a twopenny cup of coffee, and to look haughty and insulted whenever anybody as really wanted something ventured to ask for it.  A frizzle-haired cashier used to make love all day out of her pigeon-hole with the two box-office boys from the Oxford Music Hall, who took it turn and turn about.  Sometimes she’d leave off to take a customer’s money, and sometimes she wouldn’t.  I’ve been to some rummy places in my time; and a waiter ain’t the blind owl as he’s supposed to be.  But never in my life have I seen so much love-making, not all at once, as used to go on in that place.  It was a dismal, gloomy sort of hole, and spoony couples seemed to scent it out by instinct, and would spend hours there over a pot of tea and assorted pastry.  “Idyllic,” some folks would have thought it:  I used to get the fair dismals watching it.  There was one girl—­a weird-looking creature, with red eyes and long thin hands, that gave you the creeps to look at.  She’d come in regular with her young man, a pale-faced nervous sort of chap, at three o’clock every afternoon.  Theirs was the funniest love-making I ever saw.  She’d pinch him under the table, and run pins into him, and he’d sit with his eyes glued on her as if she’d been a steaming dish of steak and onions and he a starving beggar the other side of the window.  A strange story that was—­as I came to learn it later on.  I’ll tell you that, one day.

I’d been engaged for the “heavy work,” but as the heaviest order I ever heard given there was for a cold ham and chicken, which I had to slip out for to the nearest cook-shop, I must have been chiefly useful from an ornamental point of view.

I’d been there about a fortnight, and was feeling pretty sick of it, when in walked young “Kipper.”  I didn’t know him at first, he’d changed so.  He was swinging a silver-mounted crutch stick, which was the kind that was fashionable just then, and was dressed in a showy check suit and a white hat.  But the thing that struck me most was his gloves.  I suppose I hadn’t improved quite so much myself, for he knew me in a moment, and held out his hand.

“What, ’Enery!” he says, “you’ve moved on, then!”

“Yes,” I says, shaking hands with him, “and I could move on again from this shop without feeling sad.  But you’ve got on a bit?” I says.

“So-so,” he says, “I’m a journalist.”

“Oh,” I says, “what sort?” for I’d seen a good many of that lot during six months I’d spent at a house in Fleet Street, and their get-up hadn’t sumptuousness about it, so to speak.  “Kipper’s” rig-out must have totted up to a tidy little sum.  He had a diamond pin in his tie that must have cost somebody fifty quid, if not him.

“Well,” he answers, “I don’t wind out the confidential advice to old Beaky, and that sort of thing.  I do the tips, yer know.  ‘Cap’n Kit,’ that’s my name.”

“What, the Captain Kit?” I says.  O’ course I’d heard of him.

“Be’old!” he says.