her, and I
+followed him as he made his way towards the refreshment-room.  At the
+door he met one of his pals.
+
+"'Hullo!' was the question, 'wot 'a yer done wi' 'Liza?'
+
+"'Oh, I carn't stand 'er,' was his reply; 'she gives me the bloomin'
+'ump.  You 'ave a turn with 'er.'
+
+"His friend disappeared in the direction of 'Liza, and Joe pushed into
+the room, I keeping close behind him.  Now that he was alone I was
+determined to speak to him.  The longer I had studied his features the
+more resemblance I had found in them to those of my superior friend
+Joseph.
+
+"He was leaning across the bar, clamouring for two of gin, when I tapped
+him on the shoulder.  He turned his head, and the moment he saw me, his
+face went livid.
+
+"'Mr. Joseph Smythe, I believe,' I said with a smile.
+
+"'Who's Mr. Joseph Smythe?' he answered hoarsely; 'my name's Smith, I
+ain't no bloomin' Smythe.  Who are you?  I don't know yer.'
+
+"As he spoke, my eyes rested upon a curious gold ring of Indian
+workmanship which he wore upon his left hand.  There was no mistaking the
+ring, at all events: it had been passed round the club on more than one
+occasion as a unique curiosity.  His eyes followed my gaze.  He burst
+into tears, and pushing me before him into a quiet corner of the saloon,
+sat down facing me.
+
+"'Don't give me away, old man,' he whimpered; 'for Gawd's sake, don't let
+on to any of the chaps 'ere that I'm a member of that blessed old waxwork
+show in Saint James's: they'd never speak to me agen.  And keep yer mug
+shut about Oxford, there's a good sort.  I wouldn't 'ave 'em know as 'ow
+I was one o' them college blokes for anythink.'
+
+"I sat aghast.  I had listened to hear him entreat me to keep 'Smith,'
+the rorty 'Arry, a secret from the acquaintances of 'Smythe,' the
+superior person.  Here was 'Smith' in mortal terror lest his pals should
+hear of his identity with the aristocratic 'Smythe,' and discard him.  His
+attitude puzzled me at the time, but, when I came to reflect, my wonder
+was at myself for having expected the opposite.
+
+"'I carn't 'elp it,' he went on; 'I 'ave to live two lives.  'Arf my time
+I'm a stuck-up prig, as orter be jolly well kicked--'
+
+"'At which times,' I interrupted, 'I have heard you express some
+extremely uncomplimentary opinions concerning 'Arries.'
+
+"'I know,' he replied, in a voice betraying strong emotion; 'that's where
+it's so precious rough on me.  When I'm a toff I despises myself, 'cos I
+knows that underneath my sneering phiz I'm a bloomin' 'Arry.  When I'm an
+'Arry, I 'ates myself 'cos I knows I'm a toff.'
+
+"'Can't you decide which character you prefer, and stick to it?' I asked.
+
+"'No,' he answered, 'I carn't.  It's a rum thing, but whichever I am,
+sure as fate, 'bout the end of a month I begin to get sick o' myself.'
+
+"'I can quite understand it,' I murmured; 'I should give way myself in a
+fortnight.'
+
+"'I've been myself, now,' he continued, without noticing my remark, 'for
+somethin' like ten days.  One mornin', in 'bout three weeks' time, I
+shall get up in my diggins in the Mile End Road, and I shall look round
+the room, and at these clothes 'angin' over the bed, and at this yer
+concertina' (he gave it an affectionate squeeze), 'and I shall feel
+myself gettin' scarlet all over.  Then I shall jump out o' bed, and look
+at myself in the glass.  "You howling little cad," I shall say to myself,
+"I have half a mind to strangle you"; and I shall shave myself, and put
+on a quiet blue serge suit and a bowler 'at, tell my landlady to keep my
+rooms for me till I comes back, slip out o' the 'ouse, and into the fust
+'ansom I meets, and back to the Halbany.  And a month arter that, I shall
+come into my chambers at the Halbany, fling Voltaire and Parini into the
+fire, shy me 'at at the bust of good old 'Omer, slip on my blue suit
+agen, and back to the Mile End Road.'
+
+"'How do you explain your absence to both parties?' I asked.
+
+"'Oh, that's simple enough,' he replied.  'I just tells my 'ousekeeper at
+the Halbany as I'm goin' on the Continong; and my mates 'ere thinks I'm a
+traveller.'
+
+"'Nobody misses me much,' he added, pathetically; 'I hain't a
+partic'larly fetchin' sort o' bloke, either of me.  I'm sich an out-and-
+outer.  When I'm an 'Arry, I'm too much of an 'Arry, and when I'm a prig,
+I'm a reg'lar fust prize prig.  Seems to me as if I was two ends of a man
+without any middle.  If I could only mix myself up a bit more, I'd be all
+right.'
+
+"He sniffed once or twice, and then he laughed.  'Ah, well,' he said,
+casting aside his momentary gloom; 'it's all a game, and wot's the odds
+so long as yer 'appy.  'Ave a wet?'
+
+"I declined the wet, and left him playing sentimental airs to himself
+upon the concertina.
+
+"One afternoon, about a month later, the servant came to me with a card
+on which was engraved the name of 'Mr. Joseph Smythe.'  I requested her
+to show him up.  He entered with his usual air of languid
+superciliousness, and seated himself in a graceful attitude upon the
+sofa.
+
+"'Well,' I said, as soon as the girl had closed the door behind her, 'so
+you've got rid of Smith?'
+
+"A sickly smile passed over his face.  'You have not mentioned it to any
+one?' he asked anxiously.
+
+"'Not to a soul,' I replied; 'though I confess I often feel tempted to.'
+
+"'I sincerely trust you never will,' he said, in a tone of alarm.  'You
+can have no conception of the misery the whole thing causes me.  I cannot
+understand it.  What possible affinity there can be between myself and
+that disgusting little snob passes my comprehension.  I assure you, my
+dear Mac, the knowledge that I was a ghoul, or a vampire, would cause me
+less nausea than the reflection that I am one and the same with that
+odious little Whitechapel bounder.  When I think of him every nerve in my
+body--'
+
+"'Don't think about him any more,' I interrupted, perceiving his strongly-
+suppressed emotion.  'You didn't come here to talk about him, I'm sure.
+Let us dismiss him.'
+
+"'Well,' he replied, 'in a certain roundabout way it is slightly
+connected with him.  That is really my excuse for inflicting the subject
+upon you.  You are the only man I _can_ speak to about it--if I shall not
+bore you?'
+
+"'Not in the least,' I said.  'I am most interested.'  As he still
+hesitated, I asked him point-blank what it was.
+
+"He appeared embarrassed.  'It is really very absurd of me,' he said,
+while the faintest suspicion of pink crossed his usually colourless face;
+'but I feel I must talk to somebody about it.  The fact is, my dear Mac,
+I am in love.'
+
+"'Capital!' I cried; 'I'm delighted to hear it.'  (I thought it might
+make a man of him.)  'Do I know the lady?'
+
+"'I am inclined to think you must have seen her,' he replied; 'she was
+with me on the pier at Yarmouth that evening you met me.'
+
+"'Not 'Liza!' I exclaimed.
+
+"'That was she,' he answered; 'Miss Elizabeth Muggins.'  He dwelt
+lovingly upon the name.
+
+"'But,' I said, 'you seemed--I really could not help noticing, it was so
+pronounced--you seemed to positively dislike her.  Indeed, I gathered
+from your remark to a friend that her society was distinctly distasteful
+to you.'
+
+"'To Smith,' he corrected me.  'What judge would that howling little
+blackguard be of a woman's worth!  The dislike of such a man as that is a
+testimonial to her merit!'
+
+"'I may be mistaken,' I said; 'but she struck me as a bit common.'
+
+"'She is not, perhaps, what the world would call a lady,' he admitted;
+'but then, my dear Mac, my opinion of the world is not such as to render
+_its_ opinion of much value to me.  I and the world differ on most
+subjects, I am glad to say.  She is beautiful, and she is good, and she
+is my choice.'
+
+"'She's a jolly enough little girl,' I replied, 'and, I should say,
+affectionate; but have you considered, Smythe, whether she is quite--what
+shall we say--quite as intellectual as could be desired?'
+
+"'Really, to tell the truth, I have not troubled myself much about her
+intellect,' he replied, with one of his sneering smiles.  'I have no
+doubt that the amount of intellect absolutely necessary to the formation
+of a British home, I shall be able to supply myself.  I have no desire
+for an intellectual wife.  One is compelled to meet tiresome people, but
+one does not live with them if one can avoid it.'
+
+"'No,' he continued, reverting to his more natural tone; 'the more I
+think of Elizabeth the more clear it becomes to me that she is the one
+woman in the world for whom marriage with me is possible.  I perceive
+that to the superficial observer my selection must appear extraordinary.
+I do not pretend to explain it, or even to understand it.  The study of
+mankind is beyond man.  Only fools attempt it.  Maybe it is her contrast
+to myself that attracts me.  Maybe my, perhaps, too spiritual nature
+feels the need of contact with her coarser clay to perfect itself.  I
+cannot tell.  These things must always remain mysteries.  I only know
+that I love her--that, if any reliance is to be placed upon instinct, she
+is the mate to whom Artemis is leading me.'
+
+"It was clear that he was in love, and I therefore ceased to argue with
+him.  'You kept up your acquaintanceship with her, then, after you'--I
+was going to say 'after you ceased to be Smith,' but not wishing to
+agitate him by more mention of that person than I could help, I
+substituted, 'after you returned to the Albany?'
+
+"'Not exactly,' he replied; 'I lost sight of her after I left Yarmouth,
+and I did not see her again until five days ago, when I came across her
+in an aerated bread shop.  I had gone in to get a glass of milk and a
+bun, and _she_ brought them to me.  I recognised her in a moment.'  His
+face lighted up with quite a human smile.  'I take tea there every
+afternoon now,' he added, glancing towards the clock, 'at four.'
+
+"'There's not much need to ask _her_ views on the subject,' I said,
+laughing; 'her feelings towards you were pretty evident.'
+
+"'Well, that is the curious part of it,' he replied, with a return to his
+former embarrassment; 'she does not seem to care for me now at all.
+Indeed, she positively refuses me.  She says--to put it in the dear
+child's own racy language--that she wouldn't take me on at any price.  She
+says it would be like marrying a clockwork figure without the key.  She's
+more frank than complimentary, but I like that.'
+
+"'Wait a minute,' I said; 'an idea occurs to me.  Does she know of your
+identity with Smith?'
+
+"'No,' he replied, alarmed, 'I would not have her know it for worlds.
+Only yesterday she told me that I reminded her of a fellow she had met at
+Yarmouth, and my heart was in my mouth.'
+
+"'How did she look when she told you that?' I asked.
+
+"'How did she look?' he repeated, not understanding me.
+
+"'What was her expression at that moment?' I said--'was it severe or
+tender?'
+
+"'Well,' he replied, 'now I come to think of it, she did seem to soften a
+bit just then.'
+
+"'My dear boy,' I said, 'the case is as clear as daylight.  She loves
+Smith.  No girl who admired Smith could be attracted by Smythe.  As your
+present self you will never win her.  In a few weeks' time, however, you
+will be Smith.  Leave the matter over until then.  Propose to her as
+Smith, and she will accept you.  After marriage you can break Smythe
+gently to her.'
+
+"'By Jove!' he exclaimed, startled out of his customary lethargy, 'I
+never thought of that.  The truth is, when I am in my right senses, Smith
+and all his affairs seem like a dream to me.  Any idea connected with him
+would never enter my mind.'
+
+"He rose and held out his hand.  'I am so glad I came to see you,' he
+said; 'your suggestion has almost reconciled me to my miserable fate.
+Indeed, I quite look forward to a month of Smith, now.'
+
+"'I'm so pleased,' I answered, shaking hands with him.  'Mind you come
+and tell me how you get on.  Another man's love affairs are not usually
+absorbing, but there is an element of interest about yours that renders
+the case exceptional.'
+
+"We parted, and I did not see him again for another month.  Then, late
+one evening, the servant knocked at my door to say that a Mr. Smith
+wished to see me.
+
+"'Smith, Smith,' I repeated; 'what Smith? didn't he give you a card?'
+
+"'No, sir,' answered the girl; 'he doesn't look the sort that would have
+a card.  He's not a gentleman, sir; but he says you'll know him.'  She
+evidently regarded the statement as an aspersion upon myself.
+
+"I was about to tell her to say I was out, when the recollection of
+Smythe's other self flashed into my mind, and I directed her to send him
+up.
+
+"A minute passed, and then he entered.  He was wearing a new suit of a
+louder pattern, if possible, than before.  I think he must have designed
+it himself.  He looked hot and greasy.  He did not offer to shake hands,
+but sat down awkwardly on the extreme edge of a small chair, and gaped
+about the room as if he had never seen it before.
