lso noticed how dry
the vegetables appeared, and how moist the fruits which were exposed
for sale; further, how shabby and threadbare were the carpets
floating at the pawnbrokers' doors, and how fusty the odour from them.
In a word, Leonard could not help seeing that this was a very poor
region.

It did _not_ strike him that poverty and crime are near neighbours;
that the circumstances which make the honest man poor, make the lazy
man a thief. Leonard was too young to be suspicious. He scarcely saw a
shambling poorly-dressed rather wasted man whom he passed, and who
afterwards stumbled along a very little way behind him. Nor did he
specially notice two rather well-dressed but coarse-looking men who
kept just ahead of him.

But when these two began to talk loud he did notice them. When they
stood in the middle of the narrow pavement, quarrelling, Leonard
paused and looked on.

"You did!" said the one.

"I did not!" said the other.

"I'll make you confess it on your marrow-bones!"

"You shall have every bone in your body broke first!"

By this time a crowd had begun to collect. The two men seemed
preparing for a fight.

"Part them, someone!" cried Leonard.

"Let them fight it out!" cried a costermonger, seating himself on his
barrow.

"I'll see fair play!" roared a great unwashed man.

A voice behind Leonard said in his ear, "You come out of this, young
fellow!" and looking round the lad saw the shabby, sickly man who had
been following him.

The crowd hemmed them all four in the midst of it.

"Hallo! The bobbies!" was whispered.

The crowd opened a way through which one of the disputants rushed, all
eyes fixed upon him.

An arm came over Leonard's shoulder, and a dirty hand clutched his
turquoise breast-pin; another arm came over the other shoulder and
another hand clutched the first one. At the same moment two
policemen's helmets peered over the crowd, and a stern voice said,
"What's up? What's your game?"

Then in some mysterious way the first hand and arm vanished, and only
the second remained, and Leonard found himself thus hugged by a
stranger, and confronted by two stalwart policemen.

When an English man or boy finds himself in the hands (or, as in this
case, in the arms) of a stranger, his first impulse is to show fight.
Naturally Leonard began to plunge and to double his fists. But he
could not keep this up, for the man whose arm was round him quickly
retired and stood a few paces off, l