ent on providing with refreshments and plying with questions the
heroes of so remarkable an adventure. It is true that they already knew
all Tommy and Bill had to tell; but there is a pleasure, in moments of
emotional agitation, in repeating at intervals the same questions, and
making over and again the same profound remarks. The charm of these
performances was sure to be particularly keen within the very walls
where the dead man had probably taken his last convivial glass, and
where some light was certain to be thrown, by the landlady or her
customers, on the habits and history of poor Dicky Shields.

CHAPTER III.--An Academic Pothouse.

The _Hit or Miss_ tavern, to customers (rough customers, at least)
who entered it on a foggy winter night, seemed merely a public by
the river's brim. Not being ravaged and parched by a thirst for the
picturesque, Tommy and his mates failed to pause and observe the
architectural peculiarities of the building. Even if they had been of a
romantic and antiquarian turn, the fog was so thick that they could have
seen little to admire, though there was plenty to be admired. The _Hit
or Miss_ was not more antique in its aspect than modern in its fortunes.
Few public-houses, if any, boasted for their landlord such a person
as Robert Maitland, M.A., Fellow of St. Gatien's, in the University of
Oxford.

It is, perhaps, desirable and even necessary to explain how this
arrangement came into existence. We have already made acquaintance with
"mine host" of the _Hit or Miss_, and found him to be by no means the
rosy, genial Boniface of popular tradition. That a man like Maitland
should be the lessee of a waterside tavern, like the _Hit or Miss_, was
only one of the anomalies of this odd age of ours. An age of revivals,
restorations, experiments--an age of dukes who are Socialists--an age
which sees the East-end brawling in Pall Mall, and parties of West-end
tourists personally conducted down Ratcliffe Highway--need not wonder at
Maitland's eccentric choice in philanthropy.

Maitland was an orphan, and rich. He had been an unpopular lonely boy
at a public school, where he was known as a "sap," or assiduous student,
and was remarked for an almost unnatural indifference to cricket and
rowing. At Oxford, as he had plenty of money, he had been rather less
unpopular. His studies ultimately won him a Fellowship at St. Gatien's,
where his services as a tutor were not needed. Maitland now developed a