I walked once or twice round the square, seeking vainly, at first, to still the tumult of my brain. The oppressive night of locked-up London, laden like a thunder cloud with store of slumbering passions, was lowering now and settling down like a fog. The theaters were closed; the streets echoing to the last foot-falls. Seeing a hole in the hoarding, I squeezed through it and withdrew into the rank grass and weeds that choked the interior of the inclosure. I had bought and brought some food with me, and this I fell to munching as I sat on a hummock of rubbish, and was presently much comforted thereby, so that nothing but sleep seemed desirable to me in all the world. Therefore I lay down where I was and buttoning my coat about me, was, despite the frosty air, soon lost in delicious forgetfulness. At first my slumber was broken by reason of the fitful rumble of wheels, or pierced by voices and dim cries that yet resounded phantomly here and there, as if I lay in some stricken city, where only the dying yet lived and wailed, but gradually these all passed from me. I awoke with the gray of dawn on my face and sat up. My limbs were cramped and stiff with the cold, and a light rime lay upon my clothes. Otherwise no bitterer result had followed my rather untoward experiment. Then I looked about me and saw for the first time that I was not alone. Certain haggard and unclean creatures were my bed-fellows in that desolate oasis. They lay huddled here and there, like mere scarecrows blown over by the wind and lying where they fell. There were women among them, and more than one pinched and tattered urchin, with drawn, white face resolved by sleep into nothing but pathos and starvation. There they lay at intervals, as if on a battlefield where the crows had been busy, and each one seemed to lie flattened into the earth as dead bodies lie. I could not but be thankful that I had stumbled over no one of them when I had entered--an accident which would very possibly have lost me my little store of money, if it had, indeed, led to nothing worse. As it was, I prepared for a hasty exit, and was about to rise, when I became conscious that my movements were under observation by one who lay not twenty feet from me. He was so hidden by the rank grass that at first I could make out nothing but a long, large-boned face peering at me above the stems through eyes as black and glinting as boot buttons. A thatch of dark hair fell about his ears and forehead, and his eyebrows, also black, were sleek and pointed like ermine tips. The face was so full and fine that I was startled when its owner rose, which he did on the instant, to see that he was a thick-set and stunted cripple. He shambled toward me with a winning smile on his lips, and before I could summon resolution to retreat, had come and sat down beside me. “We seem the cocks of this company,” he said, in a deep musical voice. “Among the blind the one-eyed--eh?”