ere was only one possible end to it.
He'd gone fully a dozen yards, while I watched, horribly fascinated; and
then I saw the turn of his head....

He didn't meet it this time; he sprang to the other rail, as if to evade
it....

Even at the take-off he missed. As far as I could see, he made no attempt
to save himself with his hands. He just went down out of the field of
my vision. There was an awful silence; then, from far below ...

* * * * *

They weren't the men on the lower stages who moved first. The men above
went a little way down, and then they too stopped. Presently two of them
descended, but by a distant way. They returned, with two bottles of
brandy, and there was a hasty consultation. Two men drank the brandy off
there and then--getting on for a pint of brandy apiece; then they went
down, drunk.

I, Hopkins tells me, had got down on my knees in the crane cab, and was
jabbering away cheerfully to myself. When I asked him what I said,
he hesitated, and then said: "Oh, you don't want to know that, sir," and
I haven't asked him since.

What do _you_ make of it?

BENLIAN

I

It would be different if you had known Benlian. It would be different if
you had had even that glimpse of him that I had the very first time I saw
him, standing on the little wooden landing at the top of the flight of
steps outside my studio door. I say "studio"; but really it was just a
sort of loft looking out over the timber-yard, and I used it as a studio.
The real studio, the big one, was at the other end of the yard, and that
was Benlian's.

Scarcely anybody ever came there. I wondered many a time if the
timber-merchant was dead or had lost his memory and forgotten all about
his business; for his stacks of floorboards, set criss-crosswise to
season (you know how they pile them up) were grimy with soot, and nobody
ever disturbed the rows of scaffold-poles that stood like palisades along
the walls. The entrance was from the street, through a door in a
billposter's hoarding; and on the river not far away the steamboats
hooted, and, in windy weather, the floorboards hummed to keep them
company.

I suppose some of these real, regular artists wouldn't have called me an
artist at all; for I only painted miniatures, and it was trade-work at
that, copied from photographs and so on. Not that I wasn't jolly good at
it, and punctual too (lots of these high-flown artists have simply no
idea of pu