y!" drawn out in an inconceivable
passionlessness of desire again and again, till I felt myself absorbing
the ridiculous yearning for an absurd person and inclined to weep
hysterical tears at his unresponsiveness.

Then through the suffocating miasma thridded another sound--the whine of
a loafing tramp slowly pleading along the house fronts--vainly, too, as
it appeared.

"Friends," went his formula, nasal and forcibly spasmodic in the best
gull-catcher style, "p'raps you will ask why I, a able-bodied man, are
asking for ass--ist--ance in your town. Friends, I answer, becorse I
cannot get work and becorse I cannot starve. Any honest work I would be
thankful for; but no one will give it to me."

Then followed an elaborate presentation, in singsong verse, of his own
undeserved indigence and the brutality of employers, and so the
recitation again:--

"Friends, the least ass--ist--ance would be welcome. I am a honest
British workman, and employ--ment I cannot ob--tain. You sit in your
com--for--ta--ble 'ouses, and I ask you to ass--ist a fellow creature,
driven to this for no fault of his own--for many can 'elp one where one
cannot 'elp many."

Then he hove into sight--a gastropodous tub of a fellow, with a rascally
red eye; and I shrank behind my curtains, for I never court parley with
such gentlemen.

He spotted me, of course,--rogues of his feather have a hawk's eye for
timid quarry,--and his bloated face appeared at the window.

"Sir--friend," he said, in a confidential, hoarse whisper, "won't you
'elp a starvin' British workman?"

I gave him sixpence, cursing inwardly this my concession to pure
timorousness, and the bestial mask of depravity vanished with a grin.

After that I was left to myself, heat and haze alone reigning without;
and presently, I think, I must have fallen into a suetty doze, for I was
semi-conscious of voices raised in dispute for a length of time, before I
roused to the fact that two people were quarrelling just outside my
window.

They were a young man--almost a boy--and a girl of about his own age; and
both evidently belonged to the labouring classes.

She was, I took occasion to notice, aggressively pretty in that hot red
and black style that finds its warmest admirers in a class cultivated
above that to which she belonged; and she was scorning and flouting her
slow, perplexed swain with that over-measure of vehemence characteristic
of a sex devoid of the sense of proportion.

"A