low them to do); the younger lady had become convinced that the elder
lady had meant to cheat her, and the elder lady was in tears.

The florid gentleman and myself continued to Charing Cross Station. At
the booking office window it transpired that we were bound for the same
suburb, and we journeyed down together. He talked about the fourpence
all the way.

At my gate we shook hands, and he was good enough to express delight at
the discovery that we were near neighbours. What attracted him to myself
I failed to understand, for he had bored me considerably, and I had, to
the best of my ability, snubbed him. Subsequently I learned that it was
a peculiarity of his to be charmed with anyone who did not openly insult
him.

Three days afterwards he burst into my study unannounced--he appeared to
regard himself as my bosom friend--and asked me to forgive him for not
having called sooner, which I did.

"I met the postman as I was coming along," he said, handing me a blue
envelope, "and he gave me this, for you."

I saw it was an application for the water-rate.

"We must make a stand against this," he continued. "That's for water to
the 29th September. You've no right to pay it in June."

I replied to the effect that water-rates had to be paid, and that it
seemed to me immaterial whether they were paid in June or September.

"That's not it," he answered, "it's the principle of the thing. Why
should you pay for water you have never had? What right have they to
bully you into paying what you don't owe?"

He was a fluent talker, and I was ass enough to listen to him. By the
end of half an hour he had persuaded me that the question was bound up
with the inalienable rights of man, and that if I paid that fourteen and
tenpence in June instead of in September, I should be unworthy of the
privileges my forefathers had fought and died to bestow upon me.

He told me the company had not a leg to stand upon, and at his
instigation I sat down and wrote an insulting letter to the chairman.

The secretary replied that, having regard to the attitude I had taken up,
it would be incumbent upon themselves to treat it as a test case, and
presumed that my solicitors would accept service on my behalf.

When I showed him this letter he was delighted.

"You leave it to me," he said, pocketing the correspondence, "and we'll
teach them a lesson."

I left it to him. My only excuse is that at the time I was immersed in
the writing