all that any of them had been passed down to me.
'You see, Mr. Collingwood,' he said, 'when one keeps a little house
down at Wimbledon, these things have a way of dropping out as time
goes on.' 'Just like the teeth,' said I. He thought over this for a
while, and then laughed--oh, he laughed quite a lot--and declared I
was a humorist. He hadn't heard anything so quick, not for a long
while. 'Mr. Collingwood,' he said, 'I'm a lonely man with it all.
I don't mind owning to you that I've taken up these here politics
partly for distraction. It used to be different when me and Maria
could stick it out over a game of bezique. She used to make me dress
for dinner, always. We had a billiard-room, too: but that didn't
work so well. I could never bring her up to my standard of play, not
within forty in a hundred, by reason that she'd use the rest for
almost every stroke. She had a sense of humour, had Maria: you'd
have got along with her, Mr. Collingwood, and she'd have got along
with you. You'd have struck sparks. One evening I asked her,
'Maria, why are you so fond of the jigger?' 'Because of my figger,'
says she, pat as you please. Now, wasn't that humorous, eh? She
_meant_, of course, that being of the buxom sort in later life--and
it carried her off in the end--' Why, hallo!" Jimmy exclaimed.
"Are we home already?"

"We have arrived at the Temple, E.C.," said I gently, "but scarcely
yet at the beginning of the story."

He resumed it in our chambers, while I operated on the hearth with a
firelighter.

"Well," said Jimmy, smoking, "to cut a long story short"--and I
grunted my thanks--"he told me he was a lonely man, but that he knew
a thing or two yet. Had I by any chance made acquaintance with the
'Catalafina,' in Soho? 'Oh, come!' said I bashfully, 'who is she?'
'It's a restarong,' said he: 'Italian: where the cook does things you
can't guess what they're made of. Just as well, perhaps.' But the
results, he undertook to say, were excellent."

"Do I see one?" I asked.

"No, you don't," answered Jimmy, sipping his whisky-and-soda.
"That's just _it_, if you'll let me proceed. . . . He said that they
kept some marvellous Lagrima Christi--if I liked Lagrima Christi.
For his part, it always soured on his stomach. But we could send out
for a bottle of fizz--I'm using his expression, Otty--"

"I trust so," said I.

"He called it that. He said he would take it as an honour if I'd
join him in a little s