+
+"He communicated his shyness to myself.  I could not think what to say,
+and we sat for a while in painful silence.
+
+"'Well,' I said, at last, plunging head-foremost into the matter,
+according to the method of shy people, 'and how's 'Liza?'
+
+"'Oh, _she's_ all right,' he replied, keeping his eyes fixed on his hat.
+
+"'Have you done it?' I continued.
+
+"'Done wot?' he asked, looking up.
+
+"'Married her.'
+
+"'No,' he answered, returning to the contemplation of his hat.
+
+"'Has she refused you then?' I said.
+
+"'I ain't arst 'er,' he returned.
+
+"He seemed unwilling to explain matters of his own accord.  I had to put
+the conversation into the form of a cross-examination.
+
+"'Why not?' I asked; 'don't you think she cares for you any longer?'
+
+"He burst into a harsh laugh.  'There ain't much fear o' that,' he said;
+'it's like 'aving an Alcock's porous plaster mashed on yer, blowed if it
+ain't.  There's no gettin' rid of 'er.  I wish she'd giv' somebody else a
+turn.  I'm fair sick of 'er.'
+
+"'But you were enthusiastic about her a month ago!' I exclaimed in
+astonishment.
+
+"'Smythe may 'ave been,' he said; 'there ain't no accounting for that
+ninny, 'is 'ead's full of starch.  Anyhow, I don't take 'er on while I'm
+myself.  I'm too jolly fly.'
+
+"'That sort o' gal's all right enough to lark with,' he continued; 'but
+yer don't want to marry 'em.  They don't do yer no good.  A man wants a
+wife as 'e can respect--some one as is a cut above 'imself, as will raise
+'im up a peg or two--some one as 'e can look up to and worship.  A man's
+wife orter be to 'im a gawddess--a hangel, a--'
+
+"'You appear to have met the lady,' I remarked, interrupting him.
+
+"He blushed scarlet, and became suddenly absorbed in the pattern of the
+carpet.  But the next moment he looked up again, and his face seemed
+literally transformed.
+
+"'Oh!  Mr. MacShaughnassy,' he burst out, with a ring of genuine
+manliness in his voice, 'you don't know 'ow good, 'ow beautiful she is.  I
+ain't fit to breathe 'er name in my thoughts.  An' she's so clever.  I
+met 'er at that Toynbee 'All.  There was a party of toffs there all
+together.  You would 'ave enjoyed it, Mr. MacShaughnassy, if you could
+'ave 'eard 'er; she was makin' fun of the pictures and the people round
+about to 'er pa--such wit, such learnin', such 'aughtiness.  I follered
+them out and opened the carriage door for 'er, and she just drew 'er
+skirt aside and looked at me as if I was the dirt in the road.  I wish I
+was, for then perhaps one day I'd kiss 'er feet.'
+
+"His emotion was so genuine that I did not feel inclined to laugh at him.
+'Did you find out who she was?' I asked.
+
+"'Yes,' he answered; 'I 'eard the old gentleman say "'Ome" to the
+coachman, and I ran after the carriage all the way to 'Arley Street.
+Trevior's 'er name, Hedith Trevior.'
+
+"'Miss Trevior!' I cried, 'a tall, dark girl, with untidy hair and rather
+weak eyes?'
+
+"'Tall and dark,' he replied 'with 'air that seems tryin' to reach 'er
+lips to kiss 'em, and heyes, light blue, like a Cambridge necktie.  A
+'undred and seventy-three was the number.'
+
+"'That's right,' I said; 'my dear Smith, this is becoming complicated.
+You've met the lady and talked to her for half an hour--as Smythe, don't
+you remember?'
+
+"'No,' he said, after cogitating for a minute, 'carn't say I do; I never
+can remember much about Smythe.  He allers seems to me like a bad dream.'
+
+"'Well, you met her,' I said; 'I'm positive.  I introduced you to her
+myself, and she confided to me afterwards that she thought you a most
+charming man.'
+
+"'No--did she?' he remarked, evidently softening in his feelings towards
+Smythe; 'and did _I_ like '_er_?'
+
+"'Well, to tell the truth,' I answered, 'I don't think you did.  You
+looked intensely bored.'
+
+"'The Juggins,' I heard him mutter to himself, and then he said aloud:
+'D'yer think I shall get a chance o' seein' 'er agen, when I'm--when I'm
+Smythe?'
+
+"'Of course,' I said, 'I'll take you round myself.  By the bye,' I added,
+jumping up and looking on the mantelpiece, 'I've got a card for a
+Cinderella at their place--something to do with a birthday.  Will you be
+Smythe on November the twentieth?'
+
+"'Ye--as,' he replied; 'oh, yas--bound to be by then.'
+
+"'Very well, then,' I said, 'I'll call round for you at the Albany, and
+we'll go together.'
+
+"He rose and stood smoothing his hat with his sleeve.  'Fust time I've
+ever looked for'ard to bein' that hanimated corpse, Smythe,' he said
+slowly.  'Blowed if I don't try to 'urry it up--'pon my sivey I will.'
+
+"'He'll be no good to you till the twentieth,' I reminded him.  'And,' I
+added, as I stood up to ring the bell, 'you're sure it's a genuine case
+this time.  You won't be going back to 'Liza?'
+
+"'Oh, don't talk 'bout 'Liza in the same breath with Hedith,' he replied,
+'it sounds like sacrilege.'
+
+"He stood hesitating with the handle of the door in his hand.  At last,
+opening it and looking very hard at his hat, he said, 'I'm goin' to
+'Arley Street now.  I walk up and down outside the 'ouse every evening,
+and sometimes, when there ain't no one lookin', I get a chance to kiss
+the doorstep.'
+
+"He disappeared, and I returned to my chair.
+
+"On November twentieth, I called for him according to promise.  I found
+him on the point of starting for the club: he had forgotten all about our
+appointment.  I reminded him of it, and he with difficulty recalled it,
+and consented, without any enthusiasm, to accompany me.  By a few artful
+hints to her mother (including a casual mention of his income), I
+manoeuvred matters so that he had Edith almost entirely to himself for
+the whole evening.  I was proud of what I had done, and as we were
+walking home together I waited to receive his gratitude.
+
+"As it seemed slow in coming, I hinted my expectations.
+
+"'Well,' I said, 'I think I managed that very cleverly for you.'
+
+"'Managed what very cleverly?' said he.
+
+"'Why, getting you and Miss Trevior left together for such a long time in
+the conservatory,' I answered, somewhat hurt; '_I_ fixed that for you.'
+
+"'Oh, it was _you_, was it,' he replied; 'I've been cursing Providence.'
+
+"I stopped dead in the middle of the pavement, and faced him.  'Don't you
+love her?' I said.
+
+"'Love her!' he repeated, in the utmost astonishment; 'what on earth is
+there in her to love?  She's nothing but a bad translation of a modern
+French comedy, with the interest omitted.'
+
+"This 'tired' me--to use an Americanism.  'You came to me a month ago,' I
+said, 'raving over her, and talking about being the dirt under her feet
+and kissing her doorstep.'
+
+"He turned very red.  'I wish, my dear Mac,' he said, 'you would pay me
+the compliment of not mistaking me for that detestable little cad with
+whom I have the misfortune to be connected.  You would greatly oblige me
+if next time he attempts to inflict upon you his vulgar drivel you would
+kindly kick him downstairs.'
+
+"'No doubt,' he added, with a sneer, as we walked on, 'Miss Trevior would
+be his ideal.  She is exactly the type of woman, I should say, to charm
+that type of man.  For myself, I do not appreciate the artistic and
+literary female.'
+
+"'Besides,' he continued, in a deeper tone, 'you know my feelings.  I
+shall never care for any other woman but Elizabeth.'
+
+"'And she?' I said
+
+"'She,' he sighed, 'is breaking her heart for Smith.'
+
+"'Why don't you tell her you are Smith?' I asked.
+
+"'I cannot,' he replied, 'not even to win her.  Besides, she would not
+believe me.'
+
+"We said good-night at the corner of Bond Street, and I did not see him
+again till one afternoon late in the following March, when I ran against
+him in Ludgate Circus.  He was wearing his transition blue suit and
+bowler hat.  I went up to him and took his arm.
+
+"'Which are you?' I said.
+
+"'Neither, for the moment,' he replied, 'thank God.  Half an hour ago I
+was Smythe, half an hour hence I shall be Smith.  For the present half-
+hour I am a man.'
+
+"There was a pleasant, hearty ring in his voice, and a genial, kindly
+light in his eyes, and he held himself like a frank gentleman.
+
+"'You are certainly an improvement upon both of them,' I said.
+
+"He laughed a sunny laugh, with just the shadow of sadness dashed across
+it.  'Do you know my idea of Heaven?' he said.
+
+"'No,' I replied, somewhat surprised at the question.
+
+"'Ludgate Circus,' was the answer.  'The only really satisfying moments
+of my life,' he said, 'have been passed in the neighbourhood of Ludgate
+Circus.  I leave Piccadilly an unhealthy, unwholesome prig.  At Charing
+Cross I begin to feel my blood stir in my veins.  From Ludgate Circus to
+Cheapside I am a human thing with human feeling throbbing in my heart,
+and human thought throbbing in my brain--with fancies, sympathies, and
+hopes.  At the Bank my mind becomes a blank.  As I walk on, my senses
+grow coarse and blunted; and by the time I reach Whitechapel I am a poor
+little uncivilised cad.  On the return journey it is the same thing
+reversed.'
+
+"'Why not live in Ludgate Circus,' I said, 'and be always as you are
+now?'
+
+"'Because,' he answered, 'man is a pendulum, and must travel his arc.'
+
+"'My dear Mac,' said he, laying his hand upon my shoulder, 'there is only
+one good thing about me, and that is a moral.  Man is as God made him:
+don't be so sure that you can take him to pieces and improve him.  All my
+life I have sought to make myself an unnaturally superior person.  Nature
+has retaliated by making me also an unnaturally inferior person.  Nature
+abhors lopsidedness.  She turns out man as a whole, to be developed as a
+whole.  I always wonder, whenever I come across a supernaturally pious, a
+supernaturally moral, a supernaturally cultured person, if they also have
+a reverse self.'
+
+"I was shocked at his suggested argument, and walked by his side for a
+while without speaking.  At last, feeling curious on the subject, I asked
+him how his various love affairs were progressing.
+
+"'Oh, as usual,' he replied; 'in and out of a _cul de sac_.  When I am
+Smythe I love Eliza, and Eliza loathes me.  When I am Smith I love Edith,
+and the mere sight of me makes her shudder.  It is as unfortunate for
+them as for me.  I am not saying it boastfully.  Heaven knows it is an
+added draught of misery in my cup; but it is a fact that Eliza is
+literally pining away for me as Smith, and--as Smith I find it impossible
+to be even civil to her; while Edith, poor girl, has been foolish enough
+to set her heart on me as Smythe, and as Smythe she seems to me but the
+skin of a woman stuffed with the husks of learning, and rags torn from
+the corpse of wit.'
+
+"I remained absorbed in my own thoughts for some time, and did not come
+out of them till we were crossing the Minories.  Then, the idea suddenly
+occurring to me, I said:
+
+"'Why don't you get a new girl altogether?  There must be medium girls
+that both Smith and Smythe could like, and that would put up with both of
+you.'
+
+"'No more girls for this child,' he answered 'they're more trouble than
+they're worth.  Those yer want yer carn't get, and those yer can 'ave,
+yer don't want.'
+
+"I started, and looked up at him.  He was slouching along with his hands
+in his pockets, and a vacuous look in his face.
+
+"A sudden repulsion seized me.  'I must go now,' I said, stopping.  'I'd
+no idea I had come so far.'
+
+"He seemed as glad to be rid of me as I to be rid of him.  'Oh, must
+yer,' he said, holding out his hand.  'Well, so long.'
+
+"We shook hands carelessly.  He disappeared in the crowd, and that is the
+last I have ever seen of him."
+
+* * * * *
+
+"Is that a true story?" asked Jephson.
+
+"Well, I've altered the names and dates," said MacShaughnassy; "but the
+main facts you can rely upon."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+The final question discussed at our last meeting been: What shall our
+hero be?  MacShaughnassy had suggested an author, with a critic for the
+villain.  My idea was a stockbroker, with an undercurrent of romance in
+his nature.  Said Jephson, who has a practical mind: "The question is not
+what we like, but what the female novel-reader likes."
+
+"That is so," agreed MacShaughnassy.  "I propose that we collect feminine
+opinion upon this point.  I will write to my aunt and obtain from her the
+old lady's view.  You," he said, turning to me, "can put the case to your
+wife, and get the young lady's ideal.  Let Brown write to his sister at
+Newnham, and find out whom the intellectual maiden favours, while Jephson
+can learn from Miss Medbury what is most attractive to the common-sensed
+girl."
