“We crawled past Mudie’s, and there a tall woman with five or six yellow-labelled books hailed my cab, and I sprang out just in time to escape her, shaving a railway van narrowly in my flight.  I made off up the roadway to Bloomsbury Square, intending to strike north past the Museum and so get into the quiet district.  I was now cruelly chilled, and the strangeness of my situation so unnerved me that I whimpered as I ran.  At the northward corner of the Square a little white dog ran out of the Pharmaceutical Society’s offices, and incontinently made for me, nose down.

“I had never realised it before, but the nose is to the mind of a dog what the eye is to the mind of a seeing man.  Dogs perceive the scent of a man moving as men perceive his vision.  This brute began barking and leaping, showing, as it seemed to me, only too plainly that he was aware of me.  I crossed Great Russell Street, glancing over my shoulder as I did so, and went some way along Montague Street before I realised what I was running towards.

“Then I became aware of a blare of music, and looking along the street saw a number of people advancing out of Russell Square, red shirts, and the banner of the Salvation Army to the fore.  Such a crowd, chanting in the roadway and scoffing on the pavement, I could not hope to penetrate, and dreading to go back and farther from home again, and deciding on the spur of the moment, I ran up the white steps of a house facing the museum railings, and stood there until the crowd should have passed.  Happily the dog stopped at the noise of the band too, hesitated, and turned tail, running back to Bloomsbury Square again.

“On came the band, bawling with unconscious irony some hymn about ‘When shall we see His face?’ and it seemed an interminable time to me before the tide of the crowd washed along the pavement by me.  Thud, thud, thud, came the drum with a vibrating resonance, and for the moment I did not notice two urchins stopping at the railings by me.  ’See ’em,’ said one.  ‘See what?’ said the other.  ’Why—­them footmarks—­bare.  Like what you makes in mud.’

“I looked down and saw the youngsters had stopped and were gaping at the muddy footmarks I had left behind me up the newly whitened steps.  The passing people elbowed and jostled them, but their confounded intelligence was arrested.  ’Thud, thud, thud, when, thud, shall we see, thud, his face, thud, thud.’  ’There’s a barefoot man gone up them steps, or I don’t know nothing,’ said one.  ’And he ain’t never come down again.  And his foot was a-bleeding.’

“The thick of the crowd had already passed.  ‘Looky there, Ted,’ quoth the younger of the detectives, with the sharpness of surprise in his voice, and pointed straight to my feet.  I looked down and saw at once the dim suggestion of their outline sketched in splashes of mud.  For a moment I was paralysed.