There is no warning given. Suddenly, and apparently without anything that leads up to the subject in mind, this irrepressible Irishman breaks out, and before I am aware of the change, the glory of the morning and all that it holds for me of beauty has faded out of the slide of my mental camera and another has taken its place. Again I am following Fin's cab through the mazes of smoky, seething London, now waiting outside a concert-hall for some young blood, or shopping along Regent Street, or at full tilt to catch a Channel train at Charing Cross--each picture enriched by a running account of personal adventure that makes them doubly interesting. "You wouldn't mind, sor," he begins, "if I tell ye of a party of three I took home from a grand ball--one of the toppy balls of the winter, in one o' them big halls on the Strand? Two o' them Was dressed like the Royal family in satins that stuck out like a haystack and covered with diamonds that would hurt your eyes to look at 'em--" And then in his inimitable dialect--impossible to reproduce by any combination of vowels at my command, and punctured every few minutes by ringing laughs that can be heard half a mile away--follows a description of how one of his fares, Ikey by name, the son of the stoutest of the women, by a sudden lurch of his cab--Ikey rode outside--while rounding into a side street, was landed in the mud. "Oh, that was a great night, sor," he rattles on. "Ye ought to 'a' seen him when I picked him up. He looked as if they'd been a-swobbin' the cobbles wid him. 'Oh, me son! me son! it's kilt ye are!' she hollered out, clawin' him wid both hands, and up they hauled him all over them satin dresses! And where do ye think I took 'em, sor? To Hanover Square, or out by St. James Park? No, sor, not a bit of it! Down in an alley in Whitechapel, sor, that ye'd be afraid to walk through after sundown, and into a shop wid three balls over it. What do ye think o' that, sor?" Or he launches forth into an account of how he helped to rescue a woman's child from the clutches of her brutal husband; and of the race out King's Road followed by the husband in a hansom, and of the watchful bobbie who, to relieve a threatened block in the street, held up the pursuing hansom at the critical moment, thus saving the escaping child, half-smothered in a blanket, tight locked in its mother's arms, and earning for Fin the biggest fare he ever got in his life. "Think of it, sor! Fifteen bob for goin' a mile, she a-hollerin' all the time that she'd double the fare if I kep' ahead. But, Lord love ye, sor, she needn't 'a' worried; me old plug had run in the Derby wance, and for a short spurt like that he was game back to the stump of his tail." * * * * * When the last morning of his enforced exile arrived and Fin, before I was half-dressed, presented himself outside my bedroom door, an open letter in his hand, not a trace of the punt-poling Irishman was visible in his make-up!