Shades of Old Sleuth and Sherlock Holmes!  I wondered as to where the assistant was located whose duty it was to take down whatever information I might loudly vouchsafe.  And to this day, much as I have seen of Johnny Upright and much as I have puzzled over the incident, I have never been quite able to make up my mind as to whether or not he had a cold, or had an assistant planted in the other room.  But of one thing I am sure:  though I gave Johnny Upright the facts concerning myself and project, he withheld judgment till next day, when I dodged into his street conventionally garbed and in a hansom.  Then his greeting was cordial enough, and I went down into the dining-room to join the family at tea.

“We are humble here,” he said, “not given to the flesh, and you must take us for what we are, in our humble way.”

The girls were flushed and embarrassed at greeting me, while he did not make it any the easier for them.

“Ha! ha!” he roared heartily, slapping the table with his open hand till the dishes rang.  “The girls thought yesterday you had come to ask for a piece of bread!  Ha! ha! ho! ho! ho!”

This they indignantly denied, with snapping eyes and guilty red cheeks, as though it were an essential of true refinement to be able to discern under his rags a man who had no need to go ragged.

And then, while I ate bread and marmalade, proceeded a play at cross purposes, the daughters deeming it an insult to me that I should have been mistaken for a beggar, and the father considering it as the highest compliment to my cleverness to succeed in being so mistaken.  All of which I enjoyed, and the bread, the marmalade, and the tea, till the time came for Johnny Upright to find me a lodging, which he did, not half-a-dozen doors away, in his own respectable and opulent street, in a house as like to his own as a pea to its mate.

CHAPTER III—­MY LODGING AND SOME OTHERS

From an East London standpoint, the room I rented for six shillings, or a dollar and a half, per week, was a most comfortable affair.  From the American standpoint, on the other hand, it was rudely furnished, uncomfortable, and small.  By the time I had added an ordinary typewriter table to its scanty furnishing, I was hard put to turn around; at the best, I managed to navigate it by a sort of vermicular progression requiring great dexterity and presence of mind.

Having settled myself, or my property rather, I put on my knockabout clothes and went out for a walk.  Lodgings being fresh in my mind, I began to look them up, bearing in mind the hypothesis that I was a poor young man with a wife and large family.

My first discovery was that empty houses were few and far between—­so far between, in fact, that though I walked miles in irregular circles over a large area, I still remained between.  Not one empty house could I find—­a conclusive proof that the district was “saturated.”