reet
(he had no wish, it seemed, to go through the tunnel into the court),
and here we bade farewell to the ladies.

"Which way now?" I inquired. My charge responded not, but crossed to a
corner and meandered up one of those interminable thoroughfares which
lead out of London into the suburbs. Trudging with him and helping him
to sustain his balance, which was not as stable as could be wished, I
plied him with mildly genial conversation and at last elicited a few
vague answers. These were couched in the cockney idiom, but I caught a
faint nasal twang which led me to suspect that the speaker had come from
the other side of the Atlantic. Yes--he told me he had just arrived from
Canada.

We had proceeded a short distance when on the further side of the street
I descried a golden halo which outlined the silhouette of a coffee
stall. It occurred to me that a cup of hot coffee would be a good tonic
to disperse the last symptoms of my friend's indiscretion, so I
deflected him across the road, and we brought up, together, alongside
the coffee-stall's counter.

Lest the reader should be unacquainted with that unique creation, the
coffee-stall, I must explain that it is nocturnal in habit, emerging
from its lair only between the hours of 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. It is an
equipage of which the interior is inhabited by a fat, jolly man (at
least according to my experience he is always fat and jolly) surrounded
by steaming urns, plates of cake, buns of a citron-yellow hue, pale
pastries, ham sandwiches and packets of cigarettes. The upper panels of
one of its sides unfold to form a bar below and a penthouse roof above,
the latter being generally extended into an awning. The awning is a
protection for the customer not against the sun--a luminary from whose
assaults the London coffee-stalls have little to fear--but against the
rain. Thanks to these awnings, and the chattiness of the fat, jolly man,
and the warmth exhaled by the urns, and the circumstance that the public
houses are shut, our coffee-stalls are able to sell two brownish
beverages, called respectively coffee and tea, which otherwise could
hardly hope to achieve the honour of human consumption.

Fate has guided me on many midnight pilgrimages through the town, and I
have imbibed, sometimes with relish, the liquids alluded to; I have also
partaken of the pallid pastry and the citron-yellow buns. I am therefore
in a position to write, for the benefit of persons less well infor