his
smile and a sort of whimper underlying his voice, and Cleek's keen
eyes saw that his hand groped about blindly in its effort to find
the fastenings of the garden door.

"Leastwise, nothing as matters now that you are here, sir. And I _am_
glad yer back, guv'ner--Lawd, yuss! 'Nothin' like company to buck
you up,' as the bull said when he tossed the tinker; so of course----"

"Here! You let those fastenings alone. I'll attend to them!" rapped
in Cleek's voice with a curious note of alarm in it, as he moved
briskly forward and barred and locked the wall door. "If I didn't
know that eating, not drinking, was your particular failing----"

Here he stopped, his half-uttered comment cut into by a bleating
cry, and he screwed round to face a startling situation. For there
was Dollops, leaning heavily against a flowering almond tree, his
face like a dead face for colour, and his fingers clawing frantically
at the lower part of his waistcoat, doubling and twisting in the
throes of an internal convulsion.

The gravelled pathway gave forth two sharp scrunches, and Cleek was
just in time to catch him as he lurched forward and sprawled heavily
against him. The man's arms closed instinctively about the twisting,
sweat-drenched, helpless shape, and with great haste and infinite
tenderness gathered it up and carried it into the house; but he
had scarcely more than laid the boy upon a sofa and lit the lamp
of the small apartment which served them as a general living-room,
when all the agony of uncertainty which beset his mind regarding
the genesis of this terrifying attack vanished in a sudden rush of
enlightenment.

All that was left of a bounteous and strikingly diversified afternoon
tea still littered the small round dining table, and there, on one
plate, lay the shells of two crabs, on another, the remains of a
large rhubarb tart, on a third, the skins of five bananas leaning
coquettishly up against the lid of an open pickle jar, and hard by
there was a pint tumbler with the white blur of milk dimming it.

"Good Lord! The young anaconda!" blurted out Cleek, as he stood
and stared at this appalling array. "No wonder, no wonder!" Then he
turned round on his heel, looked at the writhing and moaning boy,
and in a sudden fever of doing, peeled off his coat, rolled up his
sleeves, and made a bolt for the kitchen stove, the hot-water kettle,
and the medicine chest.

The result of Master Dollops' little gastronomic experiment sca