Dressed in black cloak and conical hat he would have made an ideal stage wizard; but attired as he was in greasy black frock coat, and trousers that had long ago passed the glossy stage, he was certainly as curious-looking an individual as one could have found on the Surrey side of the Thames. He was no stranger to me, for on several occasions I had called there with Dick, and had chatted with him. Trade in herbs had dwindled almost to nothing. Nowadays, with all sorts and varieties of well-advertised medicines, the people of Newington, Walworth, and the New Kent Road did not patronise the old-fashioned herbal remedies, which, if truth be told, are perhaps more potent and wholesome than any of the quack nostrums flaunted in the daily papers and on the hoardings. Ten years ago the herbalists did a brisk trade in London, especially among lower class housewives who, having come up from the country, were glad enough to obtain the old-world decoctions; but nowadays the herbalists' only source of profit seems to be in the sale of skin soaps and worm tablets. Old Morris, with his ugly, deformed figure and shining bald head, welcomed me warmly as I entered, and at once invited me into the little shop-parlour beyond, a mere dark cupboard which still retained the odour of the midday meal--Irish stew it must have been--and seemed infested with a myriad of flies. Possibly the fragrance of the herbs attracted them, or else they revelled among the succulent tablets exposed in the open boxes upon the narrow counter. These lozenges, together with his various bottled brews, tinctures of this and of that, the old man manufactured in a kind of dilapidated shed at the rear, which, be it said, often offended the olfactory nerves of the whole neighbourhood when certain herbs were in the process of stewing. "Lily is out," croaked the weird old fellow, in response to my inquiry, "but I'll, of course, give her the message. She don't get much chance nowadays, poor child! When her mother was alive we used to manage to run down to Margit for a week or fortnight in the hot weather. But now--" and he shrugged his shoulders with quite a foreign air. "Well, there's only me to look after the shop," he added. "And things are not so brisk as they were a few years ago." He spoke with a slight accent, due, Cleugh had told me, to the fact that his mother was French, and he had lived in France a number of years. Few people, however, noticed it, for by many he was believed to be a Jew. I nodded. I could see that the trade done there was infinitesimal and quite insufficient to pay the rent; besides, was not the fact that Lily had been compelled to go out and earn her own living proof in itself that the strange-looking old fellow was the reverse of prosperous? The herbal trade in London is nearly as dead as the manufacture of that once popular metal known as German silver.