‘An old public school boy, what? [He had heard me say something to Paddy.] Don’t meet many of the old school here. I am an old Etonian. You know–twenty years hence this weather and all that.’ He began to quaver out the Eton boating-song, not untunefully:

Jolly boating weather,
And a hay harvest——

‘Stop that——noise!’ shouted several lodgers.

‘Low types,’ said the old Etonian, ‘very low types. Funny sort of place for you and me, eh? Do you know what my friends say to me? They say, “M——, you are past redemption.” Quite true, I am past redemption. I’ve come down in the world; not like these——s here, who couldn’t come down if they tried. We chaps who have come down ought to hang together a bit. Youth will be still in our faces–you know. May I offer you a drink?’

He produced a bottle of cherry brandy, and at the same moment lost his balance and fell heavily across my legs. Paddy, who was undressing, pulled him upright.

‘Get back to yer bed, you silly ole c——!’

The old Etonian walked unsteadily to his bed and crawled under the sheets with all his clothes on, even his boots. Several times in the night I heard him murmuring, ‘M——, you are past redemption,’ as though the phrase appealed to him. In the morning he was lying asleep fully dressed, with the bottle clasped in his arms. He was a man of about fifty, with a refined, worn face, and, curiously enough, quite fashionably dressed. It was queer to see his good patent-leather shoes sticking out of that filthy bed. It occurred to me, too, that the cherry brandy must have cost the equivalent of a fortnight’s lodging, so he could not have been seriously hard up. Perhaps he frequented common lodging-houses in search of the ‘nancy boys’.

The beds were not more than two feet apart. About midnight I woke up to find that the man next to me was trying to steal the money from beneath my pillow. He was pretending to be asleep while he did it, sliding his hand under the pillow as gently as a rat. In the morning I saw that he was a hunchback, with long, apelike arms. I told Paddy about the attempted theft. He laughed and said: