youth with an extremely good-natured face
nodding at us across the coping of the party-wall. "Avast there!
Busy with visitors, eh? No? Well, I've been thinkin' it over, and
I'll take sixpence an hour."

"I don't give a ha'penny over fippence," answered Captain Coffin,
patently taken aback by the interruption.

"Fivepence, then, as a pro-temporary accommodation," said the youth,
and, throwing a leg over the wall, heaved himself over and into the
back yard. "But it's taking advantage of me; and you know that if I
weren't in love and in a hurry it wouldn't happen."

"You can take fippence, or go to the devil!" said Captain Coffin.
"By the way, Brooks, this is my assistant, Mr. George Goodfellow."

CHAPTER VI.

MY FIRST GLIMPSE OF THE CHART.

"Good day," said Mr. George Goodfellow, nodding affably. "I hope I
see you well."

"Pretty well, thank you, sir," I answered.

"And where might you come from, makin' so bold?"

I told him that I was a boarder at Mr. Stimcoe's.

"Then," said Mr. Goodfellow, taking off his coat and extracting a
pencil and a two-foot rule from a pocket at the back of his
small-clothes, "I'm sorry for you. What a female!" He chose out a
long and flexible plank from a stack laid lengthwise in the alley-way
along the base of the wall, lifted it, set it on three trestles, and
began to measure and mark it off. "She's calculated to destroy one's
belief in human nature, that's what she is! Fairly knocks the gilt
off. Sometimes I can't hardly realize that she and Martha belong to
the same sex. Martha is my young woman."

"Yes, sir?"

"Yes. At present she's living in Plymouth, assistant in a
ham-and-beef shop, as you turn down to the Barbican. That's her
conscientiousness, instead of sitting at home and living on her
parents. Don't tell me that women--by which I mean some women--ain't
the equals of men.

"Because," continued Mr. Goodfellow, after a pause, "I know better.
Ever been to Plymouth?"

"Yes, sir."

"Live there?"

"No, sir."

He seemed to be disappointed.

"You go past the bottom of Treville Street, and there the shop is,
slap in front of you. You can't miss it, because it has a
plaster-of-Paris cow in the window, and the proprietor's called
Mudge. I go to Plymouth every week on purpose to see her."

"By coach, sir?" I asked, suddenly interested, and eager to compare
notes with him on the Royal Mail and its rivals, the Self-Defence and
Highflyer.

"Coach