een--a black sky tinged with
sullen rose, or a red sky seen through smoked glasses, he hardly knew
which he would have called it. But he did know that warm and angry glow
for the reflection of London's light and life; he could not forget he was
in London for a moment. Her mighty machinery with its million wheels
throbbed perpetually in his ears; and yet between the beats would come the
quack of a wild duck near at hand, the splash of a leaping fish, the
plaintive whistle of water-fowl: altogether such a chorus of incongruities
as was not lost upon our very impressionable young vagabond. The booming
strokes of eleven recalled him to a sense of time and his immediate needs.
His great adventure was still before him; he pushed on, bag in hand, to
select its scene. Another road he crossed, alive with the lamps of
cyclists, and came presently upon a wide space intersected with broad
footpaths from which he shrank; it was altogether too public here; he was
approaching an exposed corner in an angle of lighted streets, with the
Marble Arch at its apex, as a signboard made quite clear. He had come
right across the Park; back over the grass, keeping rather more to the
right, in the direction of those trees, was the best thing now.

It was here that he found the grass distinctly damp; this really was
enough to deter an asthmatic, already beginning to feel asthmatical.
Pocket Upton, however, belonged to the large class of people, weak and
strong alike, who are more than loth to abandon a course of action once
taken. It would have required a very severe attack to baulk him of his
night out and its subsequent description to electrified ears. But when
bad steering had brought him up at the bandstand, the deserted chairs
seemed an ordained compromise between prudence and audacity, and he had
climbed into the fenced enclosure when another enormous policeman rose up
horribly in its midst.

"What are you doing here?" inquired this policeman, striding upon Pocket
with inexorable tread.

"No harm, I hope," replied our hero humbly, but with unusual readiness.

"Nor no good either, I'll be bound!" said the policeman, standing over
him.

"I was only going to sit down," protested Pocket, having satisfied his
conscience that in the first place that was all he really had been going
to do.

"There are plenty of places to sit down," rejoined the policeman. "You're
not allowed in here. And unless you look sharp about it you won't have
t