, the battered teaspoons, not unwelcome the day's
newspaper, splashed with brown coffee and spots of grease. He often
lamented that this kind of establishment was growing rare, passing away
with so many other features of old London.

More fastidious, Greenacre could have wished his egg some six months
fresher, and his drink less obviously a concoction of rinsings. But he
was a guest, and his breeding did not allow him to complain. Of the
funeral he shrank from speaking; but the few words he dropped were such
as would have befitted 'a genuine grief. Gammon even heard him murmur,
unconsciously, "poor Bolsover."

Having eaten they wended their way to a little public-house, with a
parlour known only to the favoured few, where Greenacre, after a glass
or two of rum--a choice for which he thought it necessary to
apologize--began to discourse upon a topic peculiarly his own.

"I couldn't help thinking to-day, Gammon, what a strange assembly there
would be if all a man's relatives came to his funeral. Nearly all of us
must have such lots of distant connexions that we know nothing about.
Now a man like Bolsover--an aristocrat, with fifty or more acknowledged
relatives in good position--think how many more there must be in
out-of-the-way places, poor and unknown. Ay, and some of them not so
very distant kinsfolk either. Think of the hosts of illegitimate
children, for instance--some who know who they are, and some who don't."

This was said so significantly that Gammon wondered whether it had a
personal application.

"It's a theory of mine," pursued the other, his prominent eyes fixed on
some far vision, "that every one of us, however poor, has some wealthy
relative, if he could only be found. I mean a relative within
reasonable limits, not a cousin fifty times removed. That's one of the
charms of London to me. A little old man used to cobble my boots for me
a few years ago in Ball's Pond Road, He had an idea that one of his
brothers, who went out to New Zealand and was no more heard of, had
made a great fortune; said he'd dreamt about it again and again, and
couldn't get rid of the fancy. Well, now, the house in which he lived
took fire, and the poor old chap was burnt in his bed, and so his name
got into the newspapers. A day or two after I heard that his
brother--the one he spoke of--had been living for some years scarcely a
mile away at Stoke Newington--a man rolling in money, a director of the
British and Colonial Bank.