Another of our friends was a waiter in one of the public-houses and chop-houses combined, of which there are so many in the Strand. He lived in a wretched alley which ran from St. Clement’s Church to Boswell Court—I have forgotten its name—a dark crowded passage. He was a man of about sixty—invariably called John, without the addition of any surname. I knew him long before we opened our room, for I was in the habit of frequently visiting the chop-house in which he served. His hours were incredible. He began at nine o’clock in the morning with sweeping the dining-room, cleaning the tables and the gas globes, and at twelve business commenced with early luncheons. Not till three-quarters of an hour after midnight could he leave, for the house was much used by persons who supped there after the theatres. During almost the whole of this time he was on his legs, and very often he was unable to find two minutes in the day in which to get his dinner. Sundays, however, were free. John was not a head waiter, but merely a subordinate, and I never knew why at his time of life he had not risen to a better position. He used to say that “things had been against him,” and I had no right to seek for further explanations. He was married, and had had three children, of whom one only was living—a boy of ten years old, whom he hoped to get into the public-house as a potboy for a beginning. Like Taylor, the world had well-nigh overpowered John entirely—crushed him out of all shape, so that what he was originally, or might have been, it was almost impossible to tell. There was no particular character left in him. He may once have been this or that, but every angle now was knocked off, as it is knocked off from the rounded pebbles which for ages have been dragged up and down the beach by the waves. For a lifetime he had been exposed to all sorts of whims and caprices, generally speaking of the most unreasonable kind, and he had become so trained to take everything without remonstrance or murmuring that every cross in his life came to him as a chop alleged by an irritated customer to be raw or done to a cinder. Poor wretch! he had one trouble, however, which he could not accept with such equanimity, or rather with such indifference. His wife was a drunkard. This was an awful trial to him. The worst consequence was that his boy knew that his mother got drunk. The neighbours kindly enough volunteered to look after the little man when he was not at school, and they waylaid him and gave him dinner when his mother was intoxicated; but frequently he was the first when he returned to find out that there was nothing for him to eat, and many a time he got up at night as late as twelve o’clock, crawled downstairs, and went off to his father to tell him that “she was very bad, and he could not go to sleep.” The father, then, had to keep his son in the Strand till it was time to close, take him back, and manage in the best way he could. Over