hat the water almost seemed of fiercer flame than the sunset it
mirrored. It looked like a stream of literal fire winding under the vast
caverns of a subterranean country.

Syme was shabby in those days. He wore an old-fashioned black
chimney-pot hat; he was wrapped in a yet more old-fashioned cloak, black
and ragged; and the combination gave him the look of the early villains
in Dickens and Bulwer Lytton. Also his yellow beard and hair were more
unkempt and leonine than when they appeared long afterwards, cut and
pointed, on the lawns of Saffron Park. A long, lean, black cigar, bought
in Soho for twopence, stood out from between his tightened teeth, and
altogether he looked a very satisfactory specimen of the anarchists upon
whom he had vowed a holy war. Perhaps this was why a policeman on the
Embankment spoke to him, and said "Good evening."

Syme, at a crisis of his morbid fears for humanity, seemed stung by the
mere stolidity of the automatic official, a mere bulk of blue in the
twilight.

"A good evening is it?" he said sharply. "You fellows would call the end
of the world a good evening. Look at that bloody red sun and that bloody
river! I tell you that if that were literally human blood, spilt and
shining, you would still be standing here as solid as ever, looking out
for some poor harmless tramp whom you could move on. You policemen are
cruel to the poor, but I could forgive you even your cruelty if it were
not for your calm."

"If we are calm," replied the policeman, "it is the calm of organised
resistance."

"Eh?" said Syme, staring.

"The soldier must be calm in the thick of the battle," pursued the
policeman. "The composure of an army is the anger of a nation."

"Good God, the Board Schools!" said Syme. "Is this undenominational
education?"

"No," said the policeman sadly, "I never had any of those advantages.
The Board Schools came after my time. What education I had was very
rough and old-fashioned, I am afraid."

"Where did you have it?" asked Syme, wondering.

"Oh, at Harrow," said the policeman

The class sympathies which, false as they are, are the truest things in
so many men, broke out of Syme before he could control them.

"But, good Lord, man," he said, "you oughtn't to be a policeman!"

The policeman sighed and shook his head.

"I know," he said solemnly, "I know I am not worthy."

"But why did you join the police?" asked Syme with rude curiosity.

"For much the same reason tha