ir in
competition; John's case was out of all parallel. But the cabman, too,
is worth the sympathy of the judicious; for he was a fellow of genuine
kindliness and a high sense of personal dignity incensed by drink; and
his advances had been cruelly and publicly rebuffed. As he drove,
therefore, he counted his wrongs, and thirsted for sympathy and drink.
Now, it chanced he had a friend, a publican in Queensferry Street, from
whom, in view of the sacredness of the occasion, he thought he might
extract a dram. Queensferry Street lies something off the direct road to
Murrayfield. But then there is the hilly cross-road that passes by the
valley of the Leith and the Dean Cemetery; and Queensferry Street is on
the way to that. What was to hinder the cabman, since his horse was
dumb, from choosing the cross-roads, and calling on his friend in
passing? So it was decided; and the charioteer, already somewhat
mollified, turned aside his horse to the right.

John, meanwhile, sat collapsed, his chin sunk upon his chest, his mind
in abeyance. The smell of the cab was still faintly present to his
senses, and a certain leaden chill about his feet; all else had
disappeared in one vast oppression of calamity and physical faintness.
It was drawing on to noon--two-and-twenty hours since he had broken
bread; in the interval he had suffered tortures of sorrow and alarm, and
had been partly tipsy; and though it was impossible to say he slept, yet
when the cab stopped, and the cabman thrust his head into the window,
his attention had to be recalled from depths of vacancy.

"If you'll no' _stand_ me a dram," said the driver, with a well-merited
severity of tone and manner, "I daresay ye'll have no objection to my
taking one mysel'?"

"Yes--no--do what you like," returned John; and then, as he watched his
tormentor mount the stairs and enter the whisky-shop, there floated into
his mind a sense as of something long ago familiar. At that he started
fully awake, and stared at the shop-fronts. Yes, he knew them; but when?
and how? Long since, he thought; and then, casting his eye through the
front glass, which had been recently occluded by the figure of the
jarvey, he beheld the tree-tops of the rookery in Randolph Crescent. He
was close to home--home, where he had thought, at that hour, to be
sitting in the well-remembered drawing-room in friendly converse; and,
instead----!

It was his first impulse to drop into the bottom of the cab; his next