clothes fell into rags about him he presented the strange appearance of a tramp whose face and hands were spotless, and who carried himself even till towards the end with a sort of easy grace as though he were indeed only masquerading.  But there came a time when the luck of the loafer went against him.  From morning to night he tramped the streets, willing to work even till his back was broken, but unable to earn a copper.  The gnawings of hunger roused something of the wild beast in him.  A fiercer light burned in his eyes, his thin lips curled into hard, stern lines.  He loitered about the Strand, and the crowds of theatre-goers in their evening dresses, borne backwards and forwards in cabs and carriages, and crowding the pavements also, stirred in him a slow, passionate anger.  The bitter inequalities of life, its flagrant and rank injustices, he seemed for the first time to wholly realise.  A Banquo amongst the gay stream of people who brushed lightly against him every moment.  He lost for the time that admirable gift of sympathetic interest in his fellows which had once been his chief trait.  His outlook upon life was changed.  To the world which had misused him so he showed an altered front.  He scowled at the men, and kept his face turned from the women.  What had they done, these people, that they should be well-dressed and merry, whilst the aching in his bones grew to madness, and hunger gnawed at his life strings.  One night, with twitching fingers and face drawn white with pain, he turned away from the crowded streets towards Westminster, sank into a seat, and, picking up the half of a newspaper, read the smug little account of a journalist who had spent a few hours a day perhaps in the slums.  As he read he laughed softly to himself, and then, clutching the paper in his hands, he walked away to the Embankment, up Northumberland Avenue, and into the Strand.  After a few inquiries he found the offices of the newspaper, and marched boldly inside.  A vast speculation, the enterprise of a millionaire, the Daily Courier, though it sold for a halfpenny, was housed in a palace.  In a gothic chamber, like the hall of a chapel, hung with electric lights and filled with a crowd of workers and loungers, Douglas stood clutching the fragment of newspaper still in his hand, looking around for some one to address himself to—­a strange figure in his rags, wan, starving, but something of personal distinction still clinging to him.  A boy looked over a mahogany partition at him and opened a trap window.

“Well?” he asked sharply.  “Do you want papers to sell?  This is the wrong entrance for that, you know.”

“I want to see some one in authority,” Douglas said; “the sub-editor, if possible.”

It was a democratic undertaking, this newspaper, with its vast circulation and mighty staff, and visitors of all sorts daily crossed its threshold.  Yet this man’s coat hung about him in tatters, and his boots were almost soleless.  The boy hesitated.