n eye the best entertainment in the
world is a lounge in London streets. Theatres, concerts, seances, Albert
Halls, museums, galleries, are but set and formal shows; a great
weariness, for the most part, and who the deuce would care to go and
gaze at them again who could lounge in Piccadilly?

It is well worth a ten-pound note any day in May; fifty pounds sometimes
at 1 p.m., merely to look on, I mean, it is worth it; but you can see
this living show for nothing. Let the grandees go to the opera; for me,
the streets.

So I can't throw dirt at Raleigh, who often had a hatful of money, and
could and did just what seemed pleasant in his sight. But the money went
like water, and in order to get further supplies, the idle,
good-for-nothing, lazy dog worked like a prime minister with telegrams,
letters, newspapers, and so on, worked like a prime minister--at
betting. Horse-racing, in short, was the explanation of the
memorandum-book, the load of correspondence, and the telegrams, kept
flat with a glass of whiskey as a paper-weight.

While he wrote, and thought, and reckoned up his chances, a loud refrain
of snoring arose from the sofa. It was almost as loud as the boom of the
fair, but Raleigh had no nerves. His friend Freddie, becoming oppressed
with so much labour, had dropped asleep, leaving his whiskey beside him
on the sofa, so that the first time he moved over it went on the carpet.
With one long leg stretched out, the other knee up, lying on his back,
and his mouth wide open to the ceiling, Freddie was very happy.

Raleigh puffed his clay pipe, sipped, and puffed again. Freddie boomed
away on the sofa. The family was in London; Raleigh and Freddie got down
here in this way: it happened one night there was a row at a superb bar,
Haymarket trail. The "chuckers-out" began their coarse horse-play, and
in the general melee Raleigh distinguished himself. Rolled about by the
crowd, he chanced to find himself for a moment in a favourable position,
and punished one of these gigantic brutes pretty severely.

Though stout and short of breath, Raleigh was strong in the arm, he was
"up," and he hit hard. The fellow's face was a "picture," coloured in
cardinal. Such an opportunity does not occur twice in a lifetime;
Raleigh's genius seized the opportunity, and he became great. Actium was
a trifle to it.

There were mighty men before Agamemnon, and there are mighty men who do
not figure in the papers.

Raleigh became at once