He was a man of wonderful schemes, but originally they led to results as wonderful. When we first knew him he ruled in an office in Bond Street, he had partners, he had clerks, he had a porter in livery at the door. He embarked upon daring adventures and brought them off. He gave interesting commissions, and he paid for them too, as we learned to our profit. He had large ideas and a wide horizon; he shrank from the cheap and popular, from what the people like. He was not above taking the advice of others upon subjects of which he was broad-minded enough to understand and to acknowledge his own ignorance, for he spared himself no pains in his determination to secure the best. And he was full of go; that was why we liked him. I look back to evenings when he came to dinner to talk over some new scheme, and when he would sit on and talk on after his last train--his home was in the suburbs--had long gone and, as he told us afterwards, he would have to wait in one of the little restaurants near Fleet Street that are open all night for journalists until it was time to catch the earliest newspaper train. He would drop in at any odd hour to discuss his latest enterprise. We were always seeing him, and we were always delighted to see him, enthusiasm not being so common a virtue in the Briton that we can afford not to make the most of it when it happens. We found him, as a consequence, a stimulating companion. I cannot say exactly when the change came; why it came remains a mystery to us to this day. Probably it began long before we realized it. The first symptoms were a trick of borrowing: at the outset such trivial things as a daily paper to which he should have subscribed, or books which he should have bought for himself. Then it was a half crown here and a half crown there, because he had not time to go back to the office before rushing to the station, or because he had not a cab fare with him, or because of half a dozen other accidents as plausible. We might not have given a second thought to all this but for the rapidity with which the half crowns developed into five shillings, and the five into ten, and the ten into a sovereign on evenings when the cab, for which we had to take his word, had been waiting during the hours of his stay. We could not help our suspicions, the more so because that indefinable but rank odour of drugs, by which our Beggars too frequently announce themselves, grew stronger as the amount of which he was in need increased. And very soon he was confiding to us the details of a quarrel which deprived him of his partners and their capital. Then the Bond Street office was given up and his business was done in some vague rooms, the whereabouts of which he never disclosed; only too soon it seemed to be done entirely in the street. We would meet him at night slinking along the Strand, one of the miserable shadows of humanity whom the darkness lures out of the nameless holes and corners where they hide during the day.