s of dark and break-neck corridors; to tea
at the suburban homes of barmaids and chorus girls, to dinner in the
stables of a cavalry-barracks, to supper in cabmen's shelters. He was
possessed in some mysterious way of the passwords to doors in hoardings
behind which excavations were in progress; he knew by name the butchers
of the Deptford yards, the men in the blood-caked clothes, so inured to
blood that they may not with safety to their lives swear at one another;
he took me into an opium-cellar within a stone's-throw of Oxford Street,
and into a roof-chamber to call upon certain friends of his ... well,
they _said_ they were fire extinguishers, so I'd better not say they
were bombs. Up, down; here, there; good report, but more frequently
evil ... we had known this side of our London as well as two men may. And
our other adventures and peregrinations, not of the body, but of the
spirit ... but these must be spoken of in their proper place.

I had arranged with Maschka that Schofield should bring me the whole of
the work Andriaovsky had left behind him; and he arrived late one
afternoon in a fourwheeler, with four great packages done up in brown
paper. I found him to be a big, shaggy-browed, red-haired, raw-boned
Lancashire man of five-and-thirty, given to confidential demonstrations
at the length of a button-shank, quite unconscious of the gulf between
his words and his right to employ them, and bent on asserting an equality
that I did not dispute by a rather aggressive use of my surname.
Andriaovsky had appointed him his executor, and he had ever the air of
suspecting that the appointment was going to be challenged.

"A'm glad to be associated with ye in this melancholy duty, Harrison," he
said. "Now we won't waste words. Miss Andriaovsky has told me precisely
how matters stand. I had, as ye know, the honour to be poor Michael's
close friend for a period of five years, and my knowledge of him is
entirely at your disposal."

I answered that I should be seriously handicapped without it.

"Just so. It is Miss Andriaovsky's desire that we should pull together.
Now, in the firrst place, what is your idea about the forrm the book
should take?"

"In the first place, if you don't mind," I replied, "perhaps we'd better
run over together the things you've brought. The daylight will be gone
soon."

"Just as ye like, Harrison," he said, "just as ye like. It's all the same
to me...."

I cleared a space about my writing-ta