mind weakened and bewildered by disaster, he had turned for help to
his first and only love, the violin. For some years he had taught a
few pupils who were too poor to pay the fees of the professional
teachers, and, persuaded that pupils would flock to him if he gave his
whole time to it he took a room and set up as a teacher. In six months
he had to choose between starvation by inches or playing dance music in
Bob Fenner's hall for fifteen shillings a week. For a while he endured
this, playing popular airs that he hated and despised for the larrikins
whom he hated and feared, a nightly butt and target for their coarse
jests. Then he preferred starvation, and found himself in the gutter
with the clothes he stood up in and his fiddle. He had joined the army
of mendicant musicians, who scrape a tune in front of hotels and shops,
living on charity thinly veiled.

They had passed him one night on their return from Mosman, playing in
front of a public-house to an audience of three loafers. The streets
had soon dragged him to their level. Unkempt and half starved, he wore
the look of the vagrant who sleeps in his clothes for want of bedding.
Grown childish in his distress, he had forgotten his lifelong habits of
neatness and precision, going to pieces like a man who takes to drink.

Clara, who knew his history, was horrified at the sight. She thought
he lived comfortably on a crust of bread by giving lessons. Jonah
turned sulky when she reproached him.

"I don't see 'ow I'm ter blame for this any more'n if 'e'd come to the
gutter through drink. It was a fair go on the Road, an' if I beat 'im
an' the others, it was because I was a better man at the game. I spent
nearly all my money in that little shanty where I started, an' 'im an'
the others looked on an' 'oped I'd starve. Yer talk about me bein'
cruel an' callous. It's the game that's cruel, not me. I knocked 'im
out all right, but wot 'ud be the use of knockin' 'im down with one
'and an' pickin' 'im up with the other?"

"You say yourself that he took you off the streets, and gave you a
living."

"So 'e did, but 'e got 'is money's worth out of me. I did the work of
a man, an' saved 'im pounds for years. Yer wouldn't 'ave such a
sentimental way of lookin' at things if yer'd been a steet-arab,
sellin' newspapers, an' no one ter make it 'is business whether yer
lived or starved."

"But surely you can't see him in that condition without feeling sorry
for