ioners from the high seas, living together in the
evening of their days in a narrow court in a London slum, the one
paralysed and the other blind; the one a most brilliant and imaginative
story-teller, the other a most cautious, modest, tentative, and genial
critic. And let us sit between their two chairs for a moment and listen
to the moving story of Old Joe, believing it with all the simplicity, if
not with all the stupefied, admiration of the little slum children who
gaze at the pirate when his chair is moved out into the court that he
may warm his old bones in the sun.

[In brackets, let me say that I have come upon Old Joe literally posing
in the court as a most ferocious pirate before an audience of toddling
infants not more than four years of age.]

Eighty-two years ago Old Joe, surnamed Ridley, was born in the
neighbourhood of the Barbican. He remembers how murderers and highwaymen
used to come and hide in the court where he was born, "because, don't
you see, the police daren't come where we was living." He went to a
school in Charterhouse-square. "Charterhouse School," he says. But Mr.
Wells nudges us with his pipe hand. "That's a mistake," he says. "There
wasn't never no _school_ in Charterhouse Square, in those days. But
never mind; let him go on. Only you must make allowance, you know."

His father was a carman who could drink porter by the two-gallon, and
had an arm like a leg of mutton. But this great, lusty carman found
himself ruled with a rod of iron by the little spitfire he took for his
second wife. She managed the carman, and she managed his brats of
children. She particularly managed Joe because he particularly disliked
being managed.

* * * * *

So it came about that Joe found the streets pleasanter than his home,
and took to slouching about with his hands in his pockets, feeling
hungry and sometimes a little concerned, perhaps, as to what was to
become of him. One day, as he was wasting time at a street-corner in
Aldersgate, there came up to him a broad-shouldered, sandy-haired man in
a blue reefer suit, who showed all his teeth when he smiled and whose
voice had a sharp rattle in it like a bag full of gold coins. This
noticeable man hailed Joe as a fine fellow, and asked the fine fellow
whether he wouldn't step with him into a convenient tavern and wet his
whistle with a glass of the best brandy.

The broad-shouldered, easy-smiling gentleman in the reefer suit