His blunt, wholesome, weather-beaten face with its full brown beard, now going grey, was lined and sad because his leg continually gave him pain. That leg had shrivelled through an accident, and being now two inches shorter than it should have been, did little save remind him of mortality. He had a respectable, though not an affluent, appearance, for his old blue overcoat, his trousers, waistcoat, hat, were ragged from long use and stained by weather. He had been a deep-sea fisherman before his accident, but now he made his living by standing on the pavement at a certain spot, in Bayswater, from ten o’clock to seven in the evening. And any one who wished to give her bird a luxury would stop before his basket, and buy a pennyworth of groundsel. Often--as he said--he had “a job to get it,” rising at five o’clock, and going out of London by an early tram to the happy hunting grounds of those who live on the appetites of caged canaries. Here, dragging his injured limb with difficulty through ground that the heavens seldom troubled to keep dry for him, he would stoop and toilfully amass the small green plant with its close yellow-centred heads, though often--as he mentioned--“there don’t seem no life like in the stuff, the frosts ha’ spiled it!” Having collected all that Fate permitted him, he would take the tram back home, and start out for his day’s adventure. Now and again, when things had not gone well, his figure would be seen stumping home through darkness as late as nine or ten o’clock at night. On such occasions his grey-blue eyes, which had never quite lost their look of gazing through sea-mists, would reflect the bottom of his soul, where the very bird of weariness lay with its clipped wings, for ever trying to regain the air. In fact--as he had no need to tell you--he was a “trier” from year’s end to year’s end, but he had no illusions concerning his profession--there was “nothing in it”; though it was better on the whole than flowers, where there was less than nothing. And, after all, having got accustomed to the struggles of that bird of weariness within his soul, he would even perhaps have missed it, had it at last succeeded in rising from the ground and taking flight. “An ’ard life!” he had been heard to say when groundsel was scarce, customers scarcer, and the damp had struck up into his shrivelled leg. This, stated as a matter of fact, was the extent of his general complaint, though he would not unwillingly descant on the failings of his groundsel, his customers, and leg, to the few who could appreciate such things. But, as a rule, he stood or sat, silent, watching the world go by, as in old days he had watched the waves drift against his anchored fishing-smack; and the look of those blurred-blue, far-gazing eyes of his, in their extraordinary patience, was like a constant declaration of the simple and unconscious creed of man: “I hold on till I drop.”