I would I had the space or leisure to deal at further length with this remarkable and simple figure; indeed, long before Mr Burden’s death, it was my intention to devote to the portrayal of this porter’s life and character that literary skill which has now been turned into another, a far graver, and I fear a more monotonous channel. I had intended to relate exactly his career. How, stranded in the docks of London, this towering Scandinavian had obtained employment as a Life-guard; how, deserting from his Corps on account of the bullying to which he was subjected by his comrades, he found his way into the Metropolitan Police. Dismissed from this force for drunkenness, he became a chucker-out in a Music Hall, in which post his grievous muscular weakness, universal in men of his type, soon proved him unfit to deal with that athletic youth which frequents such haunts in the hey-day of its vigour; how, finally, while posing as a giant in a Fair, a position he occupied in return for his bare food, he was tempted to break his contract at the prospect of a higher wage. At the persuasion of Mr Barnett himself, he fled by night, accepted the service and livery of the M’Korio, and so reached the culmination of his career. His interesting personality has detained my pen too long, I must return to Mr Burden entering the Great Room, where he should find his colleagues on the day when the Prospectus in its final form was to be passed for Press. * * * * * Mr Burden had played a great part in the world. He had been Sheriff in the early eighties; he had been Treasurer to the Bowmakers’ Company, and had drawn up in that capacity the scheme for endowing a new Chair of Comparative Religion at Dublin, a city sadly in need of broadening its outlook upon God; he had been called as an honoured witness before many Royal Commissions, and had sat on the Committee for the Adjustment of Port Dues; he had even enjoyed, now for some years, the honourable title of Justice of the Peace; and on the occasion of the Mansion House dinner, but eight months before, he had sat between the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the moment and some other member of the Cabinet whose name I cannot recall. He was therefore not unfamiliar with the honourable pomp wherewith we surround the conduct of Empire; he was accustomed to the scenes and the personalities which accompany the furtherance of our Fate. As he had entered daily deeper and deeper into the machinery by which that fate is advanced, its complexity had overwhelmed his simple mind. I have sufficiently described the vortex of conflicting moods into which his soul had been drawn; yet must that whirlpool continually appear in this short story of his end, for without some sympathy with his grievous torment a view quite false to his nature might be conveyed. He could not comprehend.