h bells.

So, having paid his shot, he wandered out again into the pale and misty
sunlight; and as he had been struck by the appearance of St. Saviour's
in crossing the bridge, he strolled back thither, and entered the
church, and sat down in a pew. He remained through the earlier part of
the service; but when the sermon began, he left. The streets were now
quite busy, though the shops were closed. It was not like Sunday on
the shores of the Firth of Clyde.

'In any case,' he was thinking, 'it can be no great breaking of the
Sabbath that a man should provide himself with a lodging to cover his
head.'

Eventually, after much patient wandering and inquiring, he found a
house in the Southwark-bridge Road--he was attracted to it by the
presence of one or two flower-boxes on the window-sills--where he was
offered a small, fairly neat and clean bedroom for the sum of
three-and-sixpence per week. Thereupon the bargain was closed; and
John Douglas found himself established at least with headquarters, from
whence he could issue to fight his battle with the great forces of
London.

Well, day after day--nay, week after week--passed, and all his efforts
to obtain employment, had resulted in nothing. It was not through any
shame-facedness or fastidiousness or false pride. He was ready to do
anything. Many people thought this man a maniac, who calmly walked in
and offered, in his slow, methodic Scotch speech, to copy letters for
them, or do anything that could be pointed out to him, confessing, on
interrogation, that he had been in no employment before, and could
therefore produce no testimonials as to character or fitness. On his
own showing, there was nothing special he could do; though he had
bought a little treatise on book-keeping, and occasionally studied it
in the evenings. As he walked about the streets and observed how all
the people around him seemed to be fully occupied, and busy and
contented, it occurred to him as strange that they should all have
fallen into these grooves so naturally. He looked at the clerk giving
out tickets at a railway station, and thought, he could do that also.
Perhaps the business of the young men who every morning were to be seen
inside the big windows of the drapers' shops in the Borough Road,
decorating the place with ribbons and gowns, demanded a special
knowledge that he had not acquired; but it could not be difficult, for
example, to be a policeman? They seemed happy enough;