It was a dark, dreary night of March. The rain beat fitfully against the window of a bedroom in a small by-street off the Holloway Road. The room is Edward’s sleeping room, his eating-room, and his workshop. A tiny fire burns dully in a tiny grate and emits rather less heat than the gas that blares with a sickly flame above Beaumont’s head. It is close upon ten of the night, and Edward has thrown down his pen, collected the sheets of “copy” that he hopes to turn into money if editors prove kind on the morrow, and is now, pipe in mouth and book in hand, trying to find a comfortable place in the rickety, horse-hair armchair, called by his landlady in some fit of uncanny humour, an easy chair, and trying, too, to so focus his book as to catch the rays from his solitary gas-jet. A very different Edward this from the easy, debonair youth whom men had envied and maidens smiled upon. His clothes are well cut, but woefully white at the seams, his linen is frayed, his boots down at heel, the watch he glances at is manifestly a Waterbury, its chain of steel; and before he lights his pipe he is compelled to cut a pipeful of unmistakeable Limerick. Upon the small table are a jug of water, a tumbler, and a bottle labelled “Pride of the Glen.” Edward holds it to the light and measures its contents with his eye. “Still three-parts full. Behold the rewards of abstinence. Had I not been frugal last night I must have been frugal to-night; but, heaven be thanked, there are two or three hours’ quiet soaking in three-quarters of a 3s. 6d. bottle of the ‘Pride of the Glen,’ and by that is drunk this dingy hole will be a palace and Edward Beaumont its prince; my tea of bread and margarine, with a bloater, will look in the retrospect a Guildhall banquet; this very angular, grid-iron like chair will be as cosy as a divan; the cheap prints that adorn my walls will show as the works of Watteau and Greuze; my rags will fall away, and I shall be clad in purple and fine linen; my whiskey will be imperial Tokay; my twist Havanas; and, in fine, it will be Edward Beaumont and not the bottle that will be three-parts full. It is true that tomorrow my mouth will be parched and I shall crave for a hair of the dog that bit me, and have to crave unless the landlord of the ‘Jolly Dogs’ is in confiding mood; my gorge will rise at the streaky, sickly slice of bacon and the ghastly ‘shop-’un’ and the leathery bread that will be served for breakfast; it is also true my eye ill be bleared, if not blood-shot, my head will ache fit to split, and my hand tremble till I can scarce lift to my lips the cup of wash-up water my landlady calls tea. All these things I verily believe. It is doubtless also true that I am shortening my life, true as gospel, oh! most sapient Sir Wilfrid Lawson. But is it not written that man shall take no thought for the morrow and that sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. Here, benign deity at 3s. 6d. the bottle! here, thou offerest three hours’ oblivion, and