+
+This plan we had adopted, and the result was now under consideration.
+MacShaughnassy opened the proceedings by reading his aunt's letter.  Wrote
+the old lady:
+
+   "I think, if I were you, my dear boy, I should choose a soldier.  You
+   know your poor grandfather, who ran away to America with that _wicked_
+   Mrs. Featherly, the banker's wife, was a soldier, and so was your poor
+   cousin Robert, who lost eight thousand pounds at Monte Carlo.  I have
+   always felt singularly drawn towards soldiers, even as a girl; though
+   your poor dear uncle could not bear them.  You will find many
+   allusions to soldiers and men of war in the Old Testament (see Jer.
+   xlviii. 14).  Of course one does not like to think of their fighting
+   and killing each other, but then they do not seem to do that sort of
+   thing nowadays."
+
+"So much for the old lady," said MacShaughnassy, as he folded up the
+letter and returned it to his pocket.  "What says culture?"
+
+Brown produced from his cigar-case a letter addressed in a bold round
+hand, and read as follows:
+
+   "What a curious coincidence!  A few of us were discussing this very
+   subject last night in Millicent Hightopper's rooms, and I may tell you
+   at once that our decision was unanimous in favour of soldiers.  You
+   see, my dear Selkirk, in human nature the attraction is towards the
+   opposite.  To a milliner's apprentice a poet would no doubt be
+   satisfying; to a woman of intelligence he would he an unutterable
+   bore.  What the intellectual woman requires in man is not something to
+   argue with, but something to look at.  To an empty-headed woman I can
+   imagine the soldier type proving vapid and uninteresting; to the woman
+   of mind he represents her ideal of man--a creature strong, handsome,
+   well-dressed, and not too clever."
+
+"That gives us two votes for the army," remarked MacShaughnassy, as Brown
+tore his sister's letter in two, and threw the pieces into the
+waste-paper basket.  "What says the common-sensed girl?"
+
+"First catch your common-sensed girl," muttered Jephson, a little
+grumpily, as it seemed to me.  "Where do you propose finding her?"
+
+"Well," returned MacShaughnassy, "I looked to find her in Miss Medbury."
+
+As a rule, the mention of Miss Medbury's name brings a flush of joy to
+Jephson's face; but now his features wore an expression distinctly
+approaching a scowl.
+
+"Oh!" he replied, "did you?  Well, then, the common-sensed girl loves the
+military also."
+
+"By Jove!" exclaimed MacShaughnassy, "what an extraordinary thing.  What
+reason does she give?"
+
+"That there's a something about them, and that they dance so divinely,"
+answered Jephson, shortly.
+
+"Well, you do surprise me," murmured MacShaughnassy, "I am astonished."
+
+Then to me he said: "And what does the young married woman say?  The
+same?"
+
+"Yes," I replied, "precisely the same."
+
+"Does _she_ give a reason?" he asked.
+
+"Oh yes," I explained; "because you can't help liking them."
+
+There was silence for the next few minutes, while we smoked and thought.
+I fancy we were all wishing we had never started this inquiry.
+
+That four distinctly different types of educated womanhood should, with
+promptness and unanimity quite unfeminine, have selected the soldier as
+their ideal, was certainly discouraging to the civilian heart.  Had they
+been nursemaids or servant girls, I should have expected it.  The worship
+of Mars by the Venus of the white cap is one of the few vital religions
+left to this devoutless age.  A year or two ago I lodged near a barracks,
+and the sight to be seen round its huge iron gates on Sunday afternoons I
+shall never forget.  The girls began to assemble about twelve o'clock.  By
+two, at which hour the army, with its hair nicely oiled and a cane in its
+hand, was ready for a stroll, there would be some four or five hundred of
+them waiting in a line.  Formerly they had collected in a wild mob, and
+as the soldiers were let out to them two at a time, had fought for them,
+as lions for early Christians.  This, however, had led to scenes of such
+disorder and brutality, that the police had been obliged to interfere;
+and the girls were now marshalled in _queue_, two abreast, and compelled,
+by a force of constables specially told off for the purpose, to keep
+their places and wait their proper turn.
+
+At three o'clock the sentry on duty would come down to the wicket and
+close it.  "They're all gone, my dears," he would shout out to the girls
+still left; "it's no good your stopping, we've no more for you to-day."
+
+"Oh, not one!" some poor child would murmur pleadingly, while the tears
+welled up into her big round eyes, "not even a little one.  I've been
+waiting _such_ a long time."
+
+"Can't help that," the honest fellow would reply, gruffly, but not
+unkindly, turning aside to hide his emotion; "you've had 'em all between
+you.  We don't make 'em, you know: you can't have 'em if we haven't got
+'em, can you?  Come earlier next time."
+
+Then he would hurry away to escape further importunity; and the police,
+who appeared to have been waiting for this moment with gloating
+anticipation, would jeeringly hustle away the weeping remnant.  "Now
+then, pass along, you girls, pass along," they would say, in that
+irritatingly unsympathetic voice of theirs.  "You've had your chance.
+Can't have the roadway blocked up all the afternoon with this 'ere
+demonstration of the unloved.  Pass along."
+
+In connection with this same barracks, our char-woman told Amenda, who
+told Ethelbertha, who told me a story, which I now told the boys.
+
+Into a certain house, in a certain street in the neighbourhood, there
+moved one day a certain family.  Their servant had left them--most of
+their servants did at the end of a week--and the day after the moving-in
+an advertisement for a domestic was drawn up and sent to the _Chronicle_.
+It ran thus:
+
+   WANTED, GENERAL SERVANT, in small family of eleven.  Wages, 6 pounds;
+   no beer money.  Must be early riser and hard worker.  Washing done at
+   home.  Must be good cook, and not object to window-cleaning.  Unitarian
+   preferred.--Apply, with references, to A. B., etc.
+
+That advertisement was sent off on Wednesday afternoon.  At seven o'clock
+on Thursday morning the whole family were awakened by continuous ringing
+of the street-door bell.  The husband, looking out of window, was
+surprised to see a crowd of about fifty girls surrounding the house.  He
+slipped on his dressing-gown and went down to see what was the matter.
+The moment he opened the door, fifteen of them charged tumultuously into
+the passage, sweeping him completely off his legs.  Once inside, these
+fifteen faced round, fought the other thirty-five or so back on to the
+doorstep, and slammed the door in their faces.  Then they picked up the
+master of the house, and asked him politely to conduct them to "A. B."
+
+At first, owing to the clamour of the mob outside, who were hammering at
+the door and shouting curses through the keyhole, he could understand
+nothing, but at length they succeeded in explaining to him that they were
+domestic servants come ill answer to his wife's advertisement.  The man
+went and told his wife, and his wife said she would see them, one at a
+time.
+
+Which one should have audience first was a delicate question to decide.
+The man, on being appealed to, said he would prefer to leave it to them.
+They accordingly discussed the matter among themselves.  At the end of a
+quarter of an hour, the victor, having borrowed some hair-pins and a
+looking-glass from our char-woman, who had slept in the house, went
+upstairs, while the remaining fourteen sat down in the hall, and fanned
+themselves with their bonnets.
+
+"A. B." was a good deal astonished when the first applicant presented
+herself.  She was a tall, genteel-looking girl.  Up to yesterday she had
+been head housemaid at Lady Stanton's, and before that she had been under-
+cook for two years to the Duchess of York.
+
+"And why did you leave Lady Stanton?" asked "A. B."
+
+"To come here, mum," replied the girl.  The lady was puzzled.
+
+"And you'll be satisfied with six pounds a year?" she asked.
+
+"Certainly, mum, I think it ample."
+
+"And you don't mind hard work?"
+
+"I love it, mum."
+
+"And you're an early riser?"
+
+"Oh yes, mum, it upsets me stopping in bed after half-past five."
+
+"You know we do the washing at home?"
+
+"Yes, mum.  I think it so much better to do it at home.  Those laundries
+ruin good clothes.  They're so careless."
+
+"Are you a Unitarian?" continued the lady.
+
+"Not yet, mum," replied the girl, "but I should like to be one."
+
+The lady took her reference, and said she would write.
+
+The next applicant offered to come for three pounds--thought six pounds
+too much.  She expressed her willingness to sleep in the back kitchen: a
+shakedown under the sink was all she wanted.  She likewise had yearnings
+towards Unitarianism.
+
+The third girl did not require any wages at all--could not understand
+what servants wanted with wages--thought wages only encouraged a love of
+foolish finery--thought a comfortable home in a Unitarian family ought to
+be sufficient wages for any girl.
+
+This girl said there was one stipulation she should like to make, and
+that was that she should be allowed to pay for all breakages caused by
+her own carelessness or neglect.  She objected to holidays and evenings
+out; she held that they distracted a girl from her work.
+
+The fourth candidate offered a premium of five pounds for the place; and
+then "A. B." began to get frightened, and refused to see any more of the
+girls, convinced that they must be lunatics from some neighbouring asylum
+out for a walk.
+
+Later in the day, meeting the next-door lady on the doorstep, she related
+her morning's experiences.
+
+"Oh, that's nothing extraordinary," said the next-door lady; "none of us
+on this side of the street pay wages; and we get the pick of all the best
+servants in London.  Why, girls will come from the other end of the
+kingdom to get into one of these houses.  It's the dream of their lives.
+They save up for years, so as to be able to come here for nothing."
+
+"What's the attraction?" asked "A. B.," more amazed than ever.
+
+"Why, don't you see," explained the next door lady, "our back windows
+open upon the barrack yard.  A girl living in one of these houses is
+always close to soldiers.  By looking out of window she can always see
+soldiers; and sometimes a soldier will nod to her or even call up to her.
+They never dream of asking for wages.  They'll work eighteen hours a day,
+and put up with anything just to be allowed to stop."
+
+"A. B." profited by this information, and engaged the girl who offered
+the five pounds premium.  She found her a perfect treasure of a servant.
+She was invariably willing and respectful, slept on a sofa in the
+kitchen, and was always contented with an egg for her dinner.
+
+The truth of this story I cannot vouch for.  Myself, I can believe it.
+Brown and MacShaughnassy made no attempt to do so, which seemed
+unfriendly.  Jephson excused himself on the plea of a headache.  I admit
+there are points in it presenting difficulties to the average intellect.
+As I explained at the commencement, it was told to me by Ethelbertha, who
+had it from Amenda, who got it from the char-woman, and exaggerations may
+have crept into it.  The following, however, were incidents that came
+under my own personal observation.  They afforded a still stronger
+example of the influence exercised by Tommy Atkins upon the British
+domestic, and I therefore thought it right to relate them.
+
+"The heroine of them," I said, "is our Amenda.  Now, you would call her a
+tolerably well-behaved, orderly young woman, would you not?"
+
+"She is my ideal of unostentatious respectability," answered
+MacShaughnassy.
+
+"That was my opinion also," I replied.  "You can, therefore, imagine my
+feelings on passing her one evening in the Folkestone High Street with a
+Panama hat upon her head (_my_ Panama hat), and a soldier's arm round her
+waist.  She was one of a mob following the band of the Third Berkshire
+Infantry, then in camp at Sandgate.  There was an ecstatic, far-away look
+in her eyes.  She was dancing rather than walking, and with her left hand
+she beat time to the music.
+
+"Ethelbertha was with me at the time.  We stared after the procession
+until it had turned the corner, and then we stared at each other.
+
+"'Oh, it's impossible,' said Ethelbertha to me.
+
+"'But that was my hat,' I said to Ethelbertha.
+
+"The moment we reached home Ethelbertha looked for Amenda, and I looked
+for my hat.  Neither was to be found.
+
+"Nine o'clock struck, ten o'clock struck.  At half-past ten, we went down
+and got our own supper, and had it in the kitchen.  At a quarter-past
+eleven, Amenda returned.  She walked into the kitchen without a word,
+hung my hat up behind the door, and commenced clearing away the supper
+things.
+
+"Ethelbertha rose, calm but severe.
+
+"'Where have you been, Amenda?' she inquired.
+
+"'Gadding half over the county with a lot of low soldiers,' answered
+Amenda, continuing her work.
+
+"'You had on my hat,' I added.
+
+"'Yes, sir,' replied Amenda, still continuing her work, 'it was the first
+thing that came to hand.  What I'm thankful for is that it wasn't
+missis's best bonnet.'
+
+"Whether Ethelbertha was mollified by the proper spirit displayed in this
+last remark, I cannot say, but I think it probable.  At all events, it
+was in a voice more of sorrow than of anger that she resumed her
+examination.
+
+"'You were walking with a soldier's arm around your waist when we passed
+you, Amenda?' she observed interrogatively.
