the
famous chess-player, whose books are the poetry of chess, but whose life
was more than a tragedy. I need not say where I met him; his face was
bruised and swollen, his jawbone was fractured, he was in trouble, so we
became friends. He was a strange fellow, and though he visited my house
many times, he would neither eat nor drink with us. He wore no overcoat
even in the most bitter weather, he carried no umbrella, neither would
he walk under one, though the rains descended and the floods came!

He was a fatalist pure and simple, and took whatever came to him in a
thoroughly fatalist spirit. "My dear Holmes," he would say, "why do you
break your heart about me? Let me alone, let us be friends; you are what
you are because you can't help it; you can't be anything else even if
you tried. I am what I am for the same reason. You get your happiness, I
get mine. Do me a good turn when you can, but don't reason with me; let
us enjoy each other's company and take things as they are."

I took him on his own terms; I saw much of him, and when he was in
difficulties I helped him out.

For a time I became his keeper, and when he had chess engagements to
fulfil I used to deliver him carriage paid to his destination wherever
it might be. He always and most punctiliously repaid any monetary
obligation I had conferred upon him, for in that respect I found him the
soul of honour, poor though he was! As I think of him I see him dancing
and yelling in the street, surrounded by a crowd of admiring East
Enders, I see him bruised and torn hurried off to the police station,
I see him standing before the magistrate awaiting judgment. What
compensation dipsomania gave him I know not, but that he did get some
kind of wild joy I am quite sure. For I see him feverish from one
debauch, but equally feverish with the expectation of another.

With his wife it was another story, and I can see her now full of
anxiety and dread, with no relief and no hope, except, dreadful as it
may seem, his death! For then, to use her own expression, "she would
know the worst." Poor fellow! the last time I saw him he was nearing the
end. In an underground room I sat by his bedside, and a poor bed it was!

As he lay propped up by pillows he was working away at his beloved
chess, writing chess notes, and solving and explaining problems for very
miserable payments.

I knew the poverty of that underground room; and was made acquainted
with the intense disappointme