as stoker on a French steamer bound for Marseilles. I could find none that would take a negro as passenger. The dye pretty well wore off my face and hands during the voyage, but the circumstance only excited remark among the motley scum of the stokehole, and I was permitted to land without dispute. Heavens! how beautiful it was to dress once more as a European, to eat European food, to sleep on a European bed, and not to be afraid to look a European in the face. In Europe I did not care a pin for Sir Robert Ottley and all that he could do to hurt me. In Egypt his money and influence would have left me helpless to resist him; but I felt myself something more than his match in the centre of modern civilisation. He had the law of me, of course, but I had a weapon to bring him to book. I could hold him up to public scorn and ridicule. Were he to prosecute me I could put him in the pillory as a wretch ungrateful for his life saved by my care and skill, a promise-breaker and something of a lunatic. On the whole, I decided he would not venture to put me in the dock. And so sure did I feel on that head that I proceeded to London as fast as steam could carry me. Chapter XII The Meeting Whenever in London my practice for years had been to put up at my friend Dixon Hubbard's rooms in Bruton Street. We had been schoolfellows. He was one of the most fortunate and unfortunate creatures in the world. Born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he had inherited from some cross-grained ancestor a biting tongue and a gloomy disposition. He was an incurable misanthrope and unpopular beyond words. At college he had been detested. Being a sickly lad, his tongue had earned him many a thrashing which he had had to endure without other reprisal than sarcasm. Yet he had never spared that. His spirit was unconquerable. I believe that he would have taunted his executioners while they burned him at the stake. I used to hate him myself once. But one day after giving him a fairly good hammering I fell so in love with the manly way in which he immediately thereafter gave me a sound excuse for wringing his neck that I begged his pardon for being a hulking bully in having lifted hand against a weaker body but a keener brain and more untamable spirit than my own. That conquered him. From that moment we were inseparable chums, and on an average the privilege cost me at least two hard fights a week, for my code was--hit my chum and you hit me. His gratitude lay in jibing at me if I lost the fight, and if I won informing me that I was a fool for my pains. But we understood each other, and our friendship bravely withstood the test of time and circumstance. I found him nursing an attack of splenitic rheumatism before a fire in his study, and we were still only in the middle of July. His man, Miller, had just broken a Sévres vase, and Hubbard was telling Miller in a gentle, measured way his views of clumsiness in serving-men. Miller--a meek, dog-like