When I met a man the other day in Fleet Street, I touched him lightly on the shoulder and said, "Have a drink?" "Certainly," he answered, looking at me very hard; "but I don't remember meeting you before." After we had drunk part of our beer, I asked him if he had read anything of the scandal in high life, which the papers were then making much of. Now I had only met this man once, and that had been years before, in a common lodging-house in Blackfriars Road. On that occasion he had laid claim in fierce tones to the very purest French blood, and had laughed to scorn the blood of our English aristocracy. As soon as I mentioned this scandal in English high life, the man immediately began in his old manner to compare the blood of England to that of France, and proved to me at once that he had the same subject for his delight. After I left him I wandered into the Embankment Gardens, and there I saw a very ragged man sleeping on a seat. I recognized him at once, in spite of a great change in appearance. He was the man whom I met at a superior lodging-house, who hid himself when a celebrated Duchess was brought there to see the place. He told me, after she had gone, that he had been valet to the Duke, but that the lady had never liked him, and had at last succeeded in getting him dismissed. At that time he looked healthy, clean, and was well dressed, but he did not want the Duchess to see him in a lodging-house. Suppose she saw him now, ragged, dirty, and without a house of any kind. In the same house I knew many other queer characters, whom I often meet now. There was the man that starved on a small allowance made by his brother, and knew so much about finance and yet could make no money. Occasionally he received a few shillings for an article on finance, but he had hard work to keep body and soul together. Another strange character was Darky. This man had read verses to every one of the four hundred regular lodgers at the house, and hardly one stranger that came there for a single night escaped without hearing him. Seeing that every lodger in the house knew him for a poet, I had the good sense to confide in no one; for I knew that the dignity of a poet had suffered for all time, as far as this house was concerned. Darky had written an ode to the man who founded this class of lodging-house, and had received personal thanks. The Boer War kept him busy day and night, as it also did many another poet, but poor Darky could not make sixpence for one night's lodging. He had also written lines on his sister's death, which I am sorry to say he read to every stranger that would listen. He always ended by cursing his brother-in-law, that he would not--although a successful undertaker, that could have got the job done cheap--have the lines engraved on the tombstone.