Prefacing each fresh counsel with the formula, “You’ll excuse me,” he gave me some excellent advice as we threaded the greasy streets, and jostled the disreputable-looking population of the lower part of the town.  General counsels as to my conduct, and the desirableness of turning over a new leaf for “young chaps” who had been wild and got into scrapes at home.  And particular counsels which were invaluable to me, as to changing my dress, how to hide my money, what to turn my hand to with the quickest chance of bread-winning in strange places, and how to keep my own affairs to myself among strange people.

It was in the greasiest street, and among the most disreputable-looking people, that we found the “slop-shop” where, by my friend’s orders, I was to “rig out” in clothes befitting my new line of life.  He went in first, so he did not see the qualm that seized me on the doorstep.  A revulsion so violent that it nearly made me sick then and there; and if some one had seized me by the nape of my neck, and landed me straightway at my desk in Uncle Henry’s office, would, I believe, have left me tamed for life.  For if this unutterable vileness of sights and sounds and smells which hung around the dark entry of the slop shop were indeed the world, I felt a sudden and most vehement conviction that I would willingly renounce the world for ever.  As it happened, I had not at that moment the choice.  My friend had gone in, and I dared not stay among the people outside.  I groped my way into the shop, which was so dark as well as dingy that they had lighted a small oil-lamp just above the head of the man who served out the slops.  Even so the light that fell on him was dim and fitful, and was the means of giving me another start in which I gasped out—­“Moses Benson!”

The man turned and smiled (he had the Jew-clerk’s exact smile), and said softly,

“Cohen, my dear, not Benson.”

And as he bent at another angle of the oil-lamp I saw that he was older than the clerk, and dirtier; and though his coat was quite curiously like the one I had so often cleaned, he had evidently either never met with the invaluable “scouring drops,” or did not feel it worth while to make use of them in such a dingy hole.

One shock helped to cure the other.  Come what might, I could not sneak back now to the civil congratulations of that other Moses, and the scorn of his eye.  But I was so nervous that my fellow-traveller transacted my business for me, and when the oil-lamp flared and I caught Moses Cohen looking at me, I jumped as if Snuffy had come behind me.  And when we got out (and it was no easy matter to escape from the various benevolent offers of the owner of the slop-shop), my friend said,

“You’ll excuse me telling you, but whatever you do don’t go near that there Jew again.  He’s no friend for a young chap like you.”

“I should have got your slops cheaper,” he added, “if I could have taken your clothes in without you.”