to the respectable shelter of the Blue Posts? What a hollow mockery
were these brazen cymbals, these hoarse inviting voices, these coarse
show-cloths, these lights!

Curiously enough, and as if in instant sympathy with my dejection, the
cymbals ceased to clash. The showmen began to extinguish their torches.
I had lost my watch; Hartnoll did not own one. But we agreed that, at
latest, the hour could not be much more than ten. Yet the shows were
closing, the populace was melting away into the fog.

"I've had enough of this. Let's get back to the Posts," Hartnoll
repeated. His eyes told me that up to two days ago, when he left home,
nine o'clock or thereabouts had been his regular bedtime. It had been
mine also.

One of the two saucy girls, happening to pass an instant before the booth
above us extinguished its lights, spied us in dejected colloquy, and came
forward. Hartnoll turned from her, but I made bold to ask her the nearest
way to the Blue Posts.

I will give you her exact answer. She said--"Turn up on your right hand
at the next turning, but, at the next turning of all, on your left; marry,
at the very next turning, turn of no hand, but turn down indirectly to the
Blue Postesses."

I have it by heart, because years after I found it in Shakespeare's
_Merchant of Venice_, where you may find it for yourselves, if you look,
with the answer I might have made to her. She did not wait for one,
however, but stood looking around in the fog as if for a guide.
"Poor lads!" she went on, "you'll certainly never reach it without help,
though everyone in Portsmouth knows the Blue Posts: and I'd go with you
myself if I weren't due at the theatre in ten minutes' time. I have to
call on the manager as soon as the house empties to-night; and if I miss
it will mean losing an engagement." She puckered her brow thoughtfully,
and her face in spite of the paint on it struck me as a lovely one, saucy
no longer but almost angelically kind. I have never seen her again from
that day to this, and I was a boy of fourteen, but I'll wager that girl
had a good heart. "Your best plan," she decided, "is to step along with
me, and at the stage door, or inside the theatre at any rate, we'll soon
find somebody to put you in the way."

But here a small figure stepped out against us from the shadow of the
platform, and a small shrillish voice piped up--

"For a copper, miss--or a copper apiece if they'll trust me. Find the
Blue Pos