clear, little
voice: "We ha'nt any help in our house, an' Ma she had to go to the
stores, so we said we'd like comin' in here to see you till she comes
back."

"Well, that's awfully nice of you, old chap. Next time you'll bring
mother too, eh?"

They looked at each other at this, and then at their spoons as they
leaned over the soup.

"Anyhow, you'll ask her, won't you?" coaxed Bill. "Say, how pleased we
shall be if she comes in some evening."

They smiled, and Beppo said, "Sure, we'll ask her," and then we all
laughed. I suppose we were a trifle fatuous about them and treated them
more as delicious playthings than as human beings. They bore it very
well, however, and after dinner, when my friend, in spite of his long
tramp and a "job" half done upstairs in the studio, played the piano,
and did conjuring tricks with a handkerchief and a glass of water, and
then got out a concertina which had often wakened the echoes of King's
Road, Chelsea, in the small hours, they were in raptures. The concertina
certainly impressed them as "a divine box of sounds." After "Church
Bells in the Distance" they jumped and clapped their hands and said
"Bully!" A new and appreciative audience is always stimulating to an
artist. My friend surpassed himself. He told them about the London
costers, how they had hundreds of pearl buttons and velvet collared
coats and wide bell-mouthed trousers, how they played the concertina so
beautifully that the policemen in the streets wept into their helmets
and the King came out of his palace and danced a jig with the Lord Mayor
outside the Mansion House. And he told them how it sometimes chanced the
coster got drunk on his way home, and this made him play very
pathetically indeed like this ... and then the broken strains of "Two
Lovely Black Eyes" came forth, but ended abruptly in a squeak. That,
they were told, was his wife, Eliza, who had come out and slapped him.
Eliza had joined the Salvation Army and sang only hymns. This was the
prelude to "Where is My Wandering Boy To-night?" rendered in a way, Bill
remarked _sotto voce_, calculated to keep him wandering. But Beppo and
Ben sat on the edge of their chairs, entranced. It was evidently a novel
evening for them. We put the concertina away and got a drawing-board
with a sheet of paper and a stick of charcoal, and everybody had to
draw a pig blindfold. The usual fragmentary animals appeared, some so
embryonic as to be unrecognizable by their designer