"Call at the Lowrys and tell Lily to meet me at Loughborough Junction at eight to-night, at the usual place. I want to take her to the Crystal Palace to see the fireworks. I was going to wire, but you'll pass her father's place. Will you give her the message?" "Certainly," I answered. "But is she at home?" "Yes. She's got her holidays. Tell her I'm very busy, or I'd have come down myself. Sorry to trouble you." I promised him to deliver the message, and after eating a chop at the _Cock_, I walked along to the Gaiety and there took a blue motor-bus, which deposited me outside a small, very dingy shop, a few doors up the Walworth Road from the _Elephant and Castle_, which bore over the little, old-fashioned window the sign, "Morris Lowry, Herbalist." Displayed to the gaze of the passer-by were various assortments of lozenges and bunches of dried herbs, boxes of pills guaranteed to cure every ill, and a row of dirty glass bottles filled with yellow liquids, containing filthy-looking specimens of various repulsive objects. The glaring cards in the window advertised such desirable commodities as "Lowry's Wind Pills," "Lowry's Cough Tablets," and "Lowry's Herbal Ointment," while the window itself and the whole shop-front was dirt-encrusted, one pane being cracked across. As I entered the dark little shop, a mere box of a place smelling strongly of camomile, sarsaparilla and such-like herbs, which hung in dried and dusty confusion all over the ceiling, there arose from a chair the queerest, oddest creature that one might ever meet, even in the diverse crowds of lower London. Morris Lowry, the herbalist, was a strange specimen of distorted humanity, hunch-backed, with an abnormally large, semi-bald head, a scrubby grey beard, and wearing large, old-fashioned, steel-rimmed spectacles, which imparted to him an appearance of learning and distinction. His legs were short and stumpy, his body rather stout, and his arms of inordinate length, while the whole appearance of his sickly, yellow, wizened face was such as might increase one's belief in the Darwinian theory. Indeed, it was impossible to look upon him without one's mind reverting to monkeys, for his high cheek bones and square jaws bore a striking resemblance to the facial expression of the ancestral gorilla.