could not write, and only in the early days had an occasional newspaper
reached him, on which, alongside the Queen's head, she had put the mark
they had agreed on, to show that she was still alive. He would probably
never see her again, but would end his days where he was. Well, they
wouldn't be many; this was not a place that made old bones. And, as he
sat, worked on by grief and liquor, he was seized by a desperate
homesickness for the old country. Why had he ever been fool enough to
leave it? He shut his eyes, and all the well-known sights and sounds of
the familiar streets came back to him. He saw himself on his rounds of a
winter's afternoon, when each lamp had a halo in the foggy air; heard
the pit-pat of his four-footer behind him, the bump of the ladder
against the prong of the lamp-post. His friend the policeman's glazed
stovepipe shone out at the corner; from the distance came the tinkle of
the muffin-man's bell, the cries of the buy-a-brooms. He remembered the
glowing charcoal in the stoves of the chestnut and potato sellers; the
appetising smell of the cooked-fish shops; the fragrant steam of the
hot, dark coffee at the twopenny stall, when he had turned shivering out
of bed; he sighed for the lights and jollity of the "Hare and Hounds" on
a Saturday night. He would never see anything of the kind again. No;
here, under bare blue skies, out of which the sun frizzled you alive;
here, where it couldn't rain without at once being a flood; where the
very winds blew contrarily, hot from the north and bitter-chill from the
south; where, no matter how great the heat by day, the night would as
likely as not be nipping cold: here he was doomed to end his life, and
to end it, for all the yellow sunshine, more hopelessly knotted and
gnarled with rheumatism than if, dawn after dawn, he had gone out in a
cutting north-easter, or groped his way through the grey fog-mists sent
up by grey Thames.

Thus he sat and brooded, all the hatred of the unwilling exile for the