We worked together subsequently at this notion of a gaol journal, and I got out a “dummy” which showed pretty fully what the proposed organ should be. At the Home Office the science of circumlocution is better understood than in any other Department in Whitehall. There was voluminous correspondence, meaning much on the part of the parson, meaning little more than a lavish waste of the tax-payer’s stiff stationery to the Home Office. Other ardent souls would have sunk under the continuous disappointments, delays, shufflings, impertinences, and utter indifference, of the Office; but Bachelor’s was not a nature to sink under anything. He was a man of the world; his sympathy with his incarcerated parish did not stand in the way of his own reasonable pleasures. So he kept on pegging away at Home Secretary after Home Secretary, always hopeful, cheerful, _débonnaire_. At last his reward came. A large parcel of monthly magazines of the _Leisure Hour_ and _Good Words_ type was delivered at his house, with a communication from the Home Secretary. The chaplain was requested to go through the bundle, and select such of the publications as, in his opinion, might be usefully circulated among prisoners. Had such an act of brutal cynicism been played on the average man, he would have probably pitched the periodicals into the dustbin, and ceased to interest himself in the unfortunate creatures for whom he struggled in vain. But Bachelor had a finer temper than the average man. He reflected that a few crumbs are better than no bread at all. He congratulated himself that he had obtained some concession—small though it was—for those whose cause he had been fighting through weary years. He sat down before the bundle, conscientiously read through every magazine contained in it, and made his selection of publications deemed to be “suitable” under the very strict and elaborate instructions laid down by the Office in the covering letter. And so it happens that the Cameo Room in Verrey’s became always associated in my mind with convicts and their champion. In those days a dinner served there was the last word in modern luxury. A big chandelier with the hundred pendent crystals hung from the centre of the ceiling. In mid-Victorian days the chandelier, with its prismatic glass pendants, was regarded as the most swagger thing in the decoration of a saloon. Candles guttered under their red shades, science not having as yet supplied the simple preventive contrivance. The dinner was beyond cavil or criticism. The contents of the cellar had been carefully selected, and its temperature was religiously observed and maintained. But the conditions attendant . . . As the wheels of my taxi turn from the rattle of the Strand and run silent over the rubber pavement on the courtyard of the Savoy, I recognize how far, in some matters, we have travelled in a very few years. CHAPTER XVII BOOKIES AND OTHER WILD-FOWL