"Right you are, young 'un," said the breezy one. "I'm just back from my fortnight's holidays. Been to London, don't you know. Jolly time. Thought I'd give you a shout on my way to the office. See you later, and tell you all about it. Ta-ta! I'm off. Big case on at the police court this morning." Mr. Smith--Mr. Trevor Smith, if you please--was indeed a person who had assumed considerable importance in Henry's mind before he met him face to face. He was the permanent lodger by whom good Mrs. Filbert set much store. "'E's that smart," she told Henry the first night he had stayed beneath her roof "there's no sayin' what he don't know. He writes a many fine things in the _Guardian_, specially 'is story of the Mop, which my Tommy read out quite easy-like last October." "He'll be a journalist, then," Henry suggested. "Somethink o' the sort, I reckon. Leastways, e's a heditor or a reporter or somethink. The _Guardian_ pays 'im to stay for it 'ere. So 'e must be clever. Oh, you'll like 'im, 'Enry. Everybody likes Mr. Trevor." It seemed to Henry a real stroke of fortune that had brought him to the very house where one engaged in literary pursuits resided, and although keenly disappointed at the melancholy falling off in his actual experience of life under the aegis of Mr. Griggs, compared with his vision of what that was to be, he now looked forward to meeting Mr. Trevor Smith with the hope that he might point the way to better things. The exact position of that local representative of the Fourth Estate is best defined as district reporter. The paper which employed him was published in the busy industrial centre of Wheelton, some twenty-five miles distant, where it maintained a struggling existence as the _Wheelton Guardian_. It was the duty of Mr. Smith to write a column of notes on men and affairs in the Stratford district every week, to supply reports of the local police court proceedings, municipal meetings, and so forth, and also to canvass for advertisements, the few hundred copies of the paper sold in Stratford every week, thanks to these attractions, being mendaciously headed _Stratford Guardian_. What the district reporter--who occasionally hinted that he was really the editor when he saw a chance to impress a stranger thereby--called "the office," was a desk in the back premises of the news-agent and fancy-goods-shop whence the _Guardian_ was distributed weekly.