ously yelling at the top
of their strident and hoarse voices:

"Hooray! Hoo--bl----dy--ray!"

Abashed, I followed my doctor into the shelter of the building, a new
edifice, capacious and considerable, but horribly faced with terra
cotta, and quite unimposing, lacking in the spectacular effect; like
nearly everything in the Five Towns, carelessly and scornfully ugly! The
mean, swinging double-doors returned to the assault when you pushed
them, and hit you viciously. In a dark, countered room marked
"Enquiries" there was nobody.

"Hi, there!" called the doctor.

A head appeared at a door.

"Mr Buchanan upstairs?"

"Yes," snapped the head, and disappeared.

Up a dark staircase we went, and at the summit were half flung back
again by another self-acting door.

In the room to which we next came an old man and a youngish one were
bent over a large, littered table, scribbling on and arranging pieces of
grey tissue paper and telegrams. Behind the old man stood a boy. Neither
of them looked up.

"Mr Buchanan in his--" the doctor began to question. "Oh! There you
are!"

The editor was standing in hat and muffler at the window, gazing out.
His age was about that of the doctor--forty or so; and like the doctor
he was rather stout and clean-shaven. Their Scotch accents mingled in
greeting, the doctor's being the more marked. Buchanan shook my hand
with a certain courtliness, indicating that he was well accustomed to
receive strangers. As an expert in small talk, however, he shone no
brighter than his visitors, and the three of us stood there by the
window awkwardly in the heaped disorder of the room, while the other two
men scratched and fidgeted with bits of paper at the soiled table.

Suddenly and savagely the old man turned on the boy:

"What the hades are you waiting there for?"

"I thought there was something else, sir."

"Sling your hook."

Buchanan winked at Stirling and me as the boy slouched off and the old
man blandly resumed his writing.

"Perhaps you'd like to look over the place?" Buchanan suggested politely
to me. "I'll come with you. It's all I'm fit for to-day.... 'Flu!" He
glanced at Stirling, and yawned.

"Ye ought to be in bed," said Stirling.

"Yes. I know. I've known it for twelve years. I shall go to bed as soon
as I get a bit of time to myself. Well, will you come? The half-time
results are beginning to come in."

A telephone-bell rang impatiently.

"You might just see what that is,