Then, with careful hand, with delicate sympathetic touch, fingers light as those with which a woman gathers her favourite flower, he would draw forth his fiddle, and soon the little room would be filled with gentle strains—plaintive, soothing, meditative, the music of dreams; full of tender thoughts, of pensive memories; music which was like thinking aloud. And after those fond memories of familiar melody, music which was as easy a language as his mother tongue, he would open one of his battered old volumes, and pore over the intricate pages of Viotti, or Spohr, or De Beriot, or Lafont, until midnight, and even the quieter hours that follow, had sounded from all the various steeple-clocks and dockyard-clocks and factory-clocks of that watery district. He had been working upwards of a year as parish surgeon, and in all that time, and the time that went before it, had not been favoured with any more aristocratic patronage than that of the neighbouring tradesmen, his wealthiest patient being a publican at the corner of the great Essex-road, reported the richest man in the district; when chance, or that combination of small causes which seems generally to lead up to the greatest effects, brought him into friendly and professional relations with a man of a different class; a man about whom the Shadrack-road knew little, but thought much. Lucius was returning from his daily round one winter afternoon, towards the end of November, when the skies that roof in the Shadrack-Basin region begin to darken soon after three o’clock. It was nearer five when the parish surgeon set his face homeward, and the Shadrack-road was enfolded in its customary fog; the street-lamps—not too brilliant in the clearest weather—and the lighted shop-windows showing dimly athwart that sombre smoke-curtain. Suddenly, gleaming a little brighter than the rest, he saw a moving lamp, the lamp of a fast hansom; then heard an execration, in the usual cabman-voice; a crash, a grinding noise as of wheels grating against wheels; a volley of execrations rising in terrible crescendo; and then the loud commanding voice of the passenger in the stranded vehicle, demanding to be let out. Lucius went to the assistance of the distressed passenger—if that could be called distress which could command so lusty an utterance—and extricated him from the hansom, which had run foul of a monster dray, laden with beer barrels. The passenger availed himself of Mr. Davoren’s arm, and alighted, not without some show of feebleness. It seemed as if his chief strength were in his voice. Seen somewhat dimly beneath that fog curtain, he appeared an old man, tall but bent, with a leonine head and a penetrating eye—keen as the eye of hawk or eagle. He thanked the surgeon briefly, dismissed the cabman with a stern reproof and without his fare.