"Werry unexpected pleasure. Tip us your daddle! Delighted--delighted, as I was a saying, to be of the least use to yer. Take a caulker? Summat heavy, then? No? 'Tak' a drap o' kindness yet, for auld langsyne?" "You forget I was always a teetotaller." "Ay," with a look of unfeigned pity. "An' you're a going to lend us a hand? Oh, ah! perhaps you'd like to begin? Here's a most beautiful uniform, now, for a markis in her Majesty's Guards; we don't mention names--tarn't businesslike. P'r'aps you'd like best to work here to-night, for company--'for auld langsyne, my boys;' and I'll introduce yer to the gents up-stairs to-morrow." "No," I said; "I'll go up at once, if you've no objection." "Och, thin, but the sheets isn't aired--no--faix; and I'm thinking the gentleman as is a going isn't gone yet." But I insisted on going up at once; and, grumbling, she followed me. I stopped on the landing of the second floor, and asked which way; and seeing her in no hurry to answer, opened a door, inside which I heard the hum of many voices, saying in as sprightly a tone as I could muster, that I supposed that was the workroom. As I had expected, a fetid, choking den, with just room enough in it for the seven or eight sallow, starved beings, who, coatless, shoeless, and ragged, sat stitching, each on his truckle-bed. I glanced round; the man whom I sought was not there. My heart fell; why it had ever risen to such a pitch of hope I cannot tell; and half-cursing myself for a fool, in thus wildly thrusting my head into a squabble, I turned back and shut the door, saying-- "A very pleasant room, ma'am, but a leetle too crowded." Before she could answer, the opposite door opened; and a face appeared--unwashed, unshaven, shrunken to a skeleton. I did not recognise it at first. "Blessed Vargen! but that wasn't your voice, Locke?" "And who are you?" "Tear and ages! and he don't know Mike Kelly!" My first impulse was to catch him up in my arms, and run down-stairs with him. I controlled myself, however, not knowing how far he might be in his tyrant's power. But his voluble Irish heart burst out at once-- "Oh! blessed saints, take me out o' this! take me out for the love of Jesus! take me out o' this hell, or I'll go mad intirely! Och! will nobody have pity on poor sowls in purgatory--here in prison like negur slaves? We're starved to the bone, we are, and kilt intirely with cowld." And as he clutched my arm, with his long, skinny, trembling fingers, I saw that his hands and feet were all chapped and bleeding. Neither shoe nor stocking did he possess; his only garments were a ragged shirt and trousers; and--and, and in horrible mockery of his own misery, a grand new flowered satin vest, which to-morrow was to figure in some gorgeous shop-window!