“Ain’t I a devil of a feller?  Ain’t I a monster?  Ho, I’ve had a terrible life.  You just arst me another!”

Well, I know not how true is the story told by Old Joe of his own wickedness.

But, however this may be—­and it is not the province of Old Joe’s humble historian to speculate—­let us be content with the picture of these two old pensioners from the high seas, living together in the evening of their days in a narrow court in a London slum, the one paralysed and the other blind; the one a most brilliant and imaginative story-teller, the other a most cautious, modest, tentative, and genial critic.  And let us sit between their two chairs for a moment and listen to the moving story of Old Joe, believing it with all the simplicity, if not with all the stupefied, admiration of the little slum children who gaze at the pirate when his chair is moved out into the court that he may warm his old bones in the sun.

[In brackets, let me say that I have come upon Old Joe literally posing in the court as a most ferocious pirate before an audience of toddling infants not more than four years of age.]

Eighty-two years ago Old Joe, surnamed Ridley, was born in the neighbourhood of the Barbican.  He remembers how murderers and highwaymen used to come and hide in the court where he was born, “because, don’t you see, the police daren’t come where we was living.”  He went to a school in Charterhouse-square.  “Charterhouse School,” he says.  But Mr. Wells nudges us with his pipe hand.  “That’s a mistake,” he says.  “There wasn’t never no school in Charterhouse Square, in those days.  But never mind; let him go on.  Only you must make allowance, you know.”

His father was a carman who could drink porter by the two-gallon, and had an arm like a leg of mutton.  But this great, lusty carman found himself ruled with a rod of iron by the little spitfire he took for his second wife.  She managed the carman, and she managed his brats of children.  She particularly managed Joe because he particularly disliked being managed.

* * * * *

So it came about that Joe found the streets pleasanter than his home, and took to slouching about with his hands in his pockets, feeling hungry and sometimes a little concerned, perhaps, as to what was to become of him.  One day, as he was wasting time at a street-corner in Aldersgate, there came up to him a broad-shouldered, sandy-haired man in a blue reefer suit, who showed all his teeth when he smiled and whose voice had a sharp rattle in it like a bag full of gold coins.  This noticeable man hailed Joe as a fine fellow, and asked the fine fellow whether he wouldn’t step with him into a convenient tavern and wet his whistle with a glass of the best brandy.

The broad-shouldered, easy-smiling gentleman in the reefer suit told Joe, over a glass of brandy in the sanded-floor parlour of a neat tavern, that he was a rich man, with a hobby on which he spent a great deal of money.  “It’s a hobby of mine,” he said, laughing, “to put down the slave-trade.  I don’t like it, and so I put it down.  Now, a fine young likely fellow, such as you, is just the man I want for my ship.  How would you like to go sailing the lovely seas catching slave-dealers, and giving them what-for with the best steel and gunpowder that money can buy?”