and your airy pinions carry you through it. Still, Tony, far be it from me, I am sure, to wound even your feelings without a cause!”

Tony again entreats that the subject may be no longer pursued, saying emphatically, “William Guppy, drop it!” Mr Guppy acquiesces, with the reply, “I never should have taken it up, Tony, of my own accord.”

“And now,” says Tony, stirring the fire, “touching this same bundle of letters. Isn’t it an extraordinary thing of Krook to have appointed twelve o’clock to-night to hand ’em over to me?”

“Very. What did he do it for?”

“What does he do anything for? He don’t know. Said, to-day was his birthday, and he’d hand ’em over to-night at twelve o’clock. He’ll have drunk himself blind by that time. He has been at it all day.”

“He hasn’t forgotten the appointment, I hope?”

“Forgotten? Trust him for that. He never forgets anything. I saw him to-night, about eight — helped him to shut up his shop — and he had got the letters then in his hairy cap. He pulled it off, and shewed ’em me. When the shop was closed, he took them out of his cap, hung his cap on the chair-back, and stood turning them over before the fire. I heard him a little while afterwards through the floor here, humming, like the wind, the only song he knows — about Bibo, and old Charon, and Bibo being drunk when he died, or something or other. He has been as quiet, since, as an old rat asleep in his hole.”

“And you are to go down at twelve?”

“At twelve. And, as I tell you, when you came it seemed to me a hundred.”

“Tony,” says Mr Guppy, after considering a little with his legs crossed, “he can’t read yet, can he?”

“Read! He’ll never read. He can make all the letters separately, and he knows most of them separately when he sees them; he has got on that much, under me; but he can’t put them together. He’s too old to acquire the knack of it now — and too drunk.”

“Tony,” says Mr Guppy, uncrossing and recrossing his legs; “how do you suppose he spelt out that name of Hawdon?”

“He never spelt it out. You know what a curious power of eye he has, and how he has been used to employ himself in copying things by eye alone. He imitated it — evidently from the direction of a letter; and asked me what it meant.”

“Tony,” says Mr Guppy, uncrossing and recrossing his legs again; “should you say that the original was a man’s writing or a woman’s?”

“A woman’s. Fifty to one a lady’s — slopes a good deal, and the end of the letter ‘n,’ long and hasty.”

Mr Guppy has been biting his thumb-nail during this dialogue, generally changing the thumb when he has changed the crossed leg. As he is going to do so again, he happens to look at his coat-sleeve. It takes his attention. He stares at it, aghast.

“Why, Tony, what on earth is going on in this house to-night? Is there a chimney on fire?”

“Chimney on fire!”

“Ah!” returns Mr Guppy. “See how the soot’s falling. See here, on my arm! See again, on the table here! Confound the stuff, it won’t blow off — smears, like black fat!”