across the counter. Then there were waitresses, and their notion of
waiting was to spend an hour talking to a twopenny cup of coffee, and to
look haughty and insulted whenever anybody as really wanted something
ventured to ask for it. A frizzle-haired cashier used to make love all
day out of her pigeon-hole with the two box-office boys from the Oxford
Music Hall, who took it turn and turn about. Sometimes she'd leave off
to take a customer's money, and sometimes she wouldn't. I've been to
some rummy places in my time; and a waiter ain't the blind owl as he's
supposed to be. But never in my life have I seen so much love-making,
not all at once, as used to go on in that place. It was a dismal, gloomy
sort of hole, and spoony couples seemed to scent it out by instinct, and
would spend hours there over a pot of tea and assorted pastry. "Idyllic,"
some folks would have thought it: I used to get the fair dismals watching
it. There was one girl--a weird-looking creature, with red eyes and long
thin hands, that gave you the creeps to look at. She'd come in regular
with her young man, a pale-faced nervous sort of chap, at three o'clock
every afternoon. Theirs was the funniest love-making I ever saw. She'd
pinch him under the table, and run pins into him, and he'd sit with his
eyes glued on her as if she'd been a steaming dish of steak and onions
and he a starving beggar the other side of the window. A strange story
that was--as I came to learn it later on. I'll tell you that, one day.

I'd been engaged for the "heavy work," but as the heaviest order I ever
heard given there was for a cold ham and chicken, which I had to slip out
for to the nearest cook-shop, I must have been chiefly useful from an
ornamental point of view.

I'd been there about a fortnight, and was feeling pretty sick of it, when
in walked young "Kipper." I didn't know him at first, he'd changed so.
He was swinging a silver-mounted crutch stick, which was the kind that