Page:Hopkinson Smith--armchair at the inn.djvu/313

 fellows who took chances on the percentage, as Le Blanc calls it, and yet, as we Americans say, ‘arrived.’ A well-born young Englishman, down on his luck, had been tramping the streets, too proud to go home to his father’s house, the spirit of the hobo still in him. One night he struck up an acquaintance with another young chap as poor and independent as himself. Naturally they affiliated. Both were sons of gentlemen and both vagabonds in the best sense. One became a reporter and the other a news-gatherer. The first had no dress suit and was debarred from state functions and smart receptions; the second boasted not only a dress suit useful at weddings, but a respectable morning frock-coat for afternoon teas. The two outfits brought them lodgings and three meals a day, for what the dress suit could pick up in the way of society news the man with the pen got into type. Things went on this way until August set in and the season closed; then both men lost their jobs. For some weeks they braved it out, badgering the landlady; then came the pawning of their clothes, and then one meal a day, and then a bench in St. James’s Park out of sight of the bobbies. This being rock bottom, a council