st about Pocket
Upton himself; had not a real murder and _Henry Dunbar_ formed his staple
reading in the train? And yet the boy had other sensibilities which made
him hesitate outside the building, and enter eventually with quite a
nutter under the waistcoat.

A band in fantastic livery was playing away in the marble hall; but Pocket
had no ear for their music, though he was fond enough of a band. And
though history was one of his few strong points at school, the glittering
galaxy of kings and queens appealed to him no more than the great writers
at their little desks and the great cricketers in their unconvincing
flannels. They were waxworks one and all. But when the extra sixpence
had been paid at the inner turnstile, and he had passed down a dungeon
stair into the dim vaults below, his imagination was at work upon the
dreadful faces in the docks before he had brought his catalogue to bear on
one of them.

Here were wretches whose vile deeds had long been familiar to the
schoolboy through a work on his father's shelves called _Annals of Our
Time._ He recalled bad nights when certain of those annals had kept him
awake long after his attack; and here were the actual monsters, not
scowling and ferocious as he had always pictured them, but far more
horribly demure and plump. Here were immortal malefactors like the
Mannings; here were Rush and Greenacre cheek by jowl, looking as though
they had stepped out of Dickens in their obsolete raiment, looking
anything but what they had been. Some wore the very clothes their quick
bodies had filled; here and there were authentic tools of death, rusty
pistols, phials of poison with the seals still bright, and a smug face
smirking over all in self-conscious infamy. There was not enough of the
waxwork about these creatures; in the poor light, and their own clothes,
and the veritable dock in which many of them had heard their doom, they
looked hideously human and alive. One, a little old man, sat not in the
dock but on the drop itself, the noose dangling in front of him; and the
schoolboy felt sorry for him, for his silver bristles, for the broad
arrows on his poor legs, until he found out who it was. Then he
shuddered. It was Charles Peace. He had first heard of Charles Peace
from the nice governess aforesaid; and here under his nose were the old
ruffian's revolver, and the strap that strapped it to his wrist, with the
very spectacles he had wiped and worn. The hobbledeh