So

by cryin', when the gentleman didn't mean to 'urt yer?" saying, she winked at Jack, and crossed the road to the opposite public-house.

"I must really get on," thought Jack; "the body can be done with a few strokes."

He worked away vigorously for five minutes. Formless dabs of red paint were added to formless dabs, till the whole began to grow into an elongated oval. But now he discovered that the tail was really unnatural, for he had made it about a quarter of the width of the space allotted to the body, and he did not know how to diminish it.

"It is Destiny," he said. "Hitherto Fate, working by a remarkable harmonie préétablie, has driven us both into this course. But the harmonie seems to fail here. If it is the greatest art to conceal art, I have achieved perfection, for I have concealed mine beyond all chances of discovery." An organ commenced to play as Jack began on the head, and unconsciously his brush jerked up and down in time to the music.

"Væ mihi!" he sighed. "How hide these horns? I shall have to give the poor animal water on the brain." At this point he heard a long, low whistle. It came from his employer, who was looking up in speechless astonishment.

66

What do you call that?" he said at last. "Of course not," replied Jack feebly.

embryo."

"A lion where?"

"That ain't a lion!"

"It is a-a lion in

"Unfinished, you know-before birth," he explained.

་

"And d'ye mean to tell me that lions have horns befuic birth?" "Some lions have," said Jack, with logical accuracy.

"Well, you know more about them than I do, old man. But stop it now, and come and have a chop with me inside; it's dinner-time." Nothing loth, Jack descended and ate the chop, amid a sullen silence that much disturbed his friend and "the missus," the latter of whom kept plying him with ale to enliven him.

"You're sure you ain't ill, old man?" the publican said earnestly, when Jack was preparing to remount. "Because if you are, you can finish it when you're better, and when you can handle the brush better."

"I assure you," protested Jack, "I'm handling the brush better to-day than ever before."

"Think so?" said the publican doubtfully. However, you know your own business best."

It looks funny.

The crowd was anxiously waiting, and a slight cheer greeted his arrival. "They will see it out to the bitter end," he thought. No sooner was he in position than it struck him that, by giving the lion an unusually flowing mane, the horns might be utilised as hair. He set to work with extra vigour.

"Toot-a-tootle, toot-a-tootle, bang! bang!" The former mellifluous strains suddenly broke out from a paper-covered comb, played by a man whose beating of a drum produced the latter.

"Punch and Judy!" exclaimed the children in a breath, and some rushed to the new attraction. But many still refused to budge, and followed the growth of the lion with keen excitement.

"At last!" exclaimed Jack bitterly. "At last I am an equal attraction with a Punch and Judy man." He finished the head quickly, and surveyed the whole with a puzzled look.

"There seems to be something wanting, but I don't know what it is," he murmured. "Ha! How foolish! I forgot the eyes." He inserted two green spots, descended the ladder, and called the publican.

"Finished?" said the latter. Jack nodded.

"All right, I'll be out in a minute."

"Ha! ha! ha!" roared the proprietor, holding his sides.

"It's a good lion enough," said Jack moodily. "Look at the head."

"I don't say anything against the head, old man. the legs?"

But where's Jack ran up the ladder without saying a word, but looking very dazed. In a few minutes he had supplied the missing members.

'Well, it looks a little better now, Jack," said the publican after a critical examination. Perhaps, after all, I should have had more custom if you had left the lion without any legs. But candidly speaking, old man, don't you think it's a leetle different from the last one?"

Jack was silent. Suddenly he had a brilliant idea which recalled the painter in his best days.

66

You have heard of Evolution?" he said.

"Eva Lution? Oh, yes," said the publican readily. "She's the woman that says we come from monkeys, ain't she?"

66 And do you believe it?"

66 Oh, yes, it's true enough. Some of us do."

"Now, how long is it since I painted your last lion?" he asked, with a confidence probably born of a brain heated to unusual activity by his recent potations.

66 Well, it might be three years and it might be more."

"Now don't you see that in three years lions will develop?" said Jack.

"Is that it?" said the puzzled publican.

"That is it," replied Jack decisively, though wondering not a little at his own audacity. "You've no idea what changes can come over lions in three years."

Ah, well, I'll take your word for it. Here's your money. Good-bye, old man. Have another glass? That's right. Goodbye, and drop in now and again."

What was this sudden dimness that made all objects sway before Jack's eyes as he walked down the Cambridge Road? He got down the road as best he could till he reached the grounds of the Bethnal Green Museum. It was four o'clock. In five minutes he would be at home. But he would first sit down on a bench and rest for a moment, placing his paint-pots beside him. When he

awoke he felt a trifle numbed. He looked at his watch sleepily--half-past eight o'clock.

"I must have slept for some time," he muttered.

"But how did I get here? I don't remember anything after I turned out of Whitechapel Road. How my head aches!" He staggered home. Mrs. Dawe was standing weeping at the door of the cook-shop, attired in bonnet and shawl, and ran forward to meet him, her eyes blazing with fury.

"Is this seven o'clock?" she shrieked; "and I have been waitin' 'ere, dressed, since six o'clock, like a waxwork."

"It's half-past eight," he said, a little thickly.

you going?"

"Where are

"Good 'eavens, he's forgotten where I'm goin'!" she screamed. "Why, you're drunk, you beast!"

Jack drew himself up.

"I'm not," he said indignantly.

66 You are,” she shrieked, wringing her hands. "I knew what 'ud 'appen if you went to church yesterday. But it's my fault, it's my fault for not marryin' you off as your father wanted. Spare the wife, he used to say, and spile the man. And I won't spile you no more, Jack, not if I has to drag you to church by the 'air o' your 'ead."

With trembling footsteps Jack was seeking to hide himself indoors, when a terrible exclamation made him turn pale, look quickly round, and sink miserably into an empty cauldron.

"You drunken beast," shrieked his mother, "where's your pots and brushes?"

It may be doubted whether, throughout the vast realm ruled over by-well, to discard fictions, by the Right Honourable Arnold Floppington, any man crept into his bed that night more miserably self-dissatisfied than that intelligent house-and-sign painter, Jack Dawe. Painful as the events of the day had been, they were capped and the images of them deadened by the horrible climax of its close.

When Jack Dawe and his mother arrived at the Foresters' Music-hall (an average specimen of those now obsolete places of entertainment), they found that "the Claimant" (whose memory has survived how many immortals!) had already taken his turn. This was the last straw, and Mrs. Dawