In the right-hand glass, owing to our slanting position across the road, I could see reflected, a few yards off, the corner of the street out of which we had just turned, with the lamp which stood there, and above the lamp the name of the street, which, though reversewise on the mirror, I made out to be ‘Hauraki Street.’ The queer name attracted me; and I was wondering what colonial experiences could have led the builder to select it, when I saw the reflected figure of a man come into the light of the lamp along the road in which we stood. He was young, but dishevelled and dirty, and evidently wet through. His clothes, bad as their condition was, looked somehow as if their wearer had been, or ought now to be, in a better condition of body than his present one. He stared desolately about him for a while, as if to see whether there could be any other creature so miserable as to be lounging purposelessly about, without an umbrella, in such a place on such a night. A neighbouring clock struck eight, and he seemed to turn his head and listen till the clangour ceased. Then he inspected the sleeves of his coat, as people always do when unduly damp, and drew one of them across his forehead, taking off his hat for the purpose, as though hot from exercise. Then he carefully produced from inside the sodden and melancholy hat a folded piece of paper and a clay-pipe. He filled the pipe from the paper, restored the latter to the hat, and put the hat on his head. Then he looked helplessly at the pipe. I guessed that the poor wretch had neither a match nor a penny to buy one. A thought seemed to strike him. He looked up suddenly at the lamp, and I saw his face for the first time. I am an observer of faces. This one was peculiarly short and broad, with a projecting sharp-pointed chin, a long slit of a mouth, turned down at the corners; as it was now half open in perplexity, it disclosed a conspicuous blank, caused by the loss of one or more front teeth. The eyes were small and dark, and half-shut with a curious prying air. This was all I noticed; for now the man began awkwardly and laboriously to ‘swarm’ the lamp-post; evidently with the view of getting a light for his pipe. Having got about half-way to the top, he incautiously stopped to rest, and instantly slid to the bottom. Patiently he began all over again; and I now saw that if he was not altogether tipsy, he was something very like it. This time his efforts were so ill-judged that he caved in the melancholy hat against the cross-bar of the lamp; and the last I saw of him as my picture vanished at the whisking round of the hansom, he was blindly waving his pipe at the lamp-glass, his head buried in the wreck of his hat, as he vainly endeavoured to introduce the pipe through the opening underneath, and beginning once more to slide impotently down the shaft.