the copyright in the
_Gentleman's Magazine_, and I bethought me that here lay my opportunity.
I took the article to him, and after turning the manuscript pages
swiftly over, he decided to accept it. It ran, I think, to two and
thirty pages, and I received his cheque for ten shillings and sixpence a
page.

Thus armed, I felt more than fit to face the world again, and it was
whilst I was yet in this new flush of fortune that I walked into the
Ludgate Bar as already recorded, and for the second time encountered
Archibald Forbes.

And now began a period of halcyon weather. A kinder, more discerning and
more helpful chief than Edmund Yates no aspiring young journalist ever
had. He was as genial and as quick to recognise honest effort as Dawson
himself, and he knew ten times better what he wanted, and a thousand
times more about the taste and temper of the public.

He had conceived the idea of a series of articles on our civilisation,
in which the writer should deal with the sores and oddities of it, and
into this work I plunged with all the splendid vigour and avidity of
youth, I chose the hangman as my first theme, because I happened to have
had an acquaintance with a gentleman of that profession, and to have
been engaged in some personal dealings with him. His name was James
Smith, and he lived about midway between Rowley Regis and Dudley. I
held that property in trust for my infant daughter, and the rents were
collected for me weekly by a little lame clockmaker named Chesson. At
one time my business often led me along that road, and I was familiar
with the figure of a great, sprawling, muscular-looking, idle fellow,
who, whenever I passed him, was leaning across the garden-gate in his
shirt sleeves and smoking. He seemed to have no sort of employment, and,
though I did not notice it at the time, it occurred to me afterwards,
when I knew the truth about him, that I had never seen him exchange so
much as a passing salutation with a single human creature. The rents
came in regularly for some time, and then it was reported to me that
my idle tenant had not paid. Time went on, and the idle tenant _never_
paid. I determined to look into the thing myself, and I set out with the
lame clockmaker to interview the man. He was sprawling over the gate as
usual when we reached his cottage, and, to my surprise, the little lame
man lagged some yards behind and refused to approach him. I explained my
errand to the idle tenant, and he l