their
previous estate in life may have been you cannot tell, but you know that
there has been a fall, and that you are looking on a moral wreck. The
types are superficially varied, but an essential sameness, not always
visible at first sight, connects them and enables you to class them as
you would class the specimens in a gallery of the British Museum. As you
walk along on a lonely highway, you meet a man who carries himself with
a kind of jaunty air. His woeful boots show glimpses of bare feet, his
clothes have a bright gloss in places, and they hang untidily; but his
coat is buttoned with an attempt at smartness, and his ill-used hat is
set on rakishly. You note that the man wears a moustache, and you learn
in some mysterious way that he was once accustomed to be very trim and
spruce in person. When he speaks, you find that you have a hint of a
cultivated accent; he sounds the termination "ing" with precision, and
you also notice that such words as "here," "there," "over," are
pronounced with a peculiar broad vowel sound at the end. He cannot look
you boldly in the face, and it is hard to catch a sight of his eyes, but
you may take for granted that the eyes are bad and shifty. The cheeks
are probably a little pendulous, and the jaw hangs with a certain
slackness. The whole visage looks as if it had been cast in a tolerably
good mould and had somehow run out of shape a little. Your man is fluent
and communicative; he mouths his sentences with a genteel roll in his
voice, and he punctuates his talk with a stealthy, insincere laugh which
hardly rises above the dignity of a snigger.

Now how does such a man come to be tramping aimlessly on a public road?
He does not know that he is going to any place in particular; he is
certainly not walking for the sake of health, though he needs health
rather badly. Why is he in this plight? You do not need to wait long for
a solution, if the book of human experience has been your study. That
man is absolutely certain to begin bewailing his luck--it is always
"luck." Then he has a choice selection of abuse to bestow on large
numbers of people who have trodden him down--he is always down-trodden;
and he proves to you that, but for the ingratitude of A, the roguery of
B, the jealousy of C, the undeserved credit obtained by the despicable
D, he would be in "a far different position to-day, sir." If he is an
old officer--and a few gentlemen who once bore Her Majesty's commission
are now