He went at first to stay with a married cousin who had a house at
Easewood. His widowed father had recently given up the music and
bicycle shop (with the post of organist at the parish church) that had
sustained his home, and was living upon a small annuity as a guest
with this cousin, and growing a little tiresome on account of some
mysterious internal discomfort that the local practitioner diagnosed
as imagination. He had aged with mysterious rapidity and become
excessively irritable, but the cousin's wife was a born manager, and
contrived to get along with him. Our Mr. Polly's status was that of a
guest pure and simple, but after a fortnight of congested hospitality
in which he wrote nearly a hundred letters beginning:

_Sir:_

_Referring to your advt. in the "Christian World" for an improver in
Gents' outfitting I beg to submit myself for the situation. Have had
six years' experience...._

and upset a bottle of ink over a toilet cover and the bedroom carpet,
his cousin took him for a walk and pointed out the superior advantages
of apartments in London from which to swoop upon the briefly yawning
vacancy.

"Helpful," said Mr. Polly; "very helpful, O' Man indeed. I might have
gone on there for weeks," and packed.

He got a room in an institution that was partly a benevolent hostel
for men in his circumstances and partly a high minded but forbidding
coffee house and a centre for pleasant Sunday afternoons. Mr. Polly