“Well, there isn’t very much, but it may come to something more, especially with what you have just found out. The worst of it is that he is getting shy of me, and I dare not say things as I did. I told him that I wanted to run down, to take stock of Henderson’s place down here, and I asked him if he knew the neighbourhood, and whether we should take a trap and run down together. If I could get him to that, I might pick up a lot of things, in a careless and casual way, you know. But he was much too fly for any game of that sort; and it almost seemed to me as if he smelled a rat. Then I got on to him about the scientific codgers, thinking to lead up to the old Professor and the cruise he is going on about the bottom of the sea, and the place for laying cables, and a lot of things like that. But that wouldn’t serve; and so I tried another lay. We were talking of old Pots, and I said, ‘Oh, by-the-bye, was it true that the old fool was sweet upon some girl, some girl with a lot of money, who pitched him over?’ And he said, ‘What a joke! I should like to hear of that. Tell us the story, Bowles, if you know it.’ Bowles is the name he knows me by, you see; for it would not do for me to turn up as Tonks. “In fact I got no hold upon him, as I thought I should have done; for he knows how to make people useful and no more; and I saw that he would drop me as soon as he had learned all the little useful things I know at cards and pool. Of course I was not swell enough for him to introduce me to his ‘family circle,’ as the ladies call it. And as for getting him to take a drop too much, and then working him skilfully, as can be done with most fellows,—well, I am pretty tough, but if I took the water and he the brandy, I believe I should be drunk before he was. His head is too big for any barrel to upset it. “I was pretty near despairing, I can tell you, Mr. Orchardson, though I never have been beaten yet, and don’t want to begin it; when a little bit of accident, the merest casual accident, put me further forward than a month of work might do. You may be pretty sure, without my saying, that my appearance is not distinguished enough—although I have gone arm in arm with bigger nobs than he is, and real gentlemen some of them—but not swell enough to be seen in Downy Bulwrag’s company, in Piccadilly, or the Park, or high and mighty places. No no, not for Joe, as the poet quotes it. “But he is not at all above allowing me the honour of his society, when I can be of service to him, and no one is likely to say—‘Who’s that?’ And there is one particular house of his—never mind where, that has nothing to do with it—at which he always likes to have me, and treats me quite as his honoured friend. And there we were on Monday night, tickling the pigeons, as you might say, which is only what they expect of us. He can beat me now in my own inventions, not from any superior skill, but because he is the coolest hand ever seen, and nothing puts him out of tune.