“A wife and one little boy,” Burton continued.  “We were living at Garden Green in a small plastered edifice called Clematis Villa.  My wife is a vigorous woman, part of whose life has been spent in domestic service, and part in a suburban dressmaker’s establishment.  She keeps the house very clean, pins up the oleographs presented to us at Christmas time by the grocer and the oil-man, and thinks I look genteel in a silk hat when we walk out to hear the band in the public gardens on Thursday evenings.”

“I can see her!” Mr. Waddington groaned.  “My poor fellow!”

“She cuts out her own clothes,” Burton continued, “from patterns presented by a ladies’ penny paper.  She trims her own hats with an inheritance of feathers which, in their day have known every color of the rainbow.  She loves strong perfumes, and she is strenuous on the subject of the primary colors.  We have a table-cloth with fringed borders for tea on Sunday afternoons.  She hates flowers because they mess up the rooms so, but she adorns our parlor with wool-work mementoes, artificial roses under a glass case, and crockery neatly inscribed with the name of some seaside place.”

Mr. Waddington wiped the perspiration from his forehead and produced a small silver casket from his waistcoat pocket.

“Stop!” he begged.  “You win!  I can see what you are aiming at.  Here is a bean.”

Burton waved it away.

“Listen,” he proceeded.  “I have also a child—­a little son.  His name is Alfred.  He is called Alf, for short.  His mother greases his hair and he has a curl which comes over his forehead.  I have never known him when his hands were not both sticky and dirty—­his hands and his lips.  On holidays he wears a velveteen suit with grease spots inked over, an imitation lace collar, and a blue make-up tie.”

Mr. Waddington re-opened the silver casket.

“It is Fate,” he decided.  “Here are two beans.”  Burton folded them up in a piece of paper and placed them carefully in his waistcoat pocket.

“I felt convinced,” he said gratefully, “that I should not make my appeal to you in vain.  Tell me, what do you think of doing with the rest?”

“I am not sure,” Mr. Waddington admitted, after a brief pause.  “We are confronted from the beginning with the fact that there isn’t a living soul who would believe our story.  If we tried to publish it, people would only look upon it as an inferior sort of fiction, and declare that the idea had been used before.  I thought of having one of the beans resolved into its constituents by a scientific physician, but I doubt if I’d get any one to treat the matter seriously.  Of course,” he went on, “if there were any quantity of the beans, so that we could prove the truth of our statements upon any one who professed to doubt them, we might be able to put them to some practical use.  At present,” he concluded, with a little sigh, “I really can’t think of any.”