e
calm altitudes of scorn wherein his soul has its habitation. I burned to
defend him, and I burn now; and that is why I propose to write his
_apologia_, his justification.

Why he singled me out for adoption from among the unwashed urchins of
London I never could conjecture. Once I asked him.

"Because," said he, "you were ugly, dirty, ricketty, under-sized,
underfed and wholly uninteresting. Also because your mother was the very
worst washer-woman that ever breathed gin into a shirt-front."

I did not resent these charges, direct and implied, against my mother.
She did launder villainously, and she did drink gin, and of the nine
uncared-for gutter-snipes she brought into the world, I think I was the
most unkempt and neglected. I know that Sunday-school books tell you to
love your mother; but if the only maternal caresses you could remember
were administered by means of a wet pair of woollen drawers or the edge
of a hot flat-iron, you would find filial piety a virtue somewhat
abstract. Verily do earwigs care more for their progeny than did my
mother. She sold me body and soul to Paragot for half-a-crown.

It fell out thus.

One morning, laden with his--technically speaking--clean linen, I
knocked at the door of Paragot's chambers. He called them chambers, for
he was nothing if not grandiloquent, but really they consisted in an
attic in Tavistock Street, Covent Garden, above the curious club over
which he presided. I knocked, then, at the door. A sonorous voice bade
me enter. Paragot lay in bed, smoking a huge pipe with a porcelain bowl
and reading a book. The fact of one individual having a room all to
himself impressed me so greatly with a sense of luxury, refinement and
power, that I neglected to observe its pitifulness and squalor. Nor of
Paragot's personal appearance was I critical. He had long black hair,
and a long black beard, and long black finger-nails. The last were so
long and commanding that I thought ashamedly of my own bitten
fingertips, and vowed that when I too became a great man, able to smoke
a porcelain pipe of mornings in my own room, my nails should equal his
in splendour.

"I have brought the washing, Sir," I announced, "and, please, Sir,
mother says I'm not to let you have it unless you settle up for the last
three weeks."

I had a transient vision of swarthy, hairy legs, as Paragot leaped out
of bed. He stood over me, man of all the luxuries that he was, in his
nightshirt. Fancy having