+
+"'I know, mum,' admitted Amenda, 'I found it there myself when the music
+stopped.'
+
+"Ethelbertha looked her inquiries.  Amenda filled a saucepan with water,
+and then replied to them.
+
+"'I'm a disgrace to a decent household,' she said; 'no mistress who
+respected herself would keep me a moment.  I ought to be put on the
+doorstep with my box and a month's wages.'
+
+"'But why did you do it then?' said Ethelbertha, with natural
+astonishment.
+
+"'Because I'm a helpless ninny, mum.  I can't help myself; if I see
+soldiers I'm bound to follow them.  It runs in our family.  My poor
+cousin Emma was just such another fool.  She was engaged to be married to
+a quiet, respectable young fellow with a shop of his own, and three days
+before the wedding she ran off with a regiment of marines to Chatham and
+married the colour-sergeant.  That's what I shall end by doing.  I've
+been all the way to Sandgate with that lot you saw me with, and I've
+kissed four of them--the nasty wretches.  I'm a nice sort of girl to be
+walking out with a respectable milkman.'
+
+"She was so deeply disgusted with herself that it seemed superfluous for
+anybody else to be indignant with her; and Ethelbertha changed her tone
+and tried to comfort her.
+
+"'Oh, you'll get over all that nonsense, Amenda,' she said, laughingly;
+'you see yourself how silly it is.  You must tell Mr. Bowles to keep you
+away from soldiers.'
+
+"'Ah, I can't look at it in the same light way that you do, mum,'
+returned Amenda, somewhat reprovingly; 'a girl that can't see a bit of
+red marching down the street without wanting to rush out and follow it
+ain't fit to be anybody's wife.  Why, I should be leaving the shop with
+nobody in it about twice a week, and he'd have to go the round of all the
+barracks in London, looking for me.  I shall save up and get myself into
+a lunatic asylum, that's what I shall do.'
+
+"Ethelbertha began to grow quite troubled.  'But surely this is something
+altogether new, Amenda,' she said; 'you must have often met soldiers when
+you've been out in London?'
+
+"'Oh yes, one or two at a time, walking about anyhow, I can stand that
+all right.  It's when there's a lot of them with a band that I lose my
+head.'
+
+"'You don't know what it's like, mum,' she added, noticing Ethelbertha's
+puzzled expression; 'you've never had it.  I only hope you never may.'
+
+"We kept a careful watch over Amenda during the remainder of our stay at
+Folkestone, and an anxious time we had of it.  Every day some regiment or
+other would march through the town, and at the first sound of its music
+Amenda would become restless and excited.  The Pied Piper's reed could
+not have stirred the Hamelin children deeper than did those Sandgate
+bands the heart of our domestic.  Fortunately, they generally passed
+early in the morning when we were indoors, but one day, returning home to
+lunch, we heard distant strains dying away upon the Hythe Road.  We
+hurried in.  Ethelbertha ran down into the kitchen; it was empty!--up
+into Amenda's bedroom; it was vacant!  We called.  There was no answer.
+
+"'That miserable girl has gone off again,' said Ethelbertha.  'What a
+terrible misfortune it is for her.  It's quite a disease.'
+
+"Ethelbertha wanted me to go to Sandgate camp and inquire for her.  I was
+sorry for the girl myself, but the picture of a young and
+innocent-looking man wandering about a complicated camp, inquiring for a
+lost domestic, presenting itself to my mind, I said that I'd rather not.
+
+"Ethelbertha thought me heartless, and said that if I would not go she
+would go herself.  I replied that I thought one female member of my
+household was enough in that camp at a time, and requested her not to.
+Ethelbertha expressed her sense of my inhuman behaviour by haughtily
+declining to eat any lunch, and I expressed my sense of her
+unreasonableness by sweeping the whole meal into the grate, after which
+Ethelbertha suddenly developed exuberant affection for the cat (who
+didn't want anybody's love, but wanted to get under the grate after the
+lunch), and I became supernaturally absorbed in the
+day-before-yesterday's newspaper.
+
+"In the afternoon, strolling out into the garden, I heard the faint cry
+of a female in distress.  I listened attentively, and the cry was
+repeated.  I thought it sounded like Amenda's voice, but where it came
+from I could not conceive.  It drew nearer, however, as I approached the
+bottom of the garden, and at last I located it in a small wooden shed,
+used by the proprietor of the house as a dark-room for developing
+photographs.
+
+"The door was locked.  'Is that you, Amenda?' I cried through the
+keyhole.
+
+"'Yes, sir,' came back the muffled answer. 'Will you please let me out?
+you'll find the key on the ground near the door.'
+
+"I discovered it on the grass about a yard away, and released her.  'Who
+locked you in?' I asked.
+
+"'I did, sir,' she replied; 'I locked myself in, and pushed the key out
+under the door.  I had to do it, or I should have gone off with those
+beastly soldiers.'
+
+"'I hope I haven't inconvenienced you, sir,' she added, stepping out; 'I
+left the lunch all laid.'"
+
+* * * * *
+
+Amenda's passion for soldiers was her one tribute to sentiment.  Towards
+all others of the male sex she maintained an attitude of callous
+unsusceptibility, and her engagements with them (which were numerous)
+were entered into or abandoned on grounds so sordid as to seriously shock
+Ethelbertha.
+
+When she came to us she was engaged to a pork butcher--with a milkman in
+reserve.  For Amenda's sake we dealt with the man, but we never liked
+him, and we liked his pork still less.  When, therefore, Amenda announced
+to us that her engagement with him was "off," and intimated that her
+feelings would in no way suffer by our going elsewhere for our bacon, we
+secretly rejoiced.
+
+"I am confident you have done right, Amenda," said Ethelbertha; "you
+would never have been happy with that man."
+
+"No, mum, I don't think I ever should," replied Amenda.  "I don't see how
+any girl could as hadn't the digestion of an ostrich."
+
+Ethelbertha looked puzzled.  "But what has digestion got to do with it?"
+she asked.
+
+"A pretty good deal, mum," answered Amenda, "when you're thinking of
+marrying a man as can't make a sausage fit to eat."
+
+"But, surely," exclaimed Ethelbertha, "you don't mean to say you're
+breaking off the match because you don't like his sausages!"
+
+"Well, I suppose that's what it comes to," agreed Amenda, unconcernedly.
+
+"What an awful idea!" sighed poor Ethelbertha, after a long pause.  "Do
+you think you ever really loved him?"
+
+"Oh yes," said Amenda, "I loved him right enough, but it's no good loving
+a man that wants you to live on sausages that keep you awake all night."
+
+"But does he want you to live on sausages?" persisted Ethelbertha.
+
+"Oh, he doesn't say anything about it," explained Amenda; "but you know
+what it is, mum, when you marry a pork butcher; you're expected to eat
+what's left over.  That's the mistake my poor cousin Eliza made.  She
+married a muffin man.  Of course, what he didn't sell they had to finish
+up themselves.  Why, one winter, when he had a run of bad luck, they
+lived for two months on nothing but muffins.  I never saw a girl so
+changed in all my life.  One has to think of these things, you know."
+
+But the most shamefully mercenary engagement that I think Amenda ever
+entered into, was one with a 'bus conductor.  We were living in the north
+of London then, and she had a young man, a cheesemonger, who kept a shop
+in Lupus Street, Chelsea.  He could not come up to her because of the
+shop, so once a week she used to go down to him.  One did not ride ten
+miles for a penny in those days, and she found the fare from Holloway to
+Victoria and back a severe tax upon her purse.  The same 'bus that took
+her down at six brought her back at ten.  During the first journey the
+'bus conductor stared at Amenda; during the second he talked to her,
+during the third he gave her a cocoanut, during the fourth he proposed to
+her, and was promptly accepted.  After that, Amenda was enabled to visit
+her cheesemonger without expense.
+
+He was a quaint character himself, this 'bus conductor.  I often rode
+with him to Fleet Street.  He knew me quite well (I suppose Amenda must
+have pointed me out to him), and would always ask me after her--aloud,
+before all the other passengers, which was trying--and give me messages
+to take back to her.  Where women were concerned he had what is called "a
+way" with him, and from the extent and variety of his female
+acquaintance, and the evident tenderness with which the majority of them
+regarded him, I am inclined to hope that Amenda's desertion of him (which
+happened contemporaneously with her jilting of the cheesemonger) caused
+him less prolonged suffering than might otherwise have been the case.
+
+He was a man from whom I derived a good deal of amusement one way and
+another.  Thinking of him brings back to my mind a somewhat odd incident.
+
+One afternoon, I jumped upon his 'bus in the Seven Sisters Road.  An
+elderly Frenchman was the only other occupant of the vehicle.  "You vil
+not forget me," the Frenchman was saying as I entered, "I desire Sharing
+Cross."
+
+"I won't forget yer," answered the conductor, "you shall 'ave yer Sharing
+Cross.  Don't make a fuss about it."
+
+"That's the third time 'ee's arst me not to forget 'im," he remarked to
+me in a stentorian aside; "'ee don't giv' yer much chance of doin' it,
+does 'ee?"
+
+At the corner of the Holloway Road we drew up, and our conductor began to
+shout after the manner of his species: "Charing Cross--Charing Cross--'ere
+yer are--Come along, lady--Charing Cross."
+
+The little Frenchman jumped up, and prepared to exit; the conductor
+pushed him back.
+
+"Sit down and don't be silly," he said; "this ain't Charing Cross."
+
+The Frenchman looked puzzled, but collapsed meekly.  We picked up a few
+passengers, and proceeded on our way.  Half a mile up the Liverpool Road
+a lady stood on the kerb regarding us as we passed with that pathetic
+mingling of desire and distrust which is the average woman's attitude
+towards conveyances of all kinds.  Our conductor stopped.
+
+"Where d'yer want to go to?" he asked her severely--"Strand--Charing
+Cross?"
+
+The Frenchman did not hear or did not understand the first part of the
+speech, but he caught the words "Charing Cross," and bounced up and out
+on to the step.  The conductor collared him as he was getting off, and
+jerked him back savagely.
+
+"Carn't yer keep still a minute," he cried indignantly; "blessed if you
+don't want lookin' after like a bloomin' kid."
+
+"I vont to be put down at Sharing Cross," answered the Frenchman, humbly.
+
+"You vont to be put down at Sharing Cross," repeated the other bitterly,
+as he led him back to his seat.  "I shall put yer down in the middle of
+the road if I 'ave much more of yer.  You stop there till I come and
+sling yer out.  I ain't likely to let yer go much past yer Sharing Cross,
+I shall be too jolly glad to get rid o' yer."
+
+The poor Frenchman subsided, and we jolted on.  At "The Angel" we, of
+course, stopped.  "Charing Cross," shouted the conductor, and up sprang
+the Frenchman.
+
+"Oh, my Gawd," said the conductor, taking him by the shoulders and
+forcing him down into the corner seat, "wot am I to do?  Carn't somebody
+sit on 'im?"
+
+He held him firmly down until the 'bus started, and then released him.  At
+the top of Chancery Lane the same scene took place, and the poor little
+Frenchman became exasperated.
+
+"He keep saying Sharing Cross, Sharing Cross," he exclaimed, turning to
+the other passengers; "and it is _no_ Sharing Cross.  He is fool."
+
+"Carn't yer understand," retorted the conductor, equally indignant; "of
+course I say Sharing Cross--I mean Charing Cross, but that don't mean
+that it _is_ Charing Cross.  That means--" and then perceiving from the
+blank look on the Frenchman's face the utter impossibility of ever making
+the matter clear to him, he turned to us with an appealing gesture, and
+asked:
+
+"Does any gentleman know the French for 'bloomin' idiot'?"
+
+A day or two afterwards, I happened to enter his omnibus again.
+
+"Well," I asked him, "did you get your French friend to Charing Cross all
+right?"
+
+"No, sir," he replied, "you'll 'ardly believe it, but I 'ad a bit of a
+row with a policeman just before I got to the corner, and it put 'im
+clean out o' my 'ead.  Blessed if I didn't run 'im on to Victoria."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+Said Brown one evening, "There is but one vice, and that is selfishness."
+
+Jephson was standing before the fire lighting his pipe.  He puffed the
+tobacco into a glow, threw the match into the embers, and then said:
+
+"And the seed of all virtue also."
+
+"Sit down and get on with your work," said MacShaughnassy from the sofa
+where he lay at full length with his heels on a chair; "we're discussing
+the novel.  Paradoxes not admitted during business hours."
+
+Jephson, however, was in an argumentative mood.
