“It wasn’t always as clean as this, you must understand,” says Mr. Wells confidentially, his sightless eyes blinking with amusement.  “When we first come here the place was simply swarming; swarming it was—­you know, gentlemen in the overcoats we call ’em down here.  And the amusing thing was—­there, I did laugh!—­Joe could see ’em but couldn’t catch ’em, and I, who might have caught ’em, couldn’t see ’em.”  He leans over to Joe and shouts, “I was telling the genneman about the bugs when we first came here!” And Joe lifts his eyebrows, rubs his shoulder against his chair, and laughs, and says with his pipe in his mouth, “Ess, sir!” making a pantomimic gesture supposed to represent the slaughter of vermin.

Little Mr. Wells has a great and fundamental pride in the fact that he is “eight year younger nor what Joe is.”  He tells you this interesting fact more than once, speaking in his wonted low tone of voice, reaching out with his pipe between his fingers to touch you lightly with his elbow, and always concluding with the appeal, “You wouldn’t think so, would you?” And then, as the pipe goes back to his mouth, “Well, it is so,” he says, and nods his head at the fire.  And Old Joe, who doesn’t care a brass farden, or a bone button for that matter, whether he is eighty-two or one hundred and eighty-two, has his point of pride in the certain conviction that if only he had the use of his legs he would be as strong now as ever he was.

* * * * *

Now, old Joe, for all he is paralysed, has the use of his eyes, whereas Mr. Wells, who can and does shuffle about pretty freely on his feet, has not got the use of his.

Joe’s sight is a great blessing to him; he can read.  He has a sturdy taste in literature, and will stand none of your milk-and-water stuff.  He likes fighting, plenty of that:  and Red Indians, and duels, and murders, and shipwrecks, and fires, and sudden deaths.  He requires of his author that he keep his mind steeped perpetually in blood and thunder.  You will always find that Old Joe is sitting on a penny novelette, open at the place, and but little crumpled or creased from the impress of his skeleton of a body.  He is a great reader, one of the greatest readers in London; and, perhaps, to no man in all the world more than to Joe has literature brought so complete an escape from the pressing demands of self-consciousness and the inconvenient emphasis of personality.

It is at this point that we reach, by the reader’s leave, the psychological interest of this our simple story.  For the problem presents itself to Mr. Wells, as well as to me, whether all this violent reading has not created in Joe’s mind the impression of a Joe who never was on sea or land.  In other words:  in the tale which Joe tells of his own life, is any part of it fact, or is it not all a figment of his brain, the creation of his bloody-minded authors?  Joe himself believes every word of it; Joe believes he was the Joe he tells you about, and his face grows purple, and his glassy eyes dart fire out of their baggy flesh, if you insinuate never so delicately that one of his stories is in the very smallest detail just a little difficult of belief.