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xvi his story, and, after all, there was always a certain air of detachment about the man in his attitude towards us.

"Think it over, B.," he concluded, as I rose to go a little later. "You're only a young beggar yet."

"Jolly decent of you to take the trouble," was my dutiful reply. "Still," I reminded him, "you did say that you liked to hear us young beggars talk."

"Yes," he admitted, dropping into that caustic tone of his; "but I doubt if you quite appreciate why."

Certainly I have wondered about that once or twice since.

He came down to the lower door to let me out. It had been raining in the meanwhile and a forlorn creature who was evidently sheltering for the time almost fell into our arms. He offered a box of matches in extenuation of his presence.

"No," said Melwish very sharply, "and remember what I told you about hanging round this doorway, Thompson. A wretched fellow," he explained, as the miserable being shambled off into the night; "impossible to help that sort. I put him in the way of a nice job delivering circulars once and he threw it up within a week. You'd hardly credit it, B., but that wastrel fancies his real forte is to write—verse, if you please, at that! Pretty pass we're coming to. Well, so long."

There is, you will (I hope) notice, a certain system in the arrangement of this book of stories. It is not—if an author may speak more than very casually of his own work without indelicacy—intended essentially as a collection of quite the best stories I might perhaps have chosen, nor is it, I am more than sure, a collection of anything like the worst that were available; it consists rather of a suitable example taken at convenient intervals over the whole time that I have been engaged in