d-working member of Parliament, entered, threw
himself down wearily and lit a cigar. Then, idler that I was, I began to
gossip.

He was going up to Perthshire by the 11.45 from Euston that night, he
remarked.

"Where are you spending Christmas?" he asked.

"Don't know," I replied. "Probably at home."

"You seem to have the hump, my dear fellow," he remarked, with a laugh,
and then I confided to him the reason.

At last, about six o'clock, I put on my overcoat and left the club. The
rain had now stopped, therefore I decided to walk along to my rooms in
Guilford Street.

Hardly had I turned the corner into Piccadilly, when I heard a voice at
my elbow uttering my name with a foreign accent.

Turning quickly, I saw, to my great surprise, a man named Engler, whom I
had known in Bremen. He was a clerk in the Deutsche Bank, opposite the
Liebfrauen-Kirche, and popular in a certain circle in that Hanseatic
city.

"My dear Meester Jacox!" he exclaimed in broken English in his
enthusiastic way. "My dear frendt. Well, well! who would have thought of
meeting you. I am so ve-ry glad!" he cried. "I have only been in London
since three days."

I shook my friend's hand warmly, for a year ago, when I had spent some
time beside the Weser watching two men I had followed from London, we
had been extremely friendly.

I told him that I was on my way to my rooms, and invited him in to have
a chat.

He gladly accompanied me, and when we were comfortably seated in my cosy
sitting-room he began to relate to me all the latest news from Bremen
and of several of my friends.

Otto Engler was a well-dressed, rather elegant man of forty, whose fair
beard was well trimmed, whose eyes were full of fire, and who rather
prided himself upon being something of a lady-killer. He was in London
in connection with an important financial scheme in which his brother
and a German merchant in London, named Griesbach, were interested. He
and his brother Wilhelm were over on a visit to the merchant, who, he
told me, had offices in Coleman Street, and who lived in Lonsdale Road,
Barnes.

There was a fortune in the business, he declared, which was the
discovery of a new alloy, lighter than aluminium, yet with twenty times
the rigidity.

That evening we dined together at the "Trocadero," looked in at the
Empire, and returned to the club for a smoke.

Indeed, I was delighted to have found an old friend just when I was in
deepest despair of the dullne