m, looking like the vision of a cool,
reflective Don Quixote, with the sunken eyes of a dark enthusiast and a
very deliberate manner. He left the scene of his daily labours quickly
like an unobtrusive shadow. His descent into the street was like the
descent into a slimy aquarium from which the water had been run off. A
murky, gloomy dampness enveloped him. The walls of the houses were wet,
the mud of the roadway glistened with an effect of phosphorescence, and
when he emerged into the Strand out of a narrow street by the side of
Charing Cross Station the genius of the locality assimilated him. He
might have been but one more of the queer foreign fish that can be seen
of an evening about there flitting round the dark corners.

He came to a stand on the very edge of the pavement, and waited. His
exercised eyes had made out in the confused movements of lights and
shadows thronging the roadway the crawling approach of a hansom. He gave
no sign; but when the low step gliding along the curbstone came to his
feet he dodged in skilfully in front of the big turning wheel, and spoke
up through the little trap door almost before the man gazing supinely
ahead from his perch was aware of having been boarded by a fare.

It was not a long drive. It ended by signal abruptly, nowhere in
particular, between two lamp-posts before a large drapery
establishment--a long range of shops already lapped up in sheets of
corrugated iron for the night. Tendering a coin through the trap door
the fare slipped out and away, leaving an effect of uncanny, eccentric
ghastliness upon the driver's mind. But the size of the coin was
satisfactory to his touch, and his education not being literary, he
remained untroubled by the fear of finding it presently turned to a dead
leaf in his pocket. Raised above the world of fares by the nature of his
calling, he contemplated their actions with a limited interest. The
sharp pulling of his horse right round expressed his philosophy.

Meantime the Assistant Commissioner was already giving his order to a
waiter in a little Italian restaurant round the corner--one of those
traps for the hungry, long and narrow, baited with a perspective of
mirrors and white napery; without air, but with an atmosphere of their
own--an atmosphere of fraudulent cookery mocking an abject mankind in the
most pressing of its miserable necessities. In this immoral atmosphere
the Assistant Commissioner, reflecting upon his enterpr