and I found my uncle behind the counter of the pharmacy he managed, an
establishment that did not impress me as doing a particularly high-class
trade. "Lord!" he said at the sight of me, "I was wanting something to
happen!"

He greeted me warmly. I had grown taller, and he, I thought, had grown
shorter and smaller and rounder but otherwise he was unchanged. He
struck me as being rather shabby, and the silk hat he produced and put
on, when, after mysterious negotiations in the back premises he achieved
his freedom to accompany me, was past its first youth; but he was as
buoyant and confident as ever.

"Come to ask me about all THAT," he cried. "I've never written yet."

"Oh, among other things," said I, with a sudden regrettable politeness,
and waived the topic of his trusteeship to ask after my aunt Susan.

"We'll have her out of it," he said suddenly; "we'll go somewhere. We
don't get you in London every day."

"It's my first visit," I said, "I've never seen London before"; and
that made him ask me what I thought of it, and the rest of the talk was
London, London, to the exclusion of all smaller topics. He took me up
the Hampstead Road almost to the Cobden statue, plunged into some back
streets to the left, and came at last to a blistered front door that
responded to his latch-key, one of a long series of blistered front
doors with fanlights and apartment cards above. We found ourselves in
a drab-coloured passage that was not only narrow and dirty but
desolatingly empty, and then he opened a door and revealed my aunt
sitting at the window with a little sewing-machine on a bamboo