nditions of existence! Old Colney seems
right now and then: they 're the offspring of pirates, and they 've got
the manners and tastes of their progenitors, and the trick of quarrelling
everlastingly over the booty. I 'd have band-music here for a couple of
hours, three days of the week at the least; and down in the East; and
that forsaken North quarter of London; and the Baptist South too. But
just as those omnibus-wheels are the miserable music of this London of
ours, it 's only too sadly true that the people are in the first rumble
of the notion of the proper way to spend their lives. Now you see the
shop: Boyle and Luckwort: there.'

Victor looked. He threw his coat open, and pulled the waistcoat, and
swelled it, ahemming. 'That shop?' said he. And presently: 'Fenellan, I'm
not superstitious, I think. Now listen; I declare to you, on the day of
our drinking Old Veuve together last--you remember it,--I walked home up
this way across the square, and I was about to step into that identical
shop, for some household prescription in my pocket, having forgotten
Nataly's favourite City chemists Fenbird and Jay, when--I'm stating a
fact--I distinctly--I 'm sure of the shop--felt myself plucked back by
the elbow; pulled back the kind of pull when you have to put a foot
backward to keep your equilibrium.'

So does memory inspired by the sensations contribute an additional item
for the colouring of history.

He touched the elbow, showed a flitting face of crazed amazement in
amusement, and shrugged and half-laughed, dismissing the incident, as
being perhaps, if his hearer chose to have it so, a gem of the rubbish
tumbled into the dustcart out of a rather exceptional householder's
experience.

Fenellan smiled indulgently. 'Queer things happen. I recollect reading in
my green youth of a clergyman, who mounted a pulpit of the port where he
was landed after his almost solitary rescue from a burning ship at
midnight in mid-sea, to inform his congregation, that he had overnight of
the catastrophe a personal Warning right in his ear from a Voice, when at
his bed or bunk-side, about to perform the beautiful ceremony of
undressing: and the Rev. gentleman was to lie down in his full uniform,
not so much as to relieve himself of his boots, the Voice insisted twice;
and he obeyed it, despite the discomfort to his poor feet; and he jumped
up in his boots to the cry of Fire, and he got them providentially over
the scuffling deck straight