at?" I snapped, my early training come in again. "Say it
slowly--andante--rallentando."

Thank Italy for the stage instructions in the songs one used to murder!
The fellow actually understood.

"Una--quistione--di--vita."

"Or mors, eh?" I shouted, and up went the trap-door over our heads.

"Avanti, avanti, avanti!" cried the Italian, turning up his one-eyed
face.

"Hell-to-leather," I translated, "and double fare if you do it by
twelve o'clock."

But in the streets of London how is one to know the time? In the
Earl's Court Road it had not been half-past, and at Barker's in High
Street it was but a minute later. A long half-mile a minute, that was
going like the wind, and indeed we had done much of it at a gallop.
But the next hundred yards took us five minutes by the next clock, and
which was one to believe? I fell back upon my own old watch (it was my
own), which made it eighteen minutes to the hour as we swung across the
Serpentine bridge, and by the quarter we were in the Bayswater
Road--not up for once.

"Presto, presto," my pale guide murmured. "Affretatevi--avanti!"

"Ten bob if you do it," I cried through the trap, without the slightest
notion of what we were to do. But it was "una quistione di vita," and
"vostro amico" must and could only be my miserable Raffles.

What a very godsend is the perfect hansom to the man or woman in a
hurry! It had been our great good fortune to jump into a perfect
hansom; there was no choice, we had to take the first upon the rank,
but it must have deserved its place with the rest nowhere. New tires,
superb springs, a horse in a thousand, and a driver up to every trick
of his trade! In and out we went like a fast half-back at the Rugby
game, yet where the traffic was thinnest, there were we. And how he
knew his way! At the Marble Arch he slipped out of the main stream,
and so into Wigmore Street, then up and in and out and on until I saw
the gold tips of the Museum palisade gleaming between the horse's ears
in the sun. Plop, plop, plop; ting, ling, ling; bell and horse-shoes,
horse-shoes and bell, until the colossal figure of C. J. Fox in a grimy
toga spelt Bloomsbury Square with my watch still wanting three minutes
to the hour.

"What number?" cried the good fellow over-head.

"Trentotto, trentotto," said my guide, but he was looking to the right,
and I bundled him out to show the house on foot. I had not
half-a-sovereign after all, but I flung our dear