out the room!"

"Aha! well put--devilish well put!" returned Mr. Boxsious; "that's the
only sensible thing you have said since you entered my house; I begin
to like you already." With these words he nodded at me approvingly, and
jumped into the high chair that I had placed for him with the alacrity
of a young man.

"I say, Mr. Artist," he went on, when I had put him into the right
position (he insisted on the front view of his face being taken, because
the Town Council would get the most for their money in that way), "you
don't have many such good jobs as this, do you?"

"Not many," I said. "I should not be a poor man if commissions for
life-size portraits often fell in my way."

"You poor!" exclaimed Mr. Boxsious, contemptuously. "I dispute that
point with you at the outset. Why, you've got a good cloth coat, a clean
shirt, and a smooth-shaved chin. You've got the sleek look of a man
who has slept between sheets and had his breakfast. You can't humbug
me about poverty, for I know what it is. Poverty means looking like
a scarecrow, feeling like a scarecrow, and getting treated like a
scarecrow. That was _my_ luck, let me tell you, when I first thought of
trying the law. Poverty, indeed! Do you shake in your shoes, Mr. Artist,
when you think what you were at twenty? I do, I can promise you."

He began to shift about so irritably in his chair, that, in the
interests of my work, I was obliged to make an effort to calm him.

"It must be a pleasant occupation for you in your present prosperity,"
said I, "to look back sometimes at the gradual processes by which you
passed from poverty to competence, and from that to the wealth you now
enjoy."

"Gradual, did you say?" cried Mr. Boxsious; "it wasn't gradual at all. I
was sharp--damned sharp, and I jumped at my first start in business slap
into five hundred pounds in one day."

"That was an extraordinary step in advance," I rejoined. "I suppose you
contrived to make some profitable investment--"

"Not a bit of it! I hadn't a spare sixpence to invest with. I won the
money by my brains, my hands, and my pluck; and, what's more, I'm proud
of having done it. That was rather a curious case, Mr. Artist. Some men
might be shy of mentioning it; I never was shy in my life and I mention
it right and left everywhere--the whole case, just as it happened,
except the names. Catch me ever committing myself to mentioning names!
Mum's the word, sir, with yours to command, Thomas Boxsio