nd
would spend hours there over a pot of tea and assorted pastry. "Idyllic,"
some folks would have thought it: I used to get the fair dismals watching
it. There was one girl--a weird-looking creature, with red eyes and long
thin hands, that gave you the creeps to look at. She'd come in regular
with her young man, a pale-faced nervous sort of chap, at three o'clock
every afternoon. Theirs was the funniest love-making I ever saw. She'd
pinch him under the table, and run pins into him, and he'd sit with his
eyes glued on her as if she'd been a steaming dish of steak and onions
and he a starving beggar the other side of the window. A strange story
that was--as I came to learn it later on. I'll tell you that, one day.

I'd been engaged for the "heavy work," but as the heaviest order I ever
heard given there was for a cold ham and chicken, which I had to slip out
for to the nearest cook-shop, I must have been chiefly useful from an
ornamental point of view.

I'd been there about a fortnight, and was feeling pretty sick of it, when
in walked young "Kipper." I didn't know him at first, he'd changed so.
He was swinging a silver-mounted crutch stick, which was the kind that
was fashionable just then, and was dressed in a showy check suit and a
white hat. But the thing that struck me most was his gloves. I suppose
I hadn't improved quite so much myself, for he knew me in a moment, and
held out his hand.

"What, 'Enery!" he says, "you've moved on, then!"

"Yes," I says, shaking hands with him, "and I could move on again from
this shop without feeling sad. But you've got on a bit?" I says.

"So-so," he says, "I'm a journalist."

"Oh," I says, "what sort?" for I'd seen a good many of that lot during
six months I'd spent at a house in Fleet Street, and their get-up hadn't
sumptuousness about it, so to speak. "Kipper's" rig-out must have totted
up to a tidy little sum. He had a diamond pin in his tie that must have
cost somebody fifty quid, if not him.

"Well," he answers, "I don't wind out the confidential advice to old
Beaky, and that sort of thing. I do the tips, yer know. 'Cap'n Kit,'
that's my name."

"What, the Captain Kit?" I says. O' course I'd heard of him.

"Be'old!" he says.

"Oh, it's easy enough," he goes on. "Some of 'em's bound to come out
right, and when one does, you take it from me, our paper mentions the
fact. And when it is a wrong 'un--well, a man can't always be shouting
about himself