Running north from Storey’s Gate, the backs of its western houses abutting on the network of conduits which fed what is now in St. James’s Park called the Ornamental Water, but which was then “The Canal,” was a short road, or row, named Duke Street, in which was situated the building--subsequently the town home of Jeffreys, the filthy Fouquier Tinville of an earlier revolution--known as the Admiralty House. This mansion--or part of it, for the whole of it was of considerable dimensions--was, in fact, the headquarters of the recently reorganized Navy, and as such is mentioned here as being associated, however indirectly, with our narrative, inasmuch as it was to a member of its staff (a Mr. Samuel Pepys, not then long nominated to a clerkship of the acts) that Jack Bannister, the famous harpist, and a figure with whom we have hereafter to reckon, owed his “discovery,” in the exclusive as apart from the popular sense. This man, sprung into evidence no one knew whence or when, had for months been perambulating the town as an itinerant musician, earning a precarious livelihood by playing before tavern doors, at street corners, and in marketplaces, and rich only in the soulful tribute of the many-headed, to whom he had come to be known by the appellation of “Sad Jack.” For sad, indeed, he appeared, both in face and habit; a lean, stoop-shouldered fellow, grimly austere, and always clothed in grey--grey hose, grey breeches, grey doublet, and grey hat, from the shadow of whose limp wide brim his eyes shone white, like pebbles gleaming through dark water. His figure was familiar to the streets as, his instrument strapped to his back, a folding-stool hung over his arm, and his soul patiently subdued to the philosophy which could find in unrecognition the surest proof of worth, he plodded his fortuitous way, with eye grown selective in the matter of “pitches,” and at his heels, perhaps, a string of ragamuffins, who, for the merest dole of his magnificence’s quality, would be ready to walk in his shadow to the town’s end. For sweet music hath through all the ages the “force” we wot of to “tame the furious beast,” and there was never a Pied Piper of genius but could count on his audience of rats to follow him over half the world if he pleased. And this man had genius, for all it went unrecognized; but that was accident, and no moral whatever attaches to the fact. He communicated it from his finger-tips to the strings, hypostatically as it were, bestowing on them that gift of tongues which, speaking one language, speaks all. To his own ears it might appear that he was uttering no more than his native accents; to all others, gentile and barbarian, it seemed that he spoke in theirs. And that it is to command genius, the universal appeal, the gift of the Holy Ghost.