As Pinto looked at it—­Mr. Gale was not in the room, I recollect; happening to have been just called out by a customer who offered him three pound fourteen and sixpence for a blue Shepherd in pate tendre,—­Mr. Pinto gave a little start, and seemed crispe for a moment.  Then he looked steadily towards one of those great porcelain stools which you see in gardens—­and—­it seemed to me—­I tell you I won’t take my affidavit—­I may have been maddened by the six glasses I took of that pink elixir—­I may have been sleep-walking:  perhaps am as I write now—­I may have been under the influence of that astounding medium into whose hands I had fallen—­but I vow I heard Pinto say, with rather a ghastly grin at the porcelain stool,

     “Nay, nefer shague your gory locks at me,
     Dou canst not say I did it.”

(He pronounced it, by the way, I DIT it, by which I know that Pinto was a German.)

I heard Pinto say those very words, and sitting on the porcelain stool I saw, dimly at first, then with an awful distinctness—­a ghost—­an eidolon—­a form—­A headless man seated, with his head in his lap, which wore an expression of piteous surprise.

At this minute, Mr. Gale entered from the front shop to show a customer some delf plates; and he did not see—­but we did—­the figure rise up from the porcelain stool, shake its head, which it held in its hand, and which kept its eyes fixed sadly on us, and disappear behind the guillotine.

“Come to the ‘Gray’s-inn Coffee-house,’” Pinto said, “and I will tell you how the notch came to the axe.”  And we walked down Holborn at about thirty-seven minutes past six o’clock.

If there is anything in the above statement which astonishes the reader, I promise him that in the next chapter of this little story he will be astonished still more.

PART II.

“You will excuse me,” I said, to my companion, “for remarking, that when you addressed the individual sitting on the porcelain stool, with his head in his lap, your ordinarily benevolent features”—­(this I confess was a bouncer, for between ourselves a more sinister and ill-looking rascal than Mons. P. I have seldom set eyes on)—­“your ordinarily handsome face wore an expression that was by no means pleasing.  You grinned at the individual just as you did at me when you went up to the cei—­, pardon me, as I thought you did, when I fell down in a fit in your chambers;” and I qualified my words in a great flutter and tremble; I did not care to offend the man—­I did not dare to offend the man.  I thought once or twice of jumping into a cab, and flying; of taking refuge in Day and Martin’s Blacking Warehouse; of speaking to a policeman, but not one would come.  I was this man’s slave.  I followed him like his dog.  I could not get away from him.  So, you see, I went on meanly conversing with him, and affecting a simpering confidence.  I remember, when I was a little boy at school, going up fawning and smiling in this way to some great hulking bully of a sixth-form boy.  So I said in a word, “Your ordinarily handsome face wore a disagreeable expression,” &c.