ke a cursed interest in the whole thing. You may think it a ----
impertinence, but that's the way I'm made. As long as I can steam I'll
throw a rope to whoever wants a tow. I'll tell you what I'll do, Dr.
Munro, sir. I'll stand on one tack if you'll stand on the other, and
I'll let you know if I come across anything that will do."

There seemed to be no alternative between taking him with me, or letting
him go alone; so I could only thank him and let him have carte blanche.
Every night he would turn up, half-drunk as a rule, having, I believe,
walked his ten or fifteen miles as conscientiously as I had done. He
came with the most grotesque suggestions.

Once he had actually entered into negotiations with the owner of a huge
shop, a place that had been a raper's, with a counter about sixty feet
long. His reason was that he knew an innkeeper who had done very well a
little further down on the other side. Poor old "armed transport" worked
so hard that I could not help being touched and grateful; yet I longed
from my heart that he would stop for he was a most unsavoury agent,
and I never knew what extraordinary step he might take in my name. He
introduced me to two other men, one of them a singular-looking creature
named Turpey, who was struggling along upon a wound-pension, having,
when only a senior midshipman, lost the sight of one eye and the use of
one arm through the injuries he received at some unpronounceable Pah in
the Maori war. The other was a sad-faced poetical-looking man, of
good birth as I understood, who had been disowned by his family on the
occasion of his eloping with the cook. His name was Carr, and his chief
peculiarity, that he was so regular in his irregularities that he could
always tell the time of day by the state of befuddlement that he was in.
He would cock his head, think over his own symptoms, and then give
you the hour fairly correctly. An unusual drink would disarrange him,
however; and if you forced the pace in the morning, he would undress and
go to bed about tea-time, with a full conviction that all the clocks
had gone mad. These two strange waifs were among the craft to whom old
Whitehall had in his own words, "thrown a rope"; and long after I had
gone to bed I could hear the clink of their glasses, and the tapping of
their pipes against the fender in the room below.

Well, when I had finished my empty-house-and-doctor chart, I found that
there was one villa to let, which undoubtedly was