by twenty per cent!  Scandalous!  Downright robbery!  The landlord being a reasonable sort of man, it was agreed that the old rate should stand in the contract, while the balance of twenty per cent found its way into Mr. Parker’s pockets, and not, as theretofore, into his own.  The same with the servants.  From the boy who cleaned the rooms, and whom he changed as often as ever possible, he exacted a monetary deposit as a guarantee of good conduct—­a deposit which was never returned, whatever his behaviour had been.  Then—­the subscriptions.  For of course the accounts were never audited; nobody bothered about such things on Nepenthe, with all that south wind hanging about.  If they had been he would have squared the auditor up to any sum—­a hundred francs, almost; it was worth while.  Pickings, he called hem.  The place, the system suited him down to the ground.  He had lived all his life on pickings.  He was a retail welsher; he lacked the nerve for sweeping enterprises.

On his accession, the Club was in such a state of demoralization, had become such a public scandal, that Mr. Parker, in his capacity of moralist, would have been the first person to dissolve that assembly of topers and rakes.  As financier, he meant to live by it.  But how was the place to be purified?

Parker’s poison solved that problem, besides yielding a fine slice of additional revenue.  The hardest drinkers, the inveterate rowdies, refused to believe that it was anything but the ordinary whisky to which they had been accustomed from childhood; or believing, refused out of sheer boastfulness, or force of habit, to reduce their doses.  While the moderate realized the truth and acted accordingly, these others insisted upon regarding it as genuine Scotch—­with inevitable and dire results.  They succumbed.  During the first year of Freddy Parker’s reign, eight of these stubborn sinners were carried to their graves.  And year by year, the same causes being in action, the process of betterment went on.  Extremists dropped off, moderates survived.  The Club was purged of its grosser elements, the moral tone of the establishment was raised, through the operation of Parker’s poison.  It was Napoleon’s way with the Paris Parliament, he once explained to his lady, who wondered vaguely how long the hero himself would have outlived the effects of that mixture which she brewed, with her own fair hands, in the dim vaults of the Residency.

Even now it was a pretty tough place.  New crooks, like the dubious Mr. Hopkins, new fire-eaters, new cranks, new sots, were always dropping in from different corners of the globe to spread their infection among the more recent crowd of curio-hunters, gentlemen of commerce, nautical wrecks, decayed missionaries, painters, authors and other vagrant riff-raff who frequented the premises.  There were rows going on all the time—­insignificant rows, mostly about newspapers and gambling debts.  Mr. Samuel got his eye blacked over a harmless game of ecarte;