he world, lying at the foot of that fence.
I saw that I had done wrong in casting it from me. I had not even the
consolation of feeling that if any one found it he would cherish it, for
it was so much damaged that I knew it could never appeal to a new owner
as it appealed to me. I had intended telling my sister of the sacrifice
made for her sake; but after seeing her so much better, I left the room
without doing so. There was Arcadia Mixture in the house, but I had not
the heart to smoke. I went early to bed, and fell into a troubled sleep,
from which I awoke with a shiver. The rain was driving against my
window, tapping noisily on it as if calling on me to awake and go back
for my tobacco-pouch. It rained far on into the morning, and I lay
miserably, seeing nothing before me but a wet fence, and a tobacco-pouch
among the grass at the foot of it.

On the following afternoon I was again at Stratford. So far as I could
remember, I had flung away the pouch within a few miles of the station;
but I did not look for it until dusk. I felt that the porters had their
eyes on me. By crouching along hedges I at last reached the railway a
mile or two from the station, and began my search. It may be thought
that the chances were against my finding the pouch; but I recovered it
without much difficulty. The scene as I flung my old friend out at the
window had burned itself into my brain, and I could go to the spot
to-day as readily as I went on that occasion. There it was, lying among
the grass, but not quite in the place where it had fallen. Apparently
some navvy had found it, looked at it, and then dropped it. It was
half-full of water, and here and there it was sticking together; but
I took it up tenderly, and several times on the way back to the station
I felt in my pocket to make sure that it was really there.

[Illustration]

I have not described the appearance of my pouch, feeling that to be
unnecessary. It never, I fear, quite recovered from its night in the
rain, and as my female relatives refused to touch it, I had to sew it
together now and then myself. Gilray used to boast of a way of mending
a hole in a tobacco-pouch that was better than sewing. You put the two
pieces of gutta-percha close together and then cut them sharply with
scissors. This makes them run together, he says, and I believed him
until he experimented upon my pouch. However, I did not object to a hole
here and there. Wherever I laid that pouch it left a