ked in the press-room in the House of Flamma, Fleet
Street, pulling artists' proofs, or printing expensively illustrated
volumes--numbered, and the plates destroyed--actual manual work, in his
shirt sleeves.

He could stop when he liked and take a swig of stout. That was the Alere
style.

Smoking was forbidden in the old House of Flamma because of the
worm-eaten beams, the worm-eaten rafters and staircase, the dusty,
decayed bookshelves, the dry, rotten planks of the floor, the thin
wooden partitions, all ready to catch fire at the mere sight of a match.
Also because of the piles of mouldy books which choked the place, and
looked fit for nothing but a bonfire, but which were worth thousands of
pounds; the plates and lithographic stones, artists' proofs, divers and
sundry Old Masters in a room upstairs, all easily destructible.

But Alere, being a son of the house, though not in command, did not
choose to be amenable to rules and orders in fact, in fiction he was. He
smoked and kept the glue-pot ready on the stove; if a certain step was
known to be approaching the pipe was thrust out of sight, and some dry
glue set melting, the powerful incense quite hiding the flavour of
tobacco. A good deal of dry glue is used in London in this way.

If I could but write the inside history of Fleet Street, I should be
looked upon as the most wonderful exponent of human life that had ever
touched a pen. Balzac--whom everybody talks of and nobody has read,
because the discrimination of Paternoster Row has refused him a
translation till quite lately--Zola, who professes to be realistic, who
is nothing if not realistic, but whose writings are so curiously crude
and merely skim the surface; even the great Hugo, who produced the
masterpiece of all fiction, _Les Miserables_; all three of them, the
entire host of manuscript-makers, I am sure I could vanquish them all,
if I could only write the inside life of Fleet Street.

Not in any grace of style or sweeping march of diction, but just
pencil-jotted in the roughest words to hand, just as rich and poor,
well-dressed ladies and next-door beggars are bundled into a train, so,
without choice of language, but hustling the first words anyhow, as it
were, into the first compartment. If I could only get Alere to tell me
all he had seen in Fleet Street, and could just jot it down on the
margin of a stained newspaper, all the world would laugh and weep. For
such things do go on in Fleet Street as