returning to his room. He
besought me with tears in his eyes not to shut him up. "It's my last
chance--I want to go back for an hour to that garden of Saint John's.
Let me eat and drink--to-morrow I die." It seemed to me possible that
with a Bath-chair the expedition might be accomplished. The hotel, it
appeared, possessed such a convenience, which was immediately produced.
It became necessary hereupon that we should have a person to propel the
chair. As there was no one on the spot at liberty I was about to perform
the office; but just as my patient had got seated and wrapped--he now
had a perpetual chill--an elderly man emerged from a lurking-place near
the door and, with a formal salute, offered to wait upon the gentleman.
We assented, and he proceeded solemnly to trundle the chair before him.
I recognised him as a vague personage whom I had observed to lounge
shyly about the doors of the hotels, at intervals during our stay, with
a depressed air of wanting employment and a poor semblance of finding
it. He had once indeed in a half-hearted way proposed himself as an
amateur cicerone for a tour through the colleges; and I now, as I
looked at him, remembered with a pang that I had too curtly declined his
ministrations. Since then his shyness, apparently, had grown less or
his misery greater, for it was with a strange grim avidity that he
now attached himself to our service. He was a pitiful image of shabby
gentility and the dinginess of "reduced circumstances." He would
have been, I suppose, some fifty years of age; but his pale haggard
unwholesome visage, his plaintive drooping carriage and the irremediable
disarray of his apparel seemed to add to the burden of his days and
tribulations. His eyes were weak and bloodshot, his bold nose was sadly
compromised, and his reddish beard, largely streaked with grey, bristled
under a month's neglect of the razor. In all this rusty forlornness
lurked a visible assurance of our friend's having known better days.
Obviously he was the victim of some fatal depreciation in the market
value of pure gentility. There had been something terribly affecting in
the way he substituted for the attempt to touch the greasy rim of his
antiquated hat some such bow as one man of the world might make another.
Exchanging a few words with him as we went I was struck with the
decorum of his accent. His fine whole voice should have been congruously
cracked.

"Take me by some long roundabout way," said