y, is
there, Wallop? Must trouble you to go along by the roofs of the houses.
Now, now, don't flourish your umbrella at me, or I shall call the
police. My mother says I'm not to be worrited, doesn't she, Crow?"

"You ought to be ashamed of yourselves, a set of young fellows like
you," said the old lady, with great and very natural indignation,
"insulting respectable people. I suppose you call yourselves gentlemen.
I'm ashamed of you, that I am!"

"Oh, don't apologise," said Whipcord; "it's of no consequence."

"There's one of you," said the old lady, looking at me, "that looks as
if he ought to know better. A nice man you're making of him among you!"

I blushed, half with shame, half with bashfulness, to be thus singled
out, but considering it my duty to be as great a blackguard as my
companions, I joined in the chorus of ridicule and insult in a manner
which effectually disabused the poor lady of her suspicion that I was
any better than the others.

In the end she was forced to go out into the road to let us pass, and we
rollicked on rejoicing, as if we had achieved a great victory, and
speculating as to who next would be our victim.

I mention this incident to show in what frame of mind the troubles of
the day had left me. At any other time the idea of insulting a lady
would have horrified me. Now I cared for nothing if only I could forget
about Jack Smith.

We spent the remainder of the evening in the same rollicking way,
getting up rows here and there with what we were pleased to call the
"cads," and at other times indulging in practical jokes of all kinds, to
the annoyance of some passers-by and the injury of others.

More than once we adjourned to drink, and returned thence to our sport
more and more unsteady. As the evening grew later we grew more daring
and outrageous. Hawkesbury and Harris left the rest of us presently,
and, unrestrained even by their more sober demeanour, we chose the most
crowded thoroughfares and the most harmless victims for our operations.
Once we all of us trooped into a poor old man's shop who was too infirm
to come from behind the counter to prevent our turning his whole stock
upside down. Another time we considered it gentlemanly sport to upset
an orange barrow, or to capture a mild-looking doctor's boy and hustle
him along in front of us for a quarter of a mile.

In the course of our pilgrimage we came across the street in which Daly
and the Field-Marshal lodged, an