He talked to the fishmonger in Leather Lane, where he went to buy a bloater for his tea, casually as though from curiosity and without any interested motive.  “Sell,” said the master of the shop, “Why nobody wouldn’t believe what can be sold by penn’orths and twopenn’orths if you go the right way to work.  Look at whelks, for instance.  Last Saturday night me and my little Emma here, we sold 7 pounds worth of whelks between eight and half past eleven o’clock—­and almost all in penn’orths and twopenn’orths—­a few, hap’orths, but not many.  It was the steam that did it.  We kept a-boiling of ’em hot and hot, and whenever the steam came strong up from the cellar on to the pavement, the people bought, but whenever the steam went down they left off buying; so we boiled them over and over again till they was all sold.  That’s just where it is; if you know your business you can sell, if you don’t you’ll soon make a mess of it.  Why, but for the steam, I should not have sold 10s. worth of whelks all the night through.”

This, and many another yarn of kindred substance which he heard from other people determined Ernest more than ever to stake on tailoring as the one trade about which he knew anything at all, nevertheless, here were three or four days gone by and employment seemed as far off as ever.

I now did what I ought to have done before, that is to say, I called on my own tailor whom I had dealt with for over a quarter of a century and asked his advice.  He declared Ernest’s plan to be hopeless.  “If,” said Mr Larkins, for this was my tailor’s name, “he had begun at fourteen, it might have done, but no man of twenty-four could stand being turned to work into a workshop full of tailors; he would not get on with the men, nor the men with him; you could not expect him to be ’hail fellow, well met’ with them, and you could not expect his fellow-workmen to like him if he was not.  A man must have sunk low through drink or natural taste for low company, before he could get on with those who have had such a different training from his own.”

Mr Larkins said a great deal more and wound up by taking me to see the place where his own men worked.  “This is a paradise,” he said, “compared to most workshops.  What gentleman could stand this air, think you, for a fortnight?”

I was glad enough to get out of the hot, fetid atmosphere in five minutes, and saw that there was no brick of Ernest’s prison to be loosened by going and working among tailors in a workshop.

Mr Larkins wound up by saying that even if my protege were a much better workman than he probably was, no master would give him employment, for fear of creating a bother among the men.

I left, feeling that I ought to have thought of all this myself, and was more than ever perplexed as to whether I had not better let my young friend have a few thousand pounds and send him out to the colonies, when, on my return home at about five o’clock, I found him waiting for me, radiant, and declaring that he had found all he wanted.