Here it becomes needful to mention that my destination was the lodgings of a certain friend, whose name, for the purposes of this narrative, shall be Gascoigne. I call him my friend, and such he was, although he was four years older than myself. We were both natives of the same small country town; his parents and mine were old friends; and owing to the similarity of our tastes and pursuits, he and I had been much thrown together up to the date of his leaving home to push his fortunes in London. We had kept up an unbroken correspondence after his departure; and now that my father had lighted on evil days, and it became imperative that I should turn out into the world, Gascoigne had at once come to the rescue. I must leave home, he wrote, and take up my quarters with him till he should succeed in finding some situation that would be likely to suit me, which he had little doubt about being able to do in the course of a few weeks at the most. And thus it fell out that here I was in London. Outside the station, I found a policeman, from whom I inquired my nearest way to the Strand, in a street off which thoroughfare Gascoigne’s rooms were situated. The night was damp and raw, with a sort of thin, wet mist in the atmosphere, which blurred the lamps and the lights in the shops a little way off, and made the pavement greasy and unpleasant to walk on. But little recked I about the weather. I was pacing London streets, and to me, for the time being, that was all-sufficient. The coffee had warmed me; the fatigue I had felt previously was forgotten as I walked on and on in a sort of waking dream. More than once I had to ask my way, and more than once I wandered from the direct road; but at length, after about an hour’s walking, I found the street I was in search of, and two minutes later I knocked at the door of No. 16. My summons was responded to by a middle-aged woman—Gascoigne’s landlady, as I afterwards found—who, in answer to my inquiry, informed me that my friend had been called out of town two days previously on important business, and was not expected home till the morrow. I turned from the door with a sinking heart, feeling more lost and lonely than I had ever felt before. I was in the heart of the great Babylon, and knew not a single soul out of all the teeming thousands around me. Presently, I found myself in the Strand again, and there I came to a halt for a little while, gazing on a scene so fresh and strange to me. The glare, the uproar, the interminable tangle of vehicles, the hundreds of human beings, young and old, rich and poor, passing ceaselessly to and fro, winding in and out without touching each other, like midges dancing in the sun—all these affected my spirits like a tonic, and in a very little while put all morbid fancies to flight. What if I were alone in London without a creature anywhere that I knew—there were thousands of others in a similar plight. Gascoigne would be back on the morrow, and for this one night I