+
+"Selfishness," he continued, "is merely another name for Will.  Every
+deed, good or bad, that we do is prompted by selfishness.  We are
+charitable to secure ourselves a good place in the next world, to make
+ourselves respected in this, to ease our own distress at the knowledge of
+suffering.  One man is kind because it gives him pleasure to be kind,
+just as another is cruel because cruelty pleases him.  A great man does
+his duty because to him the sense of duty done is a deeper delight than
+would be the case resulting from avoidance of duty.  The religious man is
+religious because he finds a joy in religion; the moral man moral because
+with his strong self-respect, viciousness would mean wretchedness.  Self-
+sacrifice itself is only a subtle selfishness: we prefer the mental
+exaltation gained thereby to the sensual gratification which is the
+alternative reward.  Man cannot be anything else but selfish.  Selfishness
+is the law of all life.  Each thing, from the farthest fixed star to the
+smallest insect crawling on the earth, fighting for itself according to
+its strength; and brooding over all, the Eternal, working for _Himself_:
+that is the universe."
+
+"Have some whisky," said MacShaughnassy; "and don't be so complicatedly
+metaphysical.  You make my head ache."
+
+"If all action, good and bad, spring from selfishness," replied Brown,
+"then there must be good selfishness and bad selfishness: and your bad
+selfishness is my plain selfishness, without any adjective, so we are
+back where we started.  I say selfishness--bad selfishness--is the root
+of all evil, and there you are bound to agree with me."
+
+"Not always," persisted Jephson; "I've known selfishness--selfishness
+according to the ordinarily accepted meaning of the term--to be
+productive of good actions.  I can give you an instance, if you like."
+
+"Has it got a moral?" asked MacShaughnassy, drowsily,
+
+Jephson mused a moment.  "Yes," he said at length; "a very practical
+moral--and one very useful to young men."
+
+"That's the sort of story we want," said the MacShaughnassy, raising
+himself into a sitting position.  "You listen to this, Brown."
+
+Jephson seated himself upon a chair, in his favourite attitude, with his
+elbows resting upon the back, and smoked for a while in silence.
+
+"There are three people in this story," he began; "the wife, the wife's
+husband, and the other man.  In most dramas of this type, it is the wife
+who is the chief character.  In this case, the interesting person is the
+other man.
+
+"The wife--I met her once: she was the most beautiful woman I have ever
+seen, and the most wicked-looking; which is saying a good deal for both
+statements.  I remember, during a walking tour one year, coming across a
+lovely little cottage.  It was the sweetest place imaginable.  I need not
+describe it.  It was the cottage one sees in pictures, and reads of in
+sentimental poetry.  I was leaning over the neatly-cropped hedge,
+drinking in its beauty, when at one of the tiny casements I saw, looking
+out at me, a face.  It stayed there only a moment, but in that moment the
+cottage had become ugly, and I hurried away with a shudder.
+
+"That woman's face reminded me of the incident.  It was an angel's face,
+until the woman herself looked out of it: then you were struck by the
+strange incongruity between tenement and tenant.
+
+"That at one time she had loved her husband, I have little doubt.  Vicious
+women have few vices, and sordidness is not usually one of them.  She had
+probably married him, borne towards him by one of those waves of passion
+upon which the souls of animal natures are continually rising and
+falling.  On possession, however, had quickly followed satiety, and from
+satiety had grown the desire for a new sensation.
+
+"They were living at Cairo at the period; her husband held an important
+official position there, and by virtue of this, and of her own beauty and
+tact, her house soon became the centre of the Anglo-Saxon society ever
+drifting in and out of the city.  The women disliked her, and copied her.
+The men spoke slightingly of her to their wives, lightly of her to each
+other, and made idiots of themselves when they were alone with her.  She
+laughed at them to their faces, and mimicked them behind their backs.
+Their friends said it was clever.
+
+"One year there arrived a young English engineer, who had come out to
+superintend some canal works.  He brought with him satisfactory letters
+of recommendation, and was at once received by the European residents as
+a welcome addition to their social circle.  He was not particularly good-
+looking, he was not remarkably charming, but he possessed the one thing
+that few women can resist in a man, and that is strength.  The woman
+looked at the man, and the man looked back at the woman; and the drama
+began.
+
+"Scandal flies swiftly through small communities.  Before a month, their
+relationship was the chief topic of conversation throughout the quarter.
+In less than two, it reached the ears of the woman's husband.
+
+"He was either an exceptionally mean or an exceptionally noble character,
+according to how one views the matter.  He worshipped his wife--as men
+with big hearts and weak brains often do worship such women--with dog-
+like devotion.  His only dread was lest the scandal should reach
+proportions that would compel him to take notice of it, and thus bring
+shame and suffering upon the woman to whom he would have given his life.
+That a man who saw her should love her seemed natural to him; that she
+should have grown tired of himself, a thing not to be wondered at.  He
+was grateful to her for having once loved him, for a little while.
+
+"As for 'the other man,' he proved somewhat of an enigma to the gossips.
+He attempted no secrecy; if anything, he rather paraded his
+subjugation--or his conquest, it was difficult to decide which term to
+apply.  He rode and drove with her; visited her in public and in private
+(in such privacy as can be hoped for in a house filled with chattering
+servants, and watched by spying eyes); loaded her with expensive
+presents, which she wore openly, and papered his smoking-den with her
+photographs.  Yet he never allowed himself to appear in the least degree
+ridiculous; never allowed her to come between him and his work.  A letter
+from her, he would lay aside unopened until he had finished what he
+evidently regarded as more important business.  When boudoir and engine-
+shed became rivals, it was the boudoir that had to wait.
+
+"The woman chafed under his self-control, which stung her like a lash,
+but clung to him the more abjectly.
+
+"'Tell me you love me!' she would cry fiercely, stretching her white arms
+towards him.
+
+"'I have told you so,' he would reply calmly, without moving.
+
+"'I want to hear you tell it me again,' she would plead with a voice that
+trembled on a sob.  'Come close to me and tell it me again, again,
+again!'
+
+"Then, as she lay with half-closed eyes, he would pour forth a flood of
+passionate words sufficient to satisfy even her thirsty ears, and
+afterwards, as the gates clanged behind him, would take up an engineering
+problem at the exact point at which half an hour before, on her entrance
+into the room, he had temporarily dismissed it.
+
+"One day, a privileged friend put bluntly to him this question: 'Are you
+playing for love or vanity?'
+
+"To which the man, after long pondering, gave this reply: ''Pon my soul,
+Jack, I couldn't tell you.'
+
+"Now, when a man is in love with a woman who cannot make up her mind
+whether she loves him or not, we call the complication comedy; where it
+is the woman who is in earnest the result is generally tragedy.
+
+"They continued to meet and to make love.  They talked--as people in
+their position are prone to talk--of the beautiful life they would lead
+if it only were not for the thing that was; of the earthly paradise--or,
+maybe, 'earthy' would be the more suitable adjective--they would each
+create for the other, if only they had the right which they hadn't.
+
+"In this work of imagination the man trusted chiefly to his literary
+faculties, which were considerable; the woman to her desires.  Thus, his
+scenes possessed a grace and finish which hers lacked, but her pictures
+were the more vivid.  Indeed, so realistic did she paint them, that to
+herself they seemed realities, waiting for her.  Then she would rise to
+go towards them only to strike herself against the thought of the thing
+that stood between her and them.  At first she only hated the thing, but
+after a while there came an ugly look of hope into her eyes.
+
+"The time drew near for the man to return to England.  The canal was
+completed, and a day appointed for the letting in of the water.  The man
+determined to make the event the occasion of a social gathering.  He
+invited a large number of guests, among whom were the woman and her
+husband, to assist at the function.  Afterwards the party were to picnic
+at a pleasant wooded spot some three-quarters of a mile from the first
+lock.
+
+"The ceremony of flooding was to be performed by the woman, her husband's
+position entitling her to this distinction.  Between the river and the
+head of the cutting had been left a strong bank of earth, pierced some
+distance down by a hole, which hole was kept closed by means of a closely-
+fitting steel plate.  The woman drew the lever releasing this plate, and
+the water rushed through and began to press against the lock gates.  When
+it had attained a certain depth, the sluices were raised, and the water
+poured down into the deep basin of the lock.
+
+"It was an exceptionally deep lock.  The party gathered round and watched
+the water slowly rising.  The woman looked down, and shuddered; the man
+was standing by her side.
+
+"'How deep it is,' she said.
+
+"'Yes,' he replied, 'it holds thirty feet of water, when full.'
+
+"The water crept up inch by inch.
+
+"'Why don't you open the gates, and let it in quickly?' she asked.
+
+"'It would not do for it to come in too quickly,' he explained; 'we shall
+half fill this lock, and then open the sluices at the other end, and so
+let the water pass through.'
+
+"The woman looked at the smooth stone walls and at the iron-plated gates.
+
+"'I wonder what a man would do,' she said, 'if he fell in, and there was
+no one near to help him?'
+
+"The man laughed.  'I think he would stop there,' he answered.  'Come,
+the others are waiting for us.'
+
+"He lingered a moment to give some final instructions to the workmen.
+'You can follow on when you've made all right,' he said, 'and get
+something to eat.  There's no need for more than one to stop.'  Then they
+joined the rest of the party, and sauntered on, laughing and talking, to
+the picnic ground.
+
+"After lunch the party broke up, as is the custom of picnic parties, and
+wandered away in groups and pairs.  The man, whose duty as host had
+hitherto occupied all his attention, looked for the woman, but she was
+gone.
+
+"A friend strolled by, the same that had put the question to him about
+love and vanity.
+
+"'Have you quarrelled?' asked the friend.
+
+"'No,' replied the man.
+
+"'I fancied you had,' said the other.  'I met her just now walking with
+her husband, of all men in the world, and making herself quite agreeable
+to him.'
+
+"The friend strolled on, and the man sat down on a fallen tree, and
+lighted a cigar.  He smoked and thought, and the cigar burnt out, but he
+still sat thinking.
+
+"After a while he heard a faint rustling of the branches behind him, and
+peering between the interlacing leaves that hid him, saw the crouching
+figure of the woman creeping through the wood.
+
+"His lips were parted to call her name, when she turned her listening
+head in his direction, and his eyes fell full upon her face.  Something
+about it, he could not have told what, struck him dumb, and the woman
+crept on.
+
+"Gradually the nebulous thoughts floating through his brain began to
+solidify into a tangible idea, and the man unconsciously started forward.
+After walking a few steps he broke into a run, for the idea had grown
+clearer.  It continued to grow still clearer and clearer, and the man ran
+faster and faster, until at last he found himself racing madly towards
+the lock.  As he approached it he looked round for the watchman who ought
+to have been there, but the man was gone from his post.  He shouted, but
+if any answer was returned, it was drowned by the roar of the rushing
+water.
+
+"He reached the edge and looked down.  Fifteen feet below him was the
+reality of the dim vision that had come to him a mile back in the woods:
+the woman's husband swimming round and round like a rat in a pail.
+
+"The river was flowing in and out of the lock at the same rate, so that
+the level of the water remained constant.  The first thing the man did
+was to close the lower sluices and then open those in the upper gate to
+their fullest extent.  The water began to rise.
+
+"'Can you hold out?' he cried.
+
+"The drowning man turned to him a face already contorted by the agony of
+exhaustion, and answered with a feeble 'No.'
+
+"He looked around for something to throw to the man.  A plank had lain
+there in the morning, he remembered stumbling over it, and complaining of
+its having been left there; he cursed himself now for his care.
+
+"A hut used by the navvies to keep their tools in stood about two hundred
+yards away; perhaps it had been taken there, perhaps there he might even
+find a rope.
+
+"'Just one minute, old fellow!' he shouted down, 'and I'll be back.'
+
+"But the other did not hear him.  The feeble struggles ceased.  The face
+fell back upon the water, the eyes half closed as if with weary
+indifference.  There was no time for him to do more than kick off his
+riding boots and jump in and clutch the unconscious figure as it sank.
+
+"Down there, in that walled-in trap, he fought a long fight with Death
+for the life that stood between him and the woman.  He was not an expert
+swimmer, his clothes hampered him, he was already blown with his long
+race, the burden in his arms dragged him down, the water rose slowly
+enough to make his torture fit for Dante's hell.
+
+"At first he could not understand why this was so, but in glancing down
+he saw to his horror that he had not properly closed the lower sluices;
+in each some eight or ten inches remained open, so that the stream was
+passing out nearly half as fast as it came in.  It would be another five-
+and-twenty minutes before the water would be high enough for him to grasp
+the top.
+
+"He noted where the line of wet had reached to, on the smooth stone wall,
+then looked again after what he thought must be a lapse of ten minutes,
+and found it had risen half an inch, if that.  Once or twice he shouted
+for help, but the effort taxed severely his already failing breath, and
+his voice only came back to him in a hundred echoes from his prison
+walls.
+
+"Inch by inch the line of wet crept up, but the spending of his strength
+went on more swiftly.  It seemed to him as if his inside were being
+gripped and torn slowly out: his whole body cried out to him to let it
+sink and lie in rest at the bottom.
