I was glad he didn't. The Giraffe blubberin' would have been a
spectacle. I steered him back to his friends.

"Ain't you going to kiss me, Bob?" said the Great Western's big,
handsome barmaid, as the bell rang.

"Well, I don't mind kissin' you, Alice," he said, wiping his mouth.
"But I'm goin' to be married, yer know." And he kissed her fair on
the mouth.

"There's nothin' like gettin' into practice," he said, grinning
round.

We thought he was improving wonderfully; but at the last moment
something troubled him.

"Look here, you chaps," he said, hesitatingly, with his hand in his
pocket, "I don't know what I'm going to do with all this stuff.
There's that there poor washerwoman that scalded her legs liftin' the
boiler of clothes off the fire---"

We shoved him into the carriage. He hung--about half of him--out the
window, wildly waving his hat, till the train disappeared in the
scrub.

And, as I sit here writing by lamplight at midday, in the midst of a
great city of shallow social sham, of hopeless, squalid poverty, of
ignorant selfishness, cultured or brutish, and of noble and heroic
endeavour frowned down or callously neglected, I am almost aware of a
burst of sunshine in the room, and a long form leaning over my chair,