He saw himself as a tiny boy, dressed up in a white suit and white shoes and socks, going to a circus with his father. He remembered how Eliphalet No. 1 had stopped to speak to a friend, and how he had filled in the weary wait by paddling through a four-inch slough of mud, swept up by the roadside. He was on the point of laughing at the recollection when it struck him that there was nothing to laugh at in a man’s last words to his wife—how vividly the trumpery appointments of that room recurred to him, and the silly threats she had made—and how—they applauded on his first appearance in “The Corsican Brothers.” He had held his head high that night, and the pavement outside the stage-door was thronged with an eager and waiting crowd, and—all the theatrical profession were there when Eliphalet senior was laid to rest. “A Great Tragedian,” old Toole had said, and he had replied, “A wonderful father, sir.” And what a night of it they had (the early ’seventies, wasn’t it)—He and a dozen other bloods put a barricade of beer-barrels across the top of the Hay-market—Jermyn and Panton Street—and no one was allowed to go past without a drink. He was not a teetotaler then. That had been proved by the magistrate’s comments at the Police Court on the following morning. How his head had ached. Was his head aching now? Not a bit—a little dizzy, perhaps—that was from the cold—but the cold was better—much better. Fine stuff Enoch’s Instantaneous—Enoch! “And forty little laughing boys Came running out of school.” Was that Enoch Arden—or Eugene Aram? Either or neither? What did it matter? Where was his coat?—where was it? “Potter!” he called—then, “Dear me! how stupid!” Potter, he remembered, was at his aunt’s funeral—or was it christening? He found the coat on the far side of the bed, where, careless of everything, ill and miserable, he had cast it before flinging himself between the blankets. Strange he should have felt so ill overnight, when now—— He slapped his chest and sang an arpeggio. “La-di-da-daa! Resonant, my boy, and of good timbre.” “Let us then be up and doing, With a heart for any fate.” He stooped to pick up his hat, and kicked it clown-fashion right across the room. A second effort was more successful, but, oddly enough, the pattern of the carpet photographed itself vividly upon the retina of his eyes. He was still aware of it when he returned to the perpendicular. There were angles and shapes in yellow and green on a red ground which danced before them as he descended the stairs—the stairs that had such an awkward twist he had never before noticed. “They tell me,” he gravely announced to Mrs. Beecher, who had come into the hall at the sound of his approach, “they tell me that one of the most difficult achievements is to put a spiral staircase into perspective.” “Aye—well, a’ve put soup on table; you ought to take cab to theatre,” responded the good lady.