This aged butler lay in bed waiting for the inevitable striking of a small alarum clock placed in the very centre of his mantelpiece.  Flanking that round and ruthless arbiter, which drove him day by day to stand up on feet whose time had come to rest, were the effigies of his past triumphs.  On the one hand, in a papier-mache frame, slightly tinged with smuts, stood a portrait of the “Honorable Bateson,” in the uniform of his Yeomanry.  Creed’s former master’s face wore that dare-devil look with which he had been wont to say:  “D—–­n it, Creed! lend me a pound.  I’ve got no money!” On the other hand, in a green frame which had once been plush, and covered by a glass with a crack in the left-hand corner, was a portrait of the Dowager Countess of Glengower, as this former mistress of his appeared, conceived by the local photographer, laying the foundation-stone of the local almshouse.  During the wreck of Creed’s career, which, following on a lengthy illness, had preceded his salvation by the Westminster Gazette, these two household gods had lain at the bottom of an old tin trunk, in the possession of the keeper of a lodging-house, waiting to be bailed out.  The “Honorable Bateson” was now dead, nor had he paid as yet the pounds he had borrowed.  Lady Glengower, too, was in heaven, remembering that she had forgotten all her servants in her will.  He who had served them was still alive, and his first thought, when he had secured his post on the “Westminister,” was to save enough to rescue them from a dishonourable confinement.  It had taken him six months.  He had found them keeping company with three pairs of woollen drawers; an old but respectable black tail-coat; a plaid cravat; a Bible; four socks, two of which had toes and two of which had heels; some darning-cotton and a needle; a pair of elastic-sided boots; a comb and a sprig of white heather, wrapped up with a little piece of shaving-soap and two pipe-cleaners in a bit of the Globe newspaper; also two collars, whose lofty points, separated by gaps of quite two inches, had been wont to reach their master’s gills; the small alarum clock aforesaid; and a tiepin formed in the likeness of Queen Victoria at the date of her first Jubilee.  How many times had he not gone in thought over those stores of treasure while he was parted from them!  How many times since they had come back to him had he not pondered with a slow but deathless anger on the absence of a certain shirt, which he could have sworn had been amongst them.

But now he lay in bed waiting to hear the clock go off, with his old bristly chin beneath the bedclothes, and his old discoloured nose above.  He was thinking the thoughts which usually came into his mind about this hour—­that Mrs. Hughs ought not to scrape the butter off his bread for breakfast in the way she did; that she ought to take that sixpence off his rent; that the man who brought his late editions in the cart ought to be earlier, letting ‘that man’ get his Pell Mells off before him, when he himself would be having the one chance of his day; that, sooner than pay the ninepence which the bootmaker had proposed to charge for resoling him, he would wait until the summer came ‘low class o’ feller’ as he was, he’d be glad enough to sole him then for sixpence.