It is plain that the poor old paralysed fellow is lost to the Present. He is back in the Past--or in one of his novelettes; and in front of him, begging for mercy, as he slits their throats, or cracks open their skulls, are, indeed, hundreds of real and living men. His acting is superb. It is only made comical by the hanging legs, the fixture of the body to the seat of the chair, and the furious spluttering of his frenzied mouth. When he has quite finished, thoroughly exhausted, he leans back in his chair, sticks his pipe into his face, strikes a match with his shaking hands, and covers his laughing face in a wreath of tobacco-smoke. "Arst him," whispers Mr. Wells, "how many he killed? Go on; you arst him." * * * * * So you lean across to Old Joe, who shoots forward to meet your lips half-way with his left ear, and you calmly, and without dread or horror, ask the gurgling and chuckling veteran how many men he has killed. As soon as he has caught your question he bursts out laughing, flings himself suddenly back, and exclaims, with a splutter: "How many ha' I killed? How many? I couldn't say. Too many on 'em. Hundreds! Hundreds! Hundreds of 'em!" Back goes the pipe, and, wreathed in proud smiles, his shoulders twitching, his hands never still for a moment, he sits square back in his chair and looks at you proudly, as much as to say: "Ain't I a devil of a feller? Ain't I a monster? Ho, I've had a terrible life. You just arst me another!" Well, I know not how true is the story told by Old Joe of his own wickedness. But, however this may be--and it is not the province of Old Joe's humble historian to speculate--let us be content with the picture of these two old pensioners from the high seas, living together in the evening of their days in a narrow court in a London slum, the one paralysed and the other blind; the one a most brilliant and imaginative story-teller, the other a most cautious, modest, tentative, and genial critic. And let us sit between their two chairs for a moment and listen to the moving story of Old Joe, believing it with all the simplicity, if not with all the stupefied, admiration of the little slum children who gaze at the pirate when his chair is moved out into the court that he may warm his old bones in the sun. [In brackets, let me say that I have come upon Old Joe literally posing in the court as a most ferocious pirate before an audience of toddling infants not more than four years of age.]