+
+"At length his unconscious burden opened its eyes and stared at him
+stupidly, then closed them again with a sigh; a minute later opened them
+once more, and looked long and hard at him.
+
+"'Let me go,' he said, 'we shall both drown.  You can manage by
+yourself.'
+
+"He made a feeble effort to release himself, but the other held him.
+
+"'Keep still, you fool!' he hissed; 'you're going to get out of this with
+me, or I'm going down with you.'
+
+"So the grim struggle went on in silence, till the man, looking up, saw
+the stone coping just a little way above his head, made one mad leap and
+caught it with his finger-tips, held on an instant, then fell back with a
+'plump' and sank; came up and made another dash, and, helped by the
+impetus of his rise, caught the coping firmly this time with the whole of
+his fingers, hung on till his eyes saw the stunted grass, till they were
+both able to scramble out upon the bank and lie there, their breasts
+pressed close against the ground, their hands clutching the earth, while
+the overflowing water swirled softly round them.
+
+"After a while, they raised themselves and looked at one another.
+
+"'Tiring work,' said the other man, with a nod towards the lock.
+
+"'Yes,' answered the husband, 'beastly awkward not being a good swimmer.
+How did you know I had fallen in?  You met my wife, I suppose?'
+
+"'Yes,' said the other man.
+
+"The husband sat staring at a point in the horizon for some minutes.  'Do
+you know what I was wondering this morning?' said he.
+
+"'No,' said the other man.
+
+"'Whether I should kill you or not.'
+
+"'They told me,' he continued, after a pause, 'a lot of silly gossip
+which I was cad enough to believe.  I know now it wasn't true,
+because--well, if it had been, you would not have done what you have
+done.'
+
+"He rose and came across.  'I beg your pardon,' he said, holding out his
+hand.
+
+"'I beg yours,' said the other man, rising and taking it; 'do you mind
+giving me a hand with the sluices?'
+
+"They set to work to put the lock right.
+
+"'How did you manage to fall in?' asked the other man, who was raising
+one of the lower sluices, without looking round.
+
+"The husband hesitated, as if he found the explanation somewhat
+difficult.  'Oh,' he answered carelessly, 'the wife and I were chaffing,
+and she said she'd often seen you jump it, and'--he laughed a rather
+forced laugh--'she promised me a--a kiss if I cleared it.  It was a
+foolish thing to do.'
+
+"'Yes, it was rather,' said the other man.
+
+"A few days afterwards the man and woman met at a reception.  He found
+her in a leafy corner of the garden talking to some friends.  She
+advanced to meet him, holding out her hand.  'What can I say more than
+thank you?' she murmured in a low voice.
+
+"The others moved away, leaving them alone.  'They tell me you risked
+your life to save his?' she said.
+
+"'Yes,' he answered.
+
+"She raised her eyes to his, then struck him across the face with her
+ungloved hand.
+
+"'You damned fool!' she whispered.
+
+"He seized her by her white arms, and forced her back behind the orange
+trees.  'Do you know why?' he said, speaking slowly and distinctly;
+'because I feared that, with him dead, you would want me to marry you,
+and that, talked about as we have been, I might find it awkward to avoid
+doing so; because I feared that, without him to stand between us, you
+might prove an annoyance to me--perhaps come between me and the woman I
+love, the woman I am going back to.  Now do you understand?'
+
+"'Yes,' whispered the woman, and he left her.
+
+"But there are only two people," concluded Jephson, "who do not regard
+his saving of the husband's life as a highly noble and unselfish action,
+and they are the man himself and the woman."
+
+We thanked Jephson for his story, and promised to profit by the moral,
+when discovered.  Meanwhile, MacShaughnassy said that he knew a story
+dealing with the same theme, namely, the too close attachment of a woman
+to a strange man, which really had a moral, which moral was: don't have
+anything to do with inventions.
+
+Brown, who had patented a safety gun, which he had never yet found a man
+plucky enough to let off, said it was a bad moral.  We agreed to hear the
+particulars, and judge for ourselves.
+
+"This story," commenced MacShaughnassy, "comes from Furtwangen, a small
+town in the Black Forest.  There lived there a very wonderful old fellow
+named Nicholaus Geibel.  His business was the making of mechanical toys,
+at which work he had acquired an almost European reputation.  He made
+rabbits that would emerge from the heart of a cabbage, flap their ears,
+smooth their whiskers, and disappear again; cats that would wash their
+faces, and mew so naturally that dogs would mistake them for real cats,
+and fly at them; dolls, with phonographs concealed within them, that
+would raise their hats and say, 'Good morning; how do you do?' and some
+that would even sing a song.
+
+"But he was something more than a mere mechanic; he was an artist.  His
+work was with him a hobby, almost a passion.  His shop was filled with
+all manner of strange things that never would, or could, be sold--things
+he had made for the pure love of making them.  He had contrived a
+mechanical donkey that would trot for two hours by means of stored
+electricity, and trot, too, much faster than the live article, and with
+less need for exertion on the part of the driver; a bird that would shoot
+up into the air, fly round and round in a circle, and drop to earth at
+the exact spot from where it started; a skeleton that, supported by an
+upright iron bar, would dance a hornpipe; a life-size lady doll that
+could play the fiddle; and a gentleman with a hollow inside who could
+smoke a pipe and drink more lager beer than any three average German
+students put together, which is saying much.
+
+"Indeed, it was the belief of the town that old Geibel could make a man
+capable of doing everything that a respectable man need want to do.  One
+day he made a man who did too much, and it came about in this way.
+
+"Young Doctor Follen had a baby, and the baby had a birthday.  Its first
+birthday put Doctor Follen's household into somewhat of a flurry, but on
+the occasion of its second birthday, Mrs. Doctor Follen gave a ball in
+honour of the event.  Old Geibel and his daughter Olga were among the
+guests.
+
+"During the afternoon of the next day, some three or four of Olga's bosom
+friends, who had also been present at the ball, dropped in to have a chat
+about it.  They naturally fell to discussing the men, and to criticising
+their dancing.  Old Geibel was in the room, but he appeared to be
+absorbed in his newspaper, and the girls took no notice of him.
+
+"'There seem to be fewer men who can dance, at every ball you go to,'
+said one of the girls.
+
+"'Yes, and don't the ones who can, give themselves airs,' said another;
+'they make quite a favour of asking you.'
+
+"'And how stupidly they talk,' added a third.  'They always say exactly
+the same things: "How charming you are looking to-night."  "Do you often
+go to Vienna?  Oh, you should, it's delightful."  "What a charming dress
+you have on."  "What a warm day it has been."  "Do you like Wagner?"  I
+do wish they'd think of something new.'
+
+"'Oh, I never mind how they talk,' said a fourth.  'If a man dances well
+he may be a fool for all I care.'
+
+"'He generally is,' slipped in a thin girl, rather spitefully.
+
+"'I go to a ball to dance,' continued the previous speaker, not noticing
+the interruption.  'All I ask of a partner is that he shall hold me
+firmly, take me round steadily, and not get tired before I do.'
+
+"'A clockwork figure would be the thing for you,' said the girl who had
+interrupted.
+
+"'Bravo!' cried one of the others, clapping her hands, 'what a capital
+idea!'
+
+"'What's a capital idea?' they asked.
+
+"'Why, a clockwork dancer, or, better still, one that would go by
+electricity and never run down.'
+
+"The girls took up the idea with enthusiasm.
+
+"'Oh, what a lovely partner he would make,' said one; 'he would never
+kick you, or tread on your toes.'
+
+"'Or tear your dress,' said another.
+
+"'Or get out of step.'
+
+"'Or get giddy and lean on you.'
+
+"'And he would never want to mop his face with his handkerchief.  I do
+hate to see a man do that after every dance.'
+
+"'And wouldn't want to spend the whole evening in the supper-room.'
+
+"'Why, with a phonograph inside him to grind out all the stock remarks,
+you would not be able to tell him from a real man,' said the girl who had
+first suggested the idea.
+
+"'Oh yes, you would,' said the thin girl, 'he would be so much nicer.'
+
+"Old Geibel had laid down his paper, and was listening with both his
+ears.  On one of the girls glancing in his direction, however, he
+hurriedly hid himself again behind it.
+
+"After the girls were gone, he went into his workshop, where Olga heard
+him walking up and down, and every now and then chuckling to himself; and
+that night he talked to her a good deal about dancing and dancing
+men--asked what they usually said and did--what dances were most
+popular--what steps were gone through, with many other questions bearing
+on the subject.
+
+"Then for a couple of weeks he kept much to his factory, and was very
+thoughtful and busy, though prone at unexpected moments to break into a
+quiet low laugh, as if enjoying a joke that nobody else knew of.
+
+"A month later another ball took place in Furtwangen.  On this occasion
+it was given by old Wenzel, the wealthy timber merchant, to celebrate his
+niece's betrothal, and Geibel and his daughter were again among the
+invited.
+
+"When the hour arrived to set out, Olga sought her father.  Not finding
+him in the house, she tapped at the door of his workshop.  He appeared in
+his shirt-sleeves, looking hot, but radiant.
+
+"'Don't wait for me,' he said, 'you go on, I'll follow you.  I've got
+something to finish.'
+
+"As she turned to obey he called after her, 'Tell them I'm going to bring
+a young man with me--such a nice young man, and an excellent dancer.  All
+the girls will like him.'  Then he laughed and closed the door.
+
+"Her father generally kept his doings secret from everybody, but she had
+a pretty shrewd suspicion of what he had been planning, and so, to a
+certain extent, was able to prepare the guests for what was coming.
+Anticipation ran high, and the arrival of the famous mechanist was
+eagerly awaited.
+
+"At length the sound of wheels was heard outside, followed by a great
+commotion in the passage, and old Wenzel himself, his jolly face red with
+excitement and suppressed laughter, burst into the room and announced in
+stentorian tones:
+
+"'Herr Geibel--and a friend.'
+
+"Herr Geibel and his 'friend' entered, greeted with shouts of laughter
+and applause, and advanced to the centre of the room.
+
+"'Allow me, ladies and gentlemen,' said Herr Geibel, 'to introduce you to
+my friend, Lieutenant Fritz.  Fritz, my dear fellow, bow to the ladies
+and gentlemen.'
+
+"Geibel placed his hand encouragingly on Fritz's shoulder, and the
+lieutenant bowed low, accompanying the action with a harsh clicking noise
+in his throat, unpleasantly suggestive of a death rattle.  But that was
+only a detail.
+
+"'He walks a little stiffly' (old Geibel took his arm and walked him
+forward a few steps.  He certainly did walk stiffly), 'but then, walking
+is not his forte.  He is essentially a dancing man.  I have only been
+able to teach him the waltz as yet, but at that he is faultless.  Come,
+which of you ladies may I introduce him to, as a partner?  He keeps
+perfect time; he never gets tired; he won't kick you or tread on your
+dress; he will hold you as firmly as you like, and go as quickly or as
+slowly as you please; he never gets giddy; and he is full of
+conversation.  Come, speak up for yourself, my boy.'
+
+"The old gentleman twisted one of the buttons of his coat, and
+immediately Fritz opened his mouth, and in thin tones that appeared to
+proceed from the back of his head, remarked suddenly, 'May I have the
+pleasure?' and then shut his mouth again with a snap.
+
+"That Lieutenant Fritz had made a strong impression on the company was
+undoubted, yet none of the girls seemed inclined to dance with him.  They
+looked askance at his waxen face, with its staring eyes and fixed smile,
+and shuddered.  At last old Geibel came to the girl who had conceived the
+idea.
+
+"'It is your own suggestion, carried out to the letter,' said Geibel, 'an
+electric dancer.  You owe it to the gentleman to give him a trial.'
+
+"She was a bright saucy little girl, fond of a frolic.  Her host added
+his entreaties, and she consented.
+
+"Herr Geibel fixed the figure to her.  Its right arm was screwed round
+her waist, and held her firmly; its delicately jointed left hand was made
+to fasten itself upon her right.  The old toymaker showed her how to
+regulate its speed, and how to stop it, and release herself.
+
+"'It will take you round in a complete circle,' he explained; 'be careful
+that no one knocks against you, and alters its course.'
+
+"The music struck up.  Old Geibel put the current in motion, and Annette
+and her strange partner began to dance.
+
+"For a while every one stood watching them.  The figure performed its
+purpose admirably.  Keeping perfect time and step, and holding its little
+partner tightly clasped in an unyielding embrace, it revolved steadily,
+pouring forth at the same time a constant flow of squeaky conversation,
+broken by brief intervals of grinding silence.
+
+"'How charming you are looking to-night,' it remarked in its thin, far-
+away voice.  'What a lovely day it has been.  Do you like dancing?  How
+well our steps agree.  You will give me another, won't you?  Oh, don't be
+so cruel.  What a charming gown you have on.  Isn't waltzing delightful?
