wly and deliberately the exact form of answer which is most likely
to draw approval from the grand inquisitor, and we copy it down
hastily in our notes. The sleeves of his grey frock-coat are pulled
back to keep the chalk dust from soiling them as he rapidly sketches
on the board for our edification. We listen with respect, for we know
he has been through precisely the same mill as ourselves, he has come
on watch at midnight with his mouth dry and his eyelids sagging and
wishing in his heart he were dead. He has won out and now stands ready
to show us the way. We listen to every word. The lecture is short,
sharp, apposite, a model of all a lecture should be, stripped to the
bare bones of fundamental truth, pared clean of every redundant word.
As the clock strikes three he claps his hands to rid them of chalk,
pauses for a moment to answer pertinent questions, and vanishes into
his office once more.

Most of us go home.

The author now has an assignation with a lady, and the reader who
has been patiently waiting for some sort of literary allusions in a
preface to a volume of literary essays, is about to be gratified. The
scene changes from the vulgar uproar of Aldgate to a flat in Chelsea.
Hurrying through Houndsditch, across Leadenhall Street and up St. Mary
Axe, the author discovers the right 'bus in Broad Street about to
start. They are filling the radiator with water and the conductor is
intoning a mysterious incantation which resolves itself into "_Benk!
Oobun, Benk! Piccadilly, 'Yde Pawk, Sloon Stree', Sloon Square, Kings
Road, Chelsea an' Walham Green. Here y' are, lidy._" With long
practice he can make the vowels reverberate above the roar of the
traffic. The words Benk and Pawk come from his diaphragm in sullen
booms. To listen to him is a lesson in prosody. He enjoys doing it. He
is an artist. He extracts the uttermost from his material, which is
the mark of the supreme artist. He unbends when he comes up to collect
the fares from the author and a lady who is probably returning to
Turnham Green after a visit to her married daughter at Islington, and
he leans over the author's shoulder to scan the racing news in the
Stop Press Column, a courtesy as little likely to be withheld in
London as a light for a cigarette in Alexandria. "Hm!" he murmurs,
stoically. "Jes' fancy! An' I had 'im backed for a place, too. That's
the larst money I lose on _that_ stable." He clatters down again and
one hears his voice lifted o