tle of the capital city I walked,
as one who knew his way, to where the noisy and malodorous old steam
tram-cars started, and made my way by tram to Circular Quay. (I had
had my directions in Dursley.) Here I boarded a ferry-boat, and at the
cost of one penny was carried across the shining waters of the harbour
to North Shore. Half an hour later I had mounted the hill, found Mill
Street and Bay View Villa, and actually become a boarder and a lodger
there, with a latch-key of my own.

The landlady having left the bedroom to which she had escorted me, my
carefully sustained nonchalance fell from me; I turned the key in the
door, and sat down on the edge of my bed with a long-drawn sigh. The
celerity, the extraordinary swiftness of the whole business left me
almost breathless.

'Yesterday,' I told myself, as one recounting a miracle, 'I was
planting out young tomatoes in Mr. Perkins's garden in Dursley. Only a
few minutes ago I was still in the train. And now--now I'm a lodger,
and this is my room, and--I'm a lodger!'

I did not seem able to get beyond that just then, though later on,
with a recollection of a certain passage in a favourite novel, I tried
the sound, in a whisper, of:

'Mr. Nicholas Freydon was now comfortably installed in rooms on the
shady side of--North Shore.' At the same time I ran over a few
variants upon such easy phrases as: 'My rooms at North Shore,' 'Snug
quarters,' 'My boarding-house,' 'My landlady,' and the like.

One must remember that I was less than two years distant from St.
Peter's and from Sister Agatha and her cane.

There were two beds in my room; one small and the other very small. I
was sitting on the very small one. The other belonged to Mr. William
Smith, whose real name might quite possibly have been something else.
For already, though I had not seen him, I had gathered that my room-mate
was an elderly man with a history, of which this much was
generally admitted: that he had seen much better days, and was a
married man separated from his wife.

'But a pleasanter, kinder-hearted, nicer-spoken gentleman you couldn't
wish to meet, that I will say,' Mrs. Hastings, the landlady, had told
me. 'Which,' she added, after a pause given to reflection, with eyes
downcast, 'if he was otherwise I should not've thought of letting a
share of his room to anybody with recommendations from me nephew in
Dursley--not likely. No, nor for that matter, of havin' him in my
house at all.'

My land