n
"eye-composer," the chief ingredients being hot lemonade, ginger wine,
sugar, oranges, and raspberry vinegar. It had the desired effect.

I stayed till late, listening to his inexhaustible fund of stories. Over
most of them he laughed with us himself--a great gusty laugh that made
the cheap glass ornaments upon the mantelpiece to tremble; but now and
then a recollection came to him that spread a sudden gravity across his
jovial face, bringing a curious quaver into his deep voice.

Their tongues a little loosened by the punch, the old folks would have
sung his praises to the verge of tediousness had he not almost sternly
interrupted them.

"Shut up, mother," he cried at last, quite gruffly, "what I does I does
to please myself. I likes to see people comfortable about me. If they
wasn't, it's me as would be more upset than them."

I did not see him again for nearly two years. Then one October evening,
strolling about the East End, I met him coming out of a little Chapel in
the Burdett Road. He was so changed that I should not have known him had
not I overheard a woman as she passed him say, "Good-evening, Mr.
Burridge."

A pair of bushy side-whiskers had given to his red face an aggressively
respectable appearance. He was dressed in an ill-fitting suit of black,
and carried an umbrella in one hand and a book in the other.

In some mysterious way he managed to look both thinner and shorter than
my recollection of him. Altogether, he suggested to me the idea that he
himself--the real man--had by some means or other been extracted, leaving
only his shrunken husk behind. The genial juices of humanity had been
squeezed out of him.

"Not Jack Burridge!" I exclaimed, confronting him in astonishment.

His little eyes wandered shiftily up and down the street. "No, sir," he
replied (his tones had lost their windy boisterousness--a hard, metallic
voice spoke to me), "not the one as you used to know, praise be the
Lord."

"And have you given up the old business?" I asked.

"Yes, sir," he replied, "that's all over; I've been a vile sinner in my
time, God forgive me for it. But, thank Heaven, I have repented in
time."

"Come and have a drink," I said, slipping my arm through his, "and tell
me all about it."

He disengaged himself from me, firmly but gently. "You mean well, sir,"
he said, "but I have given up the drink."

Evidently he would have been rid of me, but a literary man, scenting
material for his