st, so the
newspapers said. Speaking for myself, I never believed the report: he
wasn't that sort. If anybody was eaten, it was more likely the cannibal.
But that is neither here nor there. What I am thinking of is what
happened before he and the cannibals ever got nigh to one another. He
was fourteen when I first set eyes on him--Mile End fourteen, that is;
which is the same, I take it, as City eighteen and West End
five-and-twenty--and he was smart for his age into the bargain: a trifle
too smart as a matter of fact. He always came into the shop at the same
time--half-past two; he always sat in the seat next the window; and three
days out of six, he would order the same dinner: a fourpenny beef-steak
pudding--we called it beef-steak, and, for all practical purposes, it was
beef-steak--a penny plate of potatoes, and a penny slice of roly-poly
pudding--'chest expander' was the name our customers gave it--to follow.
That showed sense, I always thought, that dinner alone; a more satisfying
menu, at the price, I defy any human being to work out. He always had a
book with him, and he generally read during his meal; which is not a bad
plan if you don't want to think too much about what you are eating. There
was a seedy chap, I remember, used to dine at a cheap restaurant where I
once served, just off the Euston Road. He would stick a book up in front
of him--Eppy something or other--and read the whole time. Our
four-course shilling table d'hote with Eppy, he would say, was a banquet
fit for a prince; without Eppy he was of opinion that a policeman
wouldn't touch it. But he was one of those men that report things for
the newspapers, and was given to exaggeration.

"A coffee-shop becomes a bit of a desert towards three o'clock; and,
after a while, young Tidelman, for that was his name, got to putting down
his book and chatting to me. His father was dead; which, judging from
what he told me about the old man, must have been a bit of luck for
everybody; and his mother, it turned out, had come from my own village in
Suffolk; and that constituted a sort of bond between us, seeing I had
known all her people pretty intimately. He was earning good money at a
dairy, where his work was scouring milk-cans; and his Christian
name--which was the only thing Christian about him, and that, somehow or
another, didn't seem to fit him--was Joseph.

"One afternoon he came into the shop looking as if he had lost a shilling
and found