"Werry well; then you must keep moving all night continually, whereby you avoids the hact; or else you goes to a twopenny-rope shop and gets a lie down. And your bundle you'd best leave at my house. Twopenny-rope society a'n't particular. I'm going off my beat; you walk home with me and leave your traps. Everybody knows me--Costello, V 21, that's my number." So on I went with the kind-hearted man, who preached solemnly to me all the way on the fifth commandment. But I heard very little of it; for before I had proceeded a quarter of a mile, a deadly faintness and dizziness came over me, I staggered, and fell against the railings. "And have you been drinking arter all?" "I never--a drop in my life--nothing but bread-and-water this fortnight." And it was true. I had been paying for my own food, and had stinted myself to such an extent, that between starvation, want of sleep, and over-exertion, I was worn to a shadow, and the last drop had filled the cup; the evening's scene and its consequences had been too much for me, and in the middle of an attempt to explain matters to the policeman, I dropped on the pavement, bruising my face heavily. He picked me up, put me under one arm and my bundle under the other, and was proceeding on his march, when three men came rollicking up. "Hullo, Poleax--Costello--What's that? Work for us? A demp unpleasant body?" "Oh, Mr. Bromley, sir! Hope you're well, sir! Werry rum go this here, sir! I finds this cove in the streets. He says his mother turned him out o' doors. He seems very fair spoken, and very bad in he's head, and very bad in he's chest, and very bad in he's legs, he does. And I can't come to no conclusions respecting my conduct in this here case, nohow!" "Memorialize the Health of Towns Commission," suggested one. "Bleed him in the great toe," said the second. "Put a blister on the back of his left eye-ball," said a third. "Case of male asterisks," observed the first. "Rj. Aquæ pumpis puræ quantum suff. Applicatur exterò pro re natâ. J. Bromley, M.D., and don't he wish he may get through!"-- "Tip us your daddle, my boy," said the second speaker. "I'll tell you what, Bromley, this fellow's very bad. He's got no more pulse than the Pimlico sewer. Run in into the next pot'us. Here--you lay hold of him, Bromley--that last round with the cabman nearly put my humerus out." The huge, burly, pea-jacketed medical student--for such I saw at once he was--laid hold of me on the right tenderly enough, and walked me off between him and the policeman. I fell again into a faintness, from which I was awakened by being shoved through the folding-doors of a gin-shop, into a glare of light and hubbub of blackguardism, and placed on a settle, while my conductor called out-- "Pots round, Mary, and a go of brandy hot with, for the patient. Here, young'un, toss it off, it'll make your hair grow." I feebly answered that I never had drunk anything stronger than water.