ut the very next day Mr. Walter Vergoe invited Jenny to come and see
some pretty picture-books, and Jenny, with much finger and pinafore
sucking and buried cheeks, followed him through the door near which she
had always been commanded not to loiter.

"Come in, my dear, and look at Mr. Vergoe's pretty pictures. Don't be
shy. Here's a bag of lollipops," he said, holding up a pennyworth of
bull's-eyes.

On the jolly June morning the room where the old clown had elected to
spend his frequently postponed retirement was exceedingly pleasant. The
sun streamed in through the big bay-window: the sparrows cheeped and
twittered outside, and on the window-sill a box of round-faced pansies
danced in the merry June breeze. The walls were hung with silhouettes of
the great dead and tinsel pictures of bygone dramas and harlequinades
and tragedies. There were daguerreotypes of beauties in crinolines, of
ruddy-cheeked actors and apple-faced old actresses. There was a
pinchbeck crown and scepter hung below a small sword with guard of cut
steel. There were framed letters and testimonials on paper gradually
rusting, written with ink that was every day losing more and more of its
ancient blackness. There were steel engravings of this or that pillared
Theatre Royal, stuck round with _menus_ of long-digested suppers; and on
the mantlepiece was a row of champagne corks whose glad explosions
happened years ago. There was a rosewood piano, whose ivory keys were
the color of coffee, whose fretwork displayed a pleated silk that once
was crimson as wine. But the most remarkable thing in the room was a
clown's dress hanging below a wreath of sausages from a hook on the
door. It used, in the days of the clown's activity, to hang thus in his
dressing-room, and when he came out of the stage door for the last time
and went home to stewed tripe and cockles with two old friends, he took
the dress with him in a brown-paper parcel and hung it up after supper.
It confronted him now like a disembodied joy whose race was over.
Rheumatic were the knees that once upon a time were bent in the wide
laugh of welcome, while in the corner a red-hot poker's vermilion fire
was harmless forevermore. Dreaming on winter eves near Christmas time,
Mr. Vergoe would think of those ample pockets that once held
inexhaustible supplies of crackers. Dreaming on winter eves by the
fireside, he would hear out of the past the laughter of children and the
flutter of the footlights, an