t with them a stretcher. He had told them briefly how the dead
man was found in the cart-load of snow.

Before the men in blue, the crowd of necessity opened. One of the
officers stooped down and flashed his lantern on the heap of snow where
the dead face lay, as pale as its frozen pillow.

"Lord, it's old Dicky Shields!" cried a voice in the crowd, as the
peaked still features were lighted up.

The man who spoke was one of the latest spectators that had arrived,
after the news that some pleasant entertainment was on foot had passed
into the warm alcoholic air and within the swinging doors of the _Hit
or Miss_.

"You know him, do you?" asked the policeman with the lantern.

"Know him, rather! Didn't I give him sixpence for rum when he tattooed
this here cross and anchor on my arm? Dicky was a grand hand at
tattooing, bless you: he'd tattooed himself all over!"

The speaker rolled up his sleeve, and showed, on his burly red forearm,
the emblems of Faith and Hope rather neatly executed in blue.

"Why, he was in the _Hit or Miss_," the speaker went on, "no later nor
last night."

"Wot beats me," said Tommy again, as the policeman lifted the light
corpse, and tried vainly to straighten the frozen limbs, "Wot beats me
is how he got in this here cart of ours."

"He's light enough surely," added Tommy; "but I warrant _we_ didn't
chuck him on the cart with the snow in Belgrave Square."

"Where do you put up at night?" asked one of the policemen suddenly. He
had been ruminating on the mystery.

"In the yard there, behind that there hoarding," answered Tommy,
pointing to a breached and battered palisade near the corner of the
public-house.

At the back of this ricketty plank fence, with its particolored tatters
of damp and torn advertisements, lay a considerable space of waste
ground. The old houses that recently occupied the site had been pulled
down, probably as condemned "slums," in some moment of reform, when
people had nothing better to think of than the housing of the poor.

There had been an idea of building model lodgings for tramps, with all
the latest improvements, on the space, but the idea evaporated when
something else occurred to divert the general interest. Now certain
sheds, with roofs sloped against the nearest walls, formed a kind of
lumber-room for the parish.

At this time the scavengers' carts were housed in the sheds, or outside
the sheds when these were overcrowded. Not far off were stables