“Yes, sir,” answered the waiter, a young man who was making preparations to close for the night.  “In half a minute.”

Soon a cabman had finished his late midnight meal and departed.  But another passer-by dropped in, who was left over a plate of stew while the waiter led Ned to a narrow stair at the end of the room, passing round a screen behind which a stout, gray-haired man slumbered in an arm chair with all the appearance of being the proprietor.  The waiter showed Ned the way with a lighted match, renewed when burnt out.  Ned noticed that the papered walls and partitions of the stairway and upper floor were dirty, torn and giving way in patches.  From the first landing a dark narrow passage led towards the front street while three or four ricketty, cracked doors were crowded at the stairhead.  Snoring sounds came from all quarters.  The waiter turned up a still narrower twisting stairway.  As they neared the top Ned could see a dim light coming through an open doorway.

The room to which he was thus introduced was some fifteen feet long and as many broad, on the floor.  Two gabled windows, back and front, made with the centre line of the low-sloping ceiling a Greek cross effect.  A single candle, burning on a backless chair by one of the windows, threw its flickering light on the choked room-full of old-fashioned iron bedsteads, bedded in make-shift manner, six in all, four packed against the wall opposite the door at which the stairs ended and one on each side of the window whereby was the light.  On one of these latter beds a bearded man lay stretched, only partly undressed; on its edge sat a youth in his shirt.  Although it was so late they were talking.

“Not gone to bed yet?” asked the waiter.

“Hullo, Jack!” replied the youth.  “Aren’t you coming to bed yet?”

“A gentleman of Jack’s profession,” said the bearded man, whose liquorous voice proclaimed how he had put in his evening, “doesn’t require to go to bed at all.  ’Gad, that’s very good.  You understand me?” He referred his wit to the youth.  He spoke with the drawling hesitation of the English “swell.”

“I understand you,” replied the youth, in a respectful voice that had acquired its tone in the English shires.

“I don’t get much chance whether I require it or not,” remarked Jack, with an American accentuation, proceeding to make up the other bed by the light.  There was nothing on the grimy mattress but a grimy blanket, so he brought a couple of fairly clean sheets from a bed in the opposite corner and spread them dexterously.

“Have we the pleasure of more company, Jack?” enquired the broken-down swell.  “You understand me?”

“I understand you,” said the English lad.

“This gentleman’s going to stay,” replied Jack, putting the sheet over the caseless pillow.

“Glad to make your acquaintance, sir,” said the swell to Ned, upon this introduction.  “We can’t offer you a chair but you’re welcome to a seat on the bed.  If you can’t offer a man wine give him whisky, and if you haven’t got whisky offer him the best you’ve got.”  This last to the youth.  “You understand me?”