e Dargo. You haf done your work gabidally, and you are
vorth fife dimes vot I am baying you. But I alvays like the shady site
of a pargain, and I shall only gif you four dimes.'

So at four times the original sum Paul's salary was fixed, and he began
to feel himself a man of consequence.

'I am Mr. Darco's private secretary,' he was told to say to people with
whom he was empowered to deal. 'I am entirely in Mr. Darco's confidence,
and you may deal with me exactly as if Mr. Darco were here.'

At the beginning of the second year the great provincial cities had
begun to take advantage of the Public Libraries Act, and here was a new
joy for Paul. The Free Library was the first place he asked for in any
big town, and at every spare hour he stuck his nose into a book, and
kept it there until duty called him away again. Something in 'Gil Bias'
about poverty in observation struck his fancy, and he cast about in
his own mind asking where he could observe, not knowing yet that he was
observing all things. He hit upon the landlady. A man who has fifty-two
landladies in a year has surely a fertile field. He sorted and
classified in the light of experience: the honeyed, the acidulated, and
bibulous-godly (mostly Scottish), the bibulous-ungodly (mostly English),
the slut with a clean outside to things, the painstaking sloven, the
peculative (here one majestic sample), the reduced in circumstances,
the confidential, the reserved, the frisky, the motherly, the
step-motherly--a most excellent assembly for mirth and pity.

Mrs. Brace came back again. How many years was it since the memory of
Mrs. Brace had touched the Exile's mind?

Darco did, in the main, his own marketing. He had sent home sausages for
breakfast, seven in number. Six came to table.

'Vere is my other zausage,' cries Darco. 'There vere zeven. Now there
are six. Vere is my other zausage?'

'Really you know, sir,' says Mrs. Brace. 'Sausages do shrink so in the
cooking.'

Paul was under the table with a helpless yelp of pleasure, and Darco
stormed like a beaten gong.

Come back again, in the brown sultry air, and the solitude, over that
bridge of years departed, Mrs. Fuller. It was Mrs. Fuller's plan to
convey a portion of the guests' clean linen from the chest of drawers
into the hall, and to lay it on the table there pinned up in a neat
newspaper parcel, and to say, 'If you please, gentlemen, the rest
of your linning have come home, and, if you please, it's two