Of all trades the least appropriate, one might have thought, to the district. Gilead, hesitating a moment, looked about him. It came to him suddenly how empty the street was of policemen. He had not remembered, to be sure, its contiguity to the New Cut. He was standing in the close vicinity of penny gaffs and penny dreadfuls, of the indigenous coster and the cosmopolitan flat-catcher, of brokers’ shops, Sunday trading, chronic drunkenness, buffetted faces and vice in its most sodden aspect. But, if the realization gave him a thrill, it left his nerves unshocked. He was always imperturbable in his unselfconscious sanctity of motive. He felt his strength to be “as the strength of ten” because his heart was pure--though he did not, like Sir Galahad, applaud the fact in the first person. Now suddenly, as he stood indetermined, and wondering if, after all, this quest was proper to his custom, the door of the shop opened, and there appeared in the aperture the figure of a young woman, speaking back, as she emerged, to someone within:-- “Yes, same place as the other, Doddington Grove. I say, I must hurry. So-long, Georgy!” She ran out--a slight anæmic girl, a sempstress by her pallor, soberly dressed, but elaborate as to her head and low as to her neck--and, with a wondering stare at Gilead, sped on her way towards the tram terminus hard by. Regarding her retreat an instant, Gilead turned to see the figure of a man standing conning him from the shop-door. He was a pert, wiry, truculent-looking young fellow, the very type of combative cockneyism. His nose was retroussé, his cheeks pink; an incipient red-gold moustache on his lip had been coaxed into two little upstanding stings or spikes; his cloth cap, tilted back from his forehead, revealed a rudimentary ‘cow-lick’, elaborated from a somewhat cropped head of the same Apollonian hue. He stood whistling softly, with his hands thrust loosely into his trouser pockets. Gilead stepped towards him. “Jenniver?” he said. “Is that the name?” “You may lay on it, my lord,” answered the young man, coolly blocking the way. “O!” said Gilead; and produced his newspaper extract. “I came about an advertisement.” The stranger nodded, eyeing the brown-paper parcel. “Yus?” he said. “I have a skin or two here of the sort you mention.” “O! have you?” said the young man. He appeared to consider a moment. “Well, no harm in looking at ’em,” he said. “Come in.” He led the way into a little dirty dismal shop with shelves and a counter, and all as empty as the window. A door at the back seemed to give upon remote and silent regions. There was not a sign of traffic, of any description whatever, in the whole place. The stranger accepted the parcel, opened it, and revealed half a dozen parrakeet skins of sorts. He turned them over, examining each minutely, and looked up. “You’ve forgotten about the ‘old’,” he said. “Old!” echoed Gilead.