a space before the whole man rolled contentedly
downhill.

He had no beard. "Young man, let your beard grow." Those who have
forgotten all else about Pym may recall him in these words. They were
his one counsel to literary aspirants, who, according as they took it,
are now bearded and prosperous or shaven and on the rates. To shave
costs threepence, another threepence for loss of time--nearly ten
pounds a year, three hundred pounds since Pym's chin first bristled.
With his beard he could have bought an annuity or a cottage in the
country, he could have had a wife and children, and driven his
dog-cart, and been made a church-warden. All gone, all shaved, and for
what? When he asked this question he would move his hand across his
chin with a sigh, and so, bravely to the barber's.

Pym was at present suffering from an ailment that had spread him out
on that sofa again and again--acute disinclination to work.

Meanwhile all the world was waiting for his new tale; so the
publishers, two little round men, have told him. They have blustered,
they have fawned, they have asked each other out to talk it over
behind the door.

Has he any idea of what the story is to be about?

He has no idea.

Then at least, Pym--excellent Pym--sit down and dip, and let us see
what will happen.

He declined to do even that. While all the world waited, this was
Pym's ultimatum:

"I shall begin the damned thing at eight o'clock."

Outside, the fog kept changing at intervals from black to white, as
lazily from white to black (the monster blinking); there was not a
sound from the street save of pedestrians tapping with their sticks on
the pavement as they moved forward warily, afraid of an embrace with
the unknown; it might have been a city of blind beggars, one of them a
boy.

At eight o'clock Pym rose with a groan and sat down in his
stocking-soles to write his delicious tale. He was now alone. But
though his legs were wound round his waste-paper basket, and he dipped
often and loudly in the saucer, like one ringing at the door of Fancy,
he could not get the idea that would set him going. He was still
dipping for inspiration when T. Sandys, who had been told to find the
second floor for himself, knocked at the door, and entered, quaking.

"I remember it vividly," Pym used to say when questioned in the after
years about this his first sight of Tommy, "and I hesitate to decide
which impressed me more, the richness of his voice, so remar