“Oh, not at all,” I replied.  “But what is it?”

“Why, it’s an operating table,” she explained.  “Of course, you know,” she added, “that I’m a physician.  And,” she continued, “of course I should want to make use of it now and then, but not regularly, not every day.”

To a lady with a patch over her eye with lodgings to let in Broome Street I one time stated, by way of being communicative, that I was often in my room a good deal doing some work there.  Ah!  With many ogles and grimaces, she whispered hoarsely, with an effort at a sly effect, that “that was all right here.  She understood,” she said.  Perfectly “safe place for that,” it was.  “The gentlemen who had the room before were something of the same kind.”

As you know, “references” frequently are demanded of one hunting lodgings.  To get into a really nice place one must really be a very nice person.  “You know, I have a daughter,” sighs the really nice landlady.

To obtain lodgings in Kensington one must be very well-to-do, particularly if one would be on the “drawing room floor.”  “I like these rooms very much,” I said to a prim person there, and I hesitated.

“But I suppose they are too dear for you,” she said.

How careful one must be hunting lodgings in England about “extras.”  Lodgings made in the U.S.A. are all ready to live in, when you have paid your rent.  But over on the other side, you recall, the rent, so amazingly cheap, is merely an item.  Light, “coals,” linen, and “attendance” are all “extra.”

I met an interesting person letting lodgings in Whitechapel.  She was not attractive physically.  Her chief drapery was an apron.  This, indeed, was fairly adequate before.  But—­I think she was like the ostrich who sticks his head in the sand.

My sister-in-law, a highly intelligent woman------  There are, by the
way, people who will think anything.   Some may say that I am ending
this article rather abruptly.

My sister-in-law, a highly intelligent woman, used to say, in compositions at school when stumped by material too much for her, that she had in her eye, so to say, things “too numerous to mention.”

Anybody who would chronicle his adventures in hunting lodgings is confronted by incidents, humorous, wild, bizarre, queer, strange, peculiar, sentimental, touching, tragic, weird, and so on and so forth, “too numerous to mention.”

XV

MY FRIEND, THE POLICEMAN

To the best of my knowledge and belief (as a popular phrase has it), I am the only person in the United States who corresponds with a London policeman.  About all you know about the London policeman is that he is a trim and well-set-up figure and an efficient-looking officer.  When you have asked him your way he has replied somewhat thus:  “Straight up the road, sir, take your first turning to the right, sir, the second left, sir, and then at the top of