As he shuffles downstairs, Mr. Snagsby, lying in wait for him, puts a half-crown in his hand.  “If you ever see me coming past your crossing with my little woman—­I mean a lady—­” says Mr. Snagsby with his finger on his nose, “don’t allude to it!”

For some little time the jurymen hang about the Sol’s Arms colloquially.  In the sequel, half-a-dozen are caught up in a cloud of pipe-smoke that pervades the parlour of the Sol’s Arms; two stroll to Hampstead; and four engage to go half-price to the play at night, and top up with oysters.  Little Swills is treated on several hands.  Being asked what he thinks of the proceedings, characterizes them (his strength lying in a slangular direction) as “a rummy start.”  The landlord of the Sol’s Arms, finding Little Swills so popular, commends him highly to the jurymen and public, observing that for a song in character he don’t know his equal and that that man’s character-wardrobe would fill a cart.

Thus, gradually the Sol’s Arms melts into the shadowy night and then flares out of it strong in gas.  The Harmonic Meeting hour arriving, the gentleman of professional celebrity takes the chair, is faced (red-faced) by Little Swills; their friends rally round them and support first-rate talent.  In the zenith of the evening, Little Swills says, “Gentlemen, if you’ll permit me, I’ll attempt a short description of a scene of real life that came off here to-day.”  Is much applauded and encouraged; goes out of the room as Swills; comes in as the coroner (not the least in the world like him); describes the inquest, with recreative intervals of piano-forte accompaniment, to the refrain:  With his (the coroner’s) tippy tol li doll, tippy tol lo doll, tippy tol li doll, Dee!

The jingling piano at last is silent, and the Harmonic friends rally round their pillows.  Then there is rest around the lonely figure, now laid in its last earthly habitation; and it is watched by the gaunt eyes in the shutters through some quiet hours of night.  If this forlorn man could have been prophetically seen lying here by the mother at whose breast he nestled, a little child, with eyes upraised to her loving face, and soft hand scarcely knowing how to close upon the neck to which it crept, what an impossibility the vision would have seemed!  Oh, if in brighter days the now-extinguished fire within him ever burned for one woman who held him in her heart, where is she, while these ashes are above the ground!

It is anything but a night of rest at Mr. Snagsby’s, in Cook’s Court, where Guster murders sleep by going, as Mr. Snagsby himself allows—­not to put too fine a point upon it—­out of one fit into twenty.  The occasion of this seizure is that Guster has a tender heart and a susceptible something that possibly might have been imagination, but for Tooting and her patron saint.  Be it what it may, now, it was so direfully impressed at tea-time by Mr. Snagsby’s account of the inquiry at which