+I could go on dancing for ever--with you.  Have you had supper?'
+
+"As she grew more familiar with the uncanny creature, the girl's
+nervousness wore off, and she entered into the fun of the thing.
+
+"'Oh, he's just lovely,' she cried, laughing, 'I could go on dancing with
+him all my life.'
+
+"Couple after couple now joined them, and soon all the dancers in the
+room were whirling round behind them.  Nicholaus Geibel stood looking on,
+beaming with childish delight at his success,
+
+"Old Wenzel approached him, and whispered something in his ear.  Geibel
+laughed and nodded, and the two worked their way quietly towards the
+door.
+
+"'This is the young people's house to-night,' said Wenzel, as soon as
+they were outside; 'you and I will have a quiet pipe and a glass of hock,
+over in the counting-house.'
+
+"Meanwhile the dancing grew more fast and furious.  Little Annette
+loosened the screw regulating her partner's rate of progress, and the
+figure flew round with her swifter and swifter.  Couple after couple
+dropped out exhausted, but they only went the faster, till at length they
+were the only pair left dancing.
+
+"Madder and madder became the waltz.  The music lagged behind: the
+musicians, unable to keep pace, ceased, and sat staring.  The younger
+guests applauded, but the older faces began to grow anxious.
+
+"'Hadn't you better stop, dear,' said one of the women, 'You'll make
+yourself so tired.'
+
+"But Annette did not answer.
+
+"'I believe she's fainted,' cried out a girl, who had caught sight of her
+face as it was swept by.
+
+"One of the men sprang forward and clutched at the figure, but its
+impetus threw him down on to the floor, where its steel-cased feet laid
+bare his cheek.  The thing evidently did not intend to part with its
+prize easily.
+
+"Had any one retained a cool head, the figure, one cannot help thinking,
+might easily have been stopped.  Two or three men, acting in concert,
+might have lifted it bodily off the floor, or have jammed it into a
+corner.  But few human heads are capable of remaining cool under
+excitement.  Those who are not present think how stupid must have been
+those who were; those who are, reflect afterwards how simple it would
+have been to do this, that, or the other, if only they had thought of it
+at the time.
+
+"The women grew hysterical.  The men shouted contradictory directions to
+one another.  Two of them made a bungling rush at the figure, which had
+the result of forcing it out of its orbit in the centre of the room, and
+sending it crashing against the walls and furniture.  A stream of blood
+showed itself down the girl's white frock, and followed her along the
+floor.  The affair was becoming horrible.  The women rushed screaming
+from the room.  The men followed them.
+
+"One sensible suggestion was made: 'Find Geibel--fetch Geibel.'
+
+"No one had noticed him leave the room, no one knew where he was.  A
+party went in search of him.  The others, too unnerved to go back into
+the ballroom, crowded outside the door and listened.  They could hear the
+steady whir of the wheels upon the polished floor, as the thing spun
+round and round; the dull thud as every now and again it dashed itself
+and its burden against some opposing object and ricocheted off in a new
+direction.
+
+"And everlastingly it talked in that thin ghostly voice, repeating over
+and over the same formula: 'How charming you are looking to-night.  What
+a lovely day it has been.  Oh, don't be so cruel.  I could go on dancing
+for ever--with you.  Have you had supper?'
+
+"Of course they sought for Geibel everywhere but where he was.  They
+looked in every room in the house, then they rushed off in a body to his
+own place, and spent precious minutes in waking up his deaf old
+housekeeper.  At last it occurred to one of the party that Wenzel was
+missing also, and then the idea of the counting-house across the yard
+presented itself to them, and there they found him.
+
+"He rose up, very pale, and followed them; and he and old Wenzel forced
+their way through the crowd of guests gathered outside, and entered the
+room, and locked the door behind them.
+
+"From within there came the muffled sound of low voices and quick steps,
+followed by a confused scuffling noise, then silence, then the low voices
+again.
+
+"After a time the door opened, and those near it pressed forward to
+enter, but old Wenzel's broad shoulders barred the way.
+
+"'I want you--and you, Bekler,' he said, addressing a couple of the elder
+men.  His voice was calm, but his face was deadly white.  'The rest of
+you, please go--get the women away as quickly as you can.'
+
+"From that day old Nicholaus Geibel confined himself to the making of
+mechanical rabbits and cats that mewed and washed their faces."
+
+We agreed that the moral of MacShaughnassy's story was a good one.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+How much more of our--fortunately not very valuable--time we devoted to
+this wonderful novel of ours, I cannot exactly say.  Turning the dogs'-
+eared leaves of the dilapidated diary that lies before me, I find the
+record of our later gatherings confused and incomplete.  For weeks there
+does not appear a single word.  Then comes an alarmingly business-like
+minute of a meeting at which there were--"Present: Jephson,
+MacShaughnassy, Brown, and Self"; and at which the "Proceedings commenced
+at 8.30."  At what time the "proceedings" terminated, and what business
+was done, the chronicle, however, sayeth not; though, faintly pencilled
+in the margin of the page, I trace these hieroglyphics: "3.14.9-2.6.7,"
+bringing out a result of "1.8.2."  Evidently an unremunerative night.
+
+On September 13th we seem to have become suddenly imbued with energy to a
+quite remarkable degree, for I read that we "Resolved to start the first
+chapter at once"--"at once" being underlined.  After this spurt, we rest
+until October 4th, when we "Discussed whether it should be a novel of
+plot or of character," without--so far as the diary affords
+indication--arriving at any definite decision.  I observe that on the
+same day "Mac told a story about a man who accidentally bought a camel at
+a sale."  Details of the story are, however, wanting, which, perhaps, is
+fortunate for the reader.
+
+On the 16th, we were still debating the character of our hero; and I see
+that I suggested "a man of the Charley Buswell type."
+
+Poor Charley, I wonder what could have made me think of him in connection
+with heroes; his lovableness, I suppose--certainly not his heroic
+qualities.  I can recall his boyish face now (it was always a boyish
+face), the tears streaming down it as he sat in the schoolyard beside a
+bucket, in which he was drowning three white mice and a tame rat.  I sat
+down opposite and cried too, while helping him to hold a saucepan lid
+over the poor little creatures, and thus there sprang up a friendship
+between us, which grew.
+
+Over the grave of these murdered rodents, he took a solemn oath never to
+break school rules again, by keeping either white mice or tame rats, but
+to devote the whole of his energies for the future to pleasing his
+masters, and affording his parents some satisfaction for the money being
+spent upon his education.
+
+Seven weeks later, the pervadence throughout the dormitory of an
+atmospheric effect more curious than pleasing led to the discovery that
+he had converted his box into a rabbit hutch.  Confronted with eleven
+kicking witnesses, and reminded of his former promises, he explained that
+rabbits were not mice, and seemed to consider that a new and vexatious
+regulation had been sprung upon him.  The rabbits were confiscated.  What
+was their ultimate fate, we never knew with certainty, but three days
+later we were given rabbit-pie for dinner.  To comfort him I endeavoured
+to assure him that these could not be his rabbits.  He, however,
+convinced that they were, cried steadily into his plate all the time that
+he was eating them, and afterwards, in the playground, had a stand-up
+fight with a fourth form boy who had requested a second helping.
+
+That evening he performed another solemn oath-taking, and for the next
+month was the model boy of the school.  He read tracts, sent his spare
+pocket-money to assist in annoying the heathen, and subscribed to _The
+Young Christian_ and _The Weekly Rambler_, an Evangelical Miscellany
+(whatever that may mean).  An undiluted course of this pernicious
+literature naturally created in him a desire towards the opposite
+extreme.  He suddenly dropped _The Young Christian_ and _The Weekly
+Rambler_, and purchased penny dreadfuls; and taking no further interest
+in the welfare of the heathen, saved up and bought a second-hand revolver
+and a hundred cartridges.  His ambition, he confided to me, was to become
+"a dead shot," and the marvel of it is that he did not succeed.
+
+Of course, there followed the usual discovery and consequent trouble, the
+usual repentance and reformation, the usual determination to start a new
+life.
+
+Poor fellow, he lived "starting a new life."  Every New Year's Day he
+would start a new life--on his birthday--on other people's birthdays.  I
+fancy that, later on, when he came to know their importance, he extended
+the principle to quarter days.  "Tidying up, and starting afresh," he
+always called it.
+
+I think as a young man he was better than most of us.  But he lacked that
+great gift which is the distinguishing feature of the English-speaking
+race all the world over, the gift of hypocrisy.  He seemed incapable of
+doing the slightest thing without getting found out; a grave misfortune
+for a man to suffer from, this.
+
+Dear simple-hearted fellow, it never occurred to him that he was as other
+men--with, perhaps, a dash of straightforwardness added; he regarded
+himself as a monster of depravity.  One evening I found him in his
+chambers engaged upon his Sisyphean labour of "tidying up." A heap of
+letters, photographs, and bills lay before him.  He was tearing them up
+and throwing them into the fire.
+
+I came towards him, but he stopped me.  "Don't come near me," he cried,
+"don't touch me.  I'm not fit to shake hands with a decent man."
+
+It was the sort of speech to make one feel hot and uncomfortable.  I did
+not know what to answer, and murmured something about his being no worse
+than the average.
+
+"Don't talk like that," he answered excitedly; "you say that to comfort
+me, I know; but I don't like to hear it.  If I thought other men were
+like me I should be ashamed of being a man.  I've been a blackguard, old
+fellow, but, please God, it's not too late.  To-morrow morning I begin a
+new life."
+
+He finished his work of destruction, and then rang the bell, and sent his
+man downstairs for a bottle of champagne.
+
+"My last drink," he said, as we clicked glasses.  "Here's to the old life
+out, and the new life in."
+
+He took a sip and flung the glass with the remainder into the fire.  He
+was always a little theatrical, especially when most in earnest.
+
+For a long while after that I saw nothing of him.  Then, one evening,
+sitting down to supper at a restaurant, I noticed him opposite to me in
+company that could hardly be called doubtful.
+
+He flushed and came over to me.  "I've been an old woman for nearly six
+months," he said, with a laugh.  "I find I can't stand it any longer."
+
+"After all," he continued, "what is life for but to live?  It's only
+hypocritical to try and be a thing we are not.  And do you know"--he
+leant across the table, speaking earnestly--"honestly and seriously, I'm
+a better man--I feel it and know it--when I am my natural self than when
+I am trying to be an impossible saint."
+
+That was the mistake he made; he always ran to extremes.  He thought that
+an oath, if it were only big enough, would frighten away Human Nature,
+instead of serving only as a challenge to it.  Accordingly, each
+reformation was more intemperate than the last, to be duly followed by a
+greater swing of the pendulum in the opposite direction.
+
+Being now in a thoroughly reckless mood, he went the pace rather hotly.
+Then, one evening, without any previous warning, I had a note from him.
+"Come round and see me on Thursday.  It is my wedding eve."
+
+I went.  He was once more "tidying up."  All his drawers were open, and
+on the table were piled packs of cards, betting books, and much written
+paper, all, as before, in course of demolition.
+
+I smiled: I could not help it, and, no way abashed, he laughed his usual
+hearty, honest laugh.
+
+"I know," he exclaimed gaily, "but this is not the same as the others."
+
+Then, laying his hand on my shoulder, and speaking with the sudden
+seriousness that comes so readily to shallow natures, he said, "God has
+heard my prayer, old friend.  He knows I am weak.  He has sent down an
+angel out of Heaven to help me."
+
+He took her portrait from the mantelpiece and handed it me.  It seemed to
+me the face of a hard, narrow woman, but, of course, he raved about her.
+
+As he talked, there fluttered to the ground from the heap before him an
+old restaurant bill, and, stooping, he picked it up and held it in his
+hand, musing.
+
+"Have you ever noticed how the scent of the champagne and the candles
+seems to cling to these things?" he said lightly, sniffing carelessly at
+it.  "I wonder what's become of her?"
+
+"I think I wouldn't think about her at all to-night," I answered.
+
+He loosened his hand, letting the paper fall into the fire.
+
+"My God!" he cried vehemently, "when I think of all the wrong I have
+done--the irreparable, ever-widening ruin I have perhaps brought into the
+world--O God! spare me a long life that I may make amends.  Every hour,
+every minute of it shall be devoted to your service."
+
+As he stood there, with his eager boyish eyes upraised, a light seemed to
+fall upon his face and illumine it.  I had pushed the photograph back to
+him, and it lay upon the table before him.  He knelt and pressed his lips
+to it.
+
+"With your help, my darling, and His," he murmured.
+
+The next morning he was married.  She was a well-meaning girl, though her
+piety, as is the case with most people, was of the negative order; and
+her antipathy to things evil much stronger than her sympathy with things
+good.  For a longer time than I had expected she kept him
+straight--perhaps a little too straight.  But at last there came the
+inevitable relapse.
+
+I called upon him, in answer to an excited message, and found him in the
+depths of despair.  It was the old story, human weakness, combined with
+lamentable lack of the most ordinary precautions against being found out.
+He gave me details, interspersed with exuberant denunciations of himself,
+and I undertook the delicate task of peace-maker.
+
+It was a weary work, but eventually she consented to forgive him.  His
+joy, when I told him, was boundless.
+
+"How good women are," he said, while the tears came into his eyes.  "But
+she shall not repent it.  Please God, from this day forth, I'll--"
+
+He stopped, and for the first time in his life the doubt of himself
+crossed his mind.  As I sat watching him, the joy died out of his face,
+and the first hint of age passed over it.
+
+"I seem to have been 'tidying up and starting afresh' all my life," he
+said wearily; "I'm beginning to see where the untidiness lies, and the
+only way to get rid of it."
+
+I did not understand the meaning of his words at the time, but learnt it
+later on.
+
+He strove, according to his strength, and fell.  But by a miracle his
+transgression was not discovered.  The facts came to light long
+afterwards, but at the time there were only two who knew.
+
+It was his last failure.  Late one evening I received a
+hurriedly-scrawled note from his wife, begging me to come round.
+
+"A terrible thing has happened," it ran; "Charley went up to his study
+after dinner, saying he had some 'tidying up,' as he calls it, to do, and
+did not wish to be disturbed.  In clearing out his desk he must have
+handled carelessly the revolver that he always keeps there, not
+remembering, I suppose, that it was loaded.  We heard a report, and on
+rushing into the room found him lying dead on the floor.  The bullet had
+passed right through his heart."
+
+Hardly the type of man for a hero!  And yet I do not know.  Perhaps he
+fought harder than many a man who conquers.  In the world's courts, we
+are compelled to judge on circumstantial evidence only, and the chief
+witness, the man's soul, cannot very well be called.
+
+I remember the subject of bravery being discussed one evening at a dinner
+party, when a German gentleman present related an anecdote, the hero of
+which was a young Prussian officer.
+
+"I cannot give you his name," our German friend explained--"the man
+himself told me the story in confidence; and though he personally, by
+virtue of his after record, could afford to have it known, there are
+other reasons why it should not be bruited about.
+
+"How I learnt it was in this way.  For a dashing exploit performed during
+the brief war against Austria he had been presented with the Iron Cross.
+This, as you are well aware, is the most highly-prized decoration in our
+army; men who have earned it are usually conceited about it, and, indeed,
+have some excuse for being so.  He, on the contrary, kept his locked in a
+drawer of his desk, and never wore it except when compelled by official
+etiquette.  The mere sight of it seemed to be painful to him.  One day I
+asked him the reason.  We are very old and close friends, and he told me.
+
+"The incident occurred when he was a young lieutenant.  Indeed, it was
+his first engagement.  By some means or another he had become separated
+from his company, and, unable to regain it, had attached himself to a
+line regiment stationed at the extreme right of the Prussian lines.
+
+"The enemy's effort was mainly directed against the left centre, and for
+a while our young lieutenant was nothing more than a distant spectator of
+the battle.  Suddenly, however, the attack shifted, and the regiment
+found itself occupying an extremely important and critical position.  The
+shells began to fall unpleasantly near, and the order was given to
+'grass.'
+
+"The men fell upon their faces and waited.  The shells ploughed the
+ground around them, smothering them with dirt.  A horrible, griping pain
+started in my young friend's stomach, and began creeping upwards.  His
+head and heart both seemed to be shrinking and growing cold.  A shot tore
+off the head of the man next to him, sending the blood spurting into his
+face; a minute later another ripped open the back of a poor fellow lying
+to the front of him.
+
+"His body seemed not to belong to himself at all.  A strange, shrivelled
+creature had taken possession of it.  He raised his head and peered about
+him.  He and three soldiers--youngsters, like himself, who had never
+before been under fire--appeared to be utterly alone in that hell.  They
+were the end men of the regiment, and the configuration of the ground
+completely hid them from their comrades.
+
+"They glanced at each other, these four, and read one another's thoughts.
+Leaving their rifles lying on the grass, they commenced to crawl
+stealthily upon their bellies, the lieutenant leading, the other three
+following.
+
+"Some few hundred yards in front of them rose a small, steep hill.  If
+they could reach this it would shut them out of sight.  They hastened on,
+pausing every thirty yards or so to lie still and pant for breath, then
+hurrying on again, quicker than before, tearing their flesh against the
+broken ground.
+
+"At last they reached the base of the slope, and slinking a little way
+round it, raised their heads and looked back.  Where they were it was
+impossible for them to be seen from the Prussian lines.
+
+"They sprang to their feet and broke into a wild race.  A dozen steps
+further they came face to face with an Austrian field battery.
+
+"The demon that had taken possession of them had been growing stronger
+the further they had fled.  They were not men, they were animals mad with
+fear.  Driven by the same frenzy that prompted other panic-stricken
+creatures to once rush down a steep place into the sea, these four men,
+with a yell, flung themselves, sword in hand, upon the whole battery; and
+the whole battery, bewildered by the suddenness and unexpectedness of the
+attack, thinking the entire battalion was upon them, gave way, and rushed
+pell-mell down the hill.
+
+"With the sight of those flying Austrians the fear, as independently as
+it had come to him, left him, and he felt only a desire to hack and kill.
+The four Prussians flew after them, cutting and stabbing at them as they
+ran; and when the Prussian cavalry came thundering up, they found my
+young lieutenant and his three friends had captured two guns and
+accounted for half a score of the enemy.
+
+"Next day, he was summoned to headquarters.
+
+"'Will you be good enough to remember for the future, sir,' said the
+Chief of the Staff, 'that His Majesty does not require his lieutenants to
+execute manoeuvres on their own responsibility, and also that to attack a
+battery with three men is not war, but damned tomfoolery.  You ought to
+be court-martialled, sir!'
+
+"Then, in somewhat different tones, the old soldier added, his face
+softening into a smile: 'However, alertness and daring, my young friend,
+are good qualities, especially when crowned with success.  If the
+Austrians had once succeeded in planting a battery on that hill it might
+have been difficult to dislodge them.  Perhaps, under the circumstances,
+His Majesty may overlook your indiscretion.'
+
+"'His Majesty not only overlooked it, but bestowed upon me the Iron
+Cross,' concluded my friend.  'For the credit of the army, I judged it
+better to keep quiet and take it.  But, as you can understand, the sight
+of it does not recall very pleasurable reflections.'"
+
+* * * * *
+
+To return to my diary, I see that on November 14th we held another
+meeting.  But at this there were present only "Jephson, MacShaughnassy,
+and Self"; and of Brown's name I find henceforth no further trace.  On
+Christmas eve we three met again, and my notes inform me that
+MacShaughnassy brewed some whiskey-punch, according to a recipe of his
+own, a record suggestive of a sad Christmas for all three of us.  No
+particular business appears to have been accomplished on either occasion.
+
+Then there is a break until February 8th, and the assemblage has shrunk
+to "Jephson and Self."  With a final flicker, as of a dying candle, my
+diary at this point, however, grows luminous, shedding much light upon
+that evening's conversation.
+
+Our talk seems to have been of many things--of most things, in fact,
+except our novel.  Among other subjects we spoke of literature generally.
+
+"I am tired of this eternal cackle about books," said Jephson; "these
+columns of criticism to every line of writing; these endless books about
+books; these shrill praises and shrill denunciations; this silly worship
+of novelist Tom; this silly hate of poet Dick; this silly squabbling over
+playwright Harry.  There is no soberness, no sense in it all.  One would
+think, to listen to the High Priests of Culture, that man was made for
+literature, not literature for man.  Thought existed before the Printing
+Press; and the men who wrote the best hundred books never read them.
+Books have their place in the world, but they are not its purpose.  They
+are things side by side with beef and mutton, the scent of the sea, the
+touch of a hand, the memory of a hope, and all the other items in the sum-
+total of our three-score years and ten.  Yet we speak of them as though
+they were the voice of Life instead of merely its faint echo.  Tales are
+delightful _as_ tales--sweet as primroses after the long winter, restful
+as the cawing of rooks at sunset.  But we do not write 'tales' now; we
+prepare 'human documents' and dissect souls."
+
+He broke off abruptly in the midst of his tirade.  "Do you know what
+these 'psychological studies,' that are so fashionable just now, always
+make me think of?" he said.  "One monkey examining another monkey for
+fleas.
+
+"And what, after all, does our dissecting pen lay bare?" he continued.
+"Human nature? or merely some more or less unsavoury undergarment,
+disguising and disfiguring human nature?  There is a story told of an
+elderly tramp, who, overtaken by misfortune, was compelled to retire for
+a while to the seclusion of Portland.  His hosts, desiring to see as much
+as possible of their guest during his limited stay with them, proceeded
+to bath him.  They bathed him twice a day for a week, each time learning
+more of him; until at last they reached a flannel shirt.  And with that
+they had to be content, soap and water proving powerless to go further.
+
+"That tramp appears to me symbolical of mankind.  Human Nature has worn
+its conventions for so long that its habit has grown on to it.  In this
+nineteenth century it is impossible to say where the clothes of custom
+end and the natural man begins.  Our virtues are taught to us as a branch
+of 'Deportment'; our vices are the recognised vices of our reign and set.
+Our religion hangs ready-made beside our cradle to be buttoned upon us by
+loving hands.  Our tastes we acquire, with difficulty; our sentiments we
+learn by rote.  At cost of infinite suffering, we study to love whiskey
+and cigars, high art and classical music.  In one age we admire Byron and
+drink sweet champagne: twenty years later it is more fashionable to
+prefer Shelley, and we like our champagne dry.  At school we are told
+that Shakespeare is a great poet, and that the Venus di Medici is a fine
+piece of sculpture; and so for the rest of our lives we go about saying
+what a great poet we think Shakespeare, and that there is no piece of
+sculpture, in our opinion, so fine as the Venus di Medici.  If we are
+Frenchmen we adore our mother; if Englishmen we love dogs and virtue.  We
+grieve for the death of a near relative twelve months; but for a second
+cousin we sorrow only three.  The good man has his regulation
+excellencies to strive after, his regulation sins to repent of.  I knew a
+good man who was quite troubled because he was not proud, and could not,
+therefore, with any reasonableness, pray for humility.  In society one
+must needs be cynical and mildly wicked: in Bohemia, orthodoxly
+unorthodox.  I remember my mother expostulating with a friend, an
+actress, who had left a devoted husband and eloped with a disagreeable,
+ugly, little low comedian (I am speaking of long, long ago).
+
+"'You must be mad,' said my mother; 'what on earth induced you to take
+such a step?'
+
+"'My dear Emma,' replied the lady; 'what else was there for me?  You know
+I can't act.  I had to do _something_ to show I was 'an artiste!'
+
+"We are dressed-up marionettes.  Our voice is the voice of the unseen
+showman, Convention; our very movements of passion and pain are but in
+answer to his jerk.  A man resembles one of those gigantic bundles that
+one sees in nursemaids' arms.  It is very bulky and very long; it looks a
+mass of delicate lace and rich fur and fine woven stuffs; and somewhere,
+hidden out of sight among the finery, there is a tiny red bit of
+bewildered humanity, with no voice but a foolish cry.
+
+"There is but one story," he went on, after a long pause, uttering his
+own thoughts aloud rather than speaking to me.  "We sit at our desks and
+think and think, and write and write, but the story is ever the same.  Men
+told it and men listened to it many years ago; we are telling it to one
+another to-day; we shall be telling it to one another a thousand years
+hence; and the story is: 'Once upon a time there lived a man, and a woman
+who loved him.'  The little critic cries that it is not new, and asks for
+something fresh, thinking--as children do--that there are strange things
+in the world."
+
+* * * * *
+
+At that point my notes end, and there is nothing in the book beyond.
+Whether any of us thought any more of the novel, whether we ever met
+again to discuss it, whether it were ever begun, whether it were ever
+abandoned--I cannot say.  There is a fairy story that I read many, many
+years ago that has never ceased to haunt me.  It told how a little boy
+once climbed a rainbow.  And at the end of the rainbow, just behind the
+clouds, he found a wondrous city.  Its houses were of gold, and its
+streets were paved with silver, and the light that shone upon it was as
+the light that lies upon the sleeping world at dawn.  In this city there
+were palaces so beautiful that merely to look upon them satisfied all
+desires; temples so perfect that they who once knelt therein were
+cleansed of sin.  And all the men who dwelt in this wondrous city were
+great and good, and the women fairer than the women of a young man's
+dreams.  And the name of the city was, "The city of the things men meant
+to do."
+
+
+
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