in Castle-street, Leicester-square, and took a half-bottle of chablis
with his oysters, and warmed himself with chambertin that was brought
to him in a dusty cobweb-shrouded bottle reposing in a wicker-basket.

But in these latter days such glimpses of sunshine very rarely
illumined the dull stream of the Captain's life. Failure and
disappointment had become the rule of his existence--success the rare
exception. Crossing the river now on his way westward, he was wont to
loiter a little on Waterloo Bridge, and to look dreamily down at the
water, wondering whether the time was near at hand when, under cover of
the evening dusk, he would pay his last halfpenny to the toll-keeper,
and never again know the need of an earthly coin.

"I saw a fellow in the Morgue one day,--a poor wretch who had drowned
himself a week or two before. Great God, how horrible he looked! If
there was any certainty they would find one immediately, and bury one
decently, there'd be no particular horror in that kind of death. But to
be found _like that_, and to lie in some riverside deadhouse down by
Wapping, with a ghastly placard rotting on the rotting door, and
nothing but ooze and slime and rottenness round about one--waiting to
be identified! And who knows, after all, whether a dead man doesn't
_feel_ that sort of thing?"

It was after such musings as these had begun to be very common with
Horatio Paget that he caught the chill which resulted in a very
dangerous illness of many weeks. The late autumn was wet and cold and
dreary; but Captain Paget, although remarkably clever after a certain
fashion, had never been a lover of intellectual pursuits, and
imprisonment in Mrs. Kepp's shabby parlour was odious to him. When he
had read every page of the borrowed newspaper, and pished and pshawed