d dark. There was heat, light, and a bar-parlor with a wide
old-fashioned chimney-place, provided with seats within the ingle.
On these little benches did Tommy and his friends make haste to place
themselves, comfortably disposed, and thawing rapidly, in a room within
a room, as it were; for the big chimney-place was like a little chamber
by itself. Not on an ordinary night could such a party have gained
admittance to the bar-parlor, where Maitland himself was wont to appear,
now and then, when he visited the tavern, and to produce by his mere
presence, and without in the least intending it, an Early Closing
Movement.

But to-night was no common night, and Mrs. Gullick, the widowed
landlady, or rather manager, was as eager to hear all the story of the
finding of poor Dicky Shields as any of the crowd outside had been.
Again and again the narrative was repeated, till conjecture once more
began to take the place of assertion.

"I wonder," asked one of the men, "how old Dicky got the money for a
boose?"

"The money, ay, and the chance," said another. "That daughter of his--a
nice-looking girl she is--kept poor Dicky pretty tight."

"Didn't let him get--" the epigrammatist of the company was just
beginning to put in, when the brilliant witticism he was about to utter
burst at once on the intellect of all his friends.

"Didn't let him _get_ tight, you was a-goin' to say, Tommy," howled
three or four at once, and there ensued a great noise of the slapping
of thighs, followed by chuckles which exploded, at intervals, like
crackers.

"Dicky 'ad been 'avin' bad times for long," the first speaker went on.
"I guess he 'ad about tattooed all the parish as would stand a pint for
tattooing. There was hardly a square inch of skin not made beautiful
forever about here."

"Ah! and there was no sale for his beastesses and bird-ses nuther; or
else he was clean sold out, and hadn't no capital to renew his stock of
hairy cats and young parrots."

"The very stuffed beasts, perched above old Dicky's shop, had got to
look real mangey and mouldy. I think I see them now: the fox in the
middle, the long-legged moulting foreign bird at one end, and that 'ere
shiny old rhinoceros in the porch under them picters of the dying deer
and t'other deer swimming. Poor old Dicky! Where he raised the price o'
a drain, let alone a booze, beats me, it does."

"Why," said Mrs. Gullick, who had been in the outer room during the
conversation, "why, it