u?"

Stevie was staring at the horse, whose hind quarters appeared unduly
elevated by the effect of emaciation. The little stiff tail seemed to
have been fitted in for a heartless joke; and at the other end the thin,
flat neck, like a plank covered with old horse-hide, drooped to the
ground under the weight of an enormous bony head. The ears hung at
different angles, negligently; and the macabre figure of that mute
dweller on the earth steamed straight up from ribs and backbone in the
muggy stillness of the air.

The cabman struck lightly Stevie's breast with the iron hook protruding
from a ragged, greasy sleeve.

"Look 'ere, young feller. 'Ow'd _you_ like to sit behind this 'oss up to
two o'clock in the morning p'raps?"

Stevie looked vacantly into the fierce little eyes with red-edged lids.

"He ain't lame," pursued the other, whispering with energy. "He ain't
got no sore places on 'im. 'Ere he is. 'Ow would _you_ like--"

His strained, extinct voice invested his utterance with a character of
vehement secrecy. Stevie's vacant gaze was changing slowly into dread.

"You may well look! Till three and four o'clock in the morning. Cold
and 'ungry. Looking for fares. Drunks."

His jovial purple cheeks bristled with white hairs; and like Virgil's
Silenus, who, his face smeared with the juice of berries, discoursed of
Olympian Gods to the innocent shepherds of Sicily, he talked to Stevie of
domestic matters and the affairs of men whose sufferings are great and
immortality by no means assured.

"I am a night cabby, I am," he whispered, with a sort of boastful
exasperation. "I've got to take out what they will blooming well give me
at the yard. I've got my missus and four kids at 'ome."

The monstrous nature of that declaration of paternity seemed to strike
the world dumb. A silence reigned during which the flanks of the old
horse, the steed of apocalyptic misery, smoked upwards in the light of
the charitable gas-lamp.

The cabman grunted, then added in his mysterious whisper:

"This ain't an easy world." Stevie's face had been twitching for some
time, and at last his feelings burst out in their usual concise form.

"Bad! Bad!"

His gaze remained fixed on the ribs of the horse, self-conscious and
sombre, as though he were afraid to look about him at the badness of the
world. And his slenderness, his rosy lips and pale, clear complexion,
gave him the aspect of a delicate boy, notwithstanding the