was obviously not pressed with business, I tried to recoup myself by a
little conversation.

"I suppose your job is pretty well over now? I don't see many of your
chairs occupied."

"Well, no sir, not by day, sir. But there's quite a few taken at night,
sir--over there in the hollow." I looked a leading question, and he went
on: "Young people come to sit there in the evening, sir. It's a quiet
place and out of the way."

"Oh, yes. Where they're not molested by the unemployed?" I cast a
generalizing glance over the dead and wounded of the battle of life
strewn about the grass of an adjacent space.

"Well, that's just where it is, sir. Those fellows do nothing but sleep
all day, and then after dark they get up and begin to prowl. They spy,
some of 'em, on the young people courting, and follow 'em 'ome and
blackmail 'em. They're a bad lot, sir. They wouldn't work if they could
get it."

I perceived that my friend was a capitalist, and I suspected him of
being one of the directors of the penny-chair company. But perhaps he
thought me a capitalist, too, and fancied that I would like to have him
decry the unemployed. Still he may have been right about the
blackmailing; one must live, and the innocent courage of open-air
courtship in London offers occasions of wilful misconstruction. In a
great city, the sense of being probably unnoted and unknown among its
myriads must eventuate in much indifference to one's surroundings. How
should a young couple on an omnibus-top imagine that a stranger in the