his hands. This last fact I did not learn till afterwards. The
general impression conveyed to me was that of a local personage.
He was a bachelor and gave weekly card-parties in his house out of
town, which were attended by the best people in the colony.

The greater, then, was my surprise to discover his office in shabby
surroundings, quite away from the business quarter, amongst a lot
of hovels. Guided by a black board with white lettering, I climbed
a narrow wooden staircase and entered a room with a bare floor of
planks littered with bits of brown paper and wisps of packing
straw. A great number of what looked like wine-cases were piled up
against one of the walls. A lanky, inky, light-yellow, mulatto
youth, miserably long-necked and generally recalling a sick
chicken, got off a three-legged stool behind a cheap deal desk and
faced me as if gone dumb with fright. I had some difficulty in
persuading him to take in my name, though I could not get from him
the nature of his objection. He did it at last with an almost
agonised reluctance which ceased to be mysterious to me when I
heard him being sworn at menacingly with savage, suppressed growls,
then audibly cuffed and finally kicked out without any concealment
whatever; because he came back flying head foremost through the
door with a stifled shriek.

To say I was startled would not express it. I remained still, like
a man lost in a dream. Clapping both his hands to that part of his
frail anatomy which had received the shock, the poor wretch said to
me simply:

"Will you go in, please." His lamentable self-possession was
wonderful; but it did not do away with the incredibility of the