All, as I said, came together; all were entirely new sensations. “Close quarters,” too, is used advisedly, for not only was the room a small one, the cheapest in a cheap house, but it was occupied by three of us--three Englishmen “on their uppers,” three big Englishmen into the bargain, two of us standing 6 feet 2 inches, the other 6 feet 3 inches in his socks. We shared that room for many weeks, taking our turn at sleeping two in the bed, and one on the mattress we pulled off and kept hidden in the cupboard during the day. Mrs. Bernstein, denying her blood, won our affection by charging eight dollars only, the price for two, morning coffee included; and Mrs. Bernstein’s face, fat, kindly, perspiring, dirty, is more vivid in my memory after all these years than that of the lady last night who so generously mistook me for De Vere Stacpoole. Her voice even rings clear, with its Jewish lisp, its guttural German, its nasal twang thrown in: “I ask my hospand. Berhaps he let you stay anozzer week.” What the husband said we never knew. He was usually too drunk to say anything coherent. What mattered to us was that we were not turned out at the moment, and that, in the long run, the good-hearted woman received her money. Certain objects in that room retain exceptional clarity in my mind. If thought-pictures could be photographed, a perfect print of the bed and gas-bracket could be printed from my memory. With the former especially I associate the vermin, the hunger, and the rather tawdry criminal. I could describe that bed down to the smallest detail; I could draw it accurately, even to the carving; were I a carpenter I could make it. All that I suffered in it, of physical and mental anguish, the vain longings and despair, the hopes and fears, the loneliness, the feverish dreams--the entire dread panorama still hangs in the air between its stained brown foot and the broken sofa, as though of yesterday. I can see a tall man pass the end of it, one eye on me and another on the door, opening a razor slowly as he went. I see the blue eyes narrowing in his white face, the treachery of the coward twisting his lip into a smirk. I can see him sleeping like a child beside me, touching me. Moving stealthily about the room in the darkness too, as, thinking me asleep, he stole on bare feet to recover the confession of forgery I had forced him to sign, I can still see his dim outline, and even hear his tread--a petty scoundrel unwittingly on his way to gaol.