g, or eats and shows reversed trouser-pockets in
default of settlement, to deal with.... But one does not develop muscle,
the thing above all that W. Keyse most longed to possess. When he went
into the printing-business and bent all day over the formes of type in the
composing-room, hand-setting up the columns of the North London
_Half-penny Herald_, to the tune of three-and-eightpence a day, the hollow
chest grew hollower, and he developed a "corf." The physician in charge of
the out-patients' department at University College Hospital said there was
lung-trouble, and a man at the printing-office who had never been there,
said South Africa was the cure for that. And W. Keyse had thirty pounds in
the Post-Office Savings Bank, earned by the sweat of a brow which was his
best feature, and the steamships were advertising ten-pound third-class
single fares to Cape Town. One of the Societies for the Aid of Emigrants
would have helped him, but while W. Keyse 'ad a bit of 'is own, no
Blooming Paupery, said he, for him! His sole living relative, an aunt who
inhabited one of a row of ginger-brick Virginia-creeper-clad almshouses
"over aginst 'Ighgyte Cimitery," sniffled a little when he called to say
good-bye, bringing in a parting present of a half-pound of Liphook's
Luscious Tea and a screw of snuff.

"I shan't never see you no more, William."

"Ow yes, you will, mother! Don't be such a silly!" William's step cousin
'Melia, in service as general in Adelaide Road, Chalk Farm end, had said;
and she had looked coldly upon William immediately afterwards, bestowing
an amorous ogle upon Lobster, who sat well forward upon a backless Windsor
chair, sucking the silver top of his swagger cane,--Lobster, who was six
foot high and in the Grenadier Guards, and had supplanted William in
'Melia's affections, for they 'ad used to walk out regularly on Sundays
and holidays before Lobster came along.... How William loved Lobster now!
Why, but for him he might have been married to 'Melia to-day;--doomed to
tread in the ways of commonplace, ordinary married life, fated to live and
die without once having peeped into Paradise, without ever having looked
upon the 'only woman in the world!' Greta, of the glorious golden pigtail,
the entrancing figure and the bewitching, twinkling, teasing eyes of blue!

Suppose--only suppose--the silent threatening Thing across the border,
jewelled with the glowing Argus-eyes of many camp-fires, conjecturable in
dar