endeavoured to retain his method, which was individual; and this, I
think, is the story as he would have told it to me himself, had he told
it in this order:

My first place--well to be honest, it was a coffee shop in the Mile End
Road--I'm not ashamed of it. We all have our beginnings. Young
"Kipper," as we called him--he had no name of his own, not that he knew
of anyhow, and that seemed to fit him down to the ground--had fixed his
pitch just outside, between our door and the music hall at the corner;
and sometimes, when I might happen to have a bit on, I'd get a paper from
him, and pay him for it, when the governor was not about, with a mug of
coffee, and odds and ends that the other customers had left on their
plates--an arrangement that suited both of us. He was just about as
sharp as they make boys, even in the Mile End Road, which is saying a
good deal; and now and then, spying around among the right sort, and
keeping his ears open, he would put me up to a good thing, and I would
tip him a bob or a tanner as the case might be. He was the sort that
gets on--you know.

One day in he walks, for all the world as if the show belonged to him,
with a young imp of a girl on his arm, and down they sits at one of the
tables.

"Garsong," he calls out, "what's the menoo to-day?"

"The menoo to-day," I says, "is that you get outside 'fore I clip you
over the ear, and that you take that back and put it where you found it;"
meaning o' course, the kid.

She was a pretty little thing, even then, in spite of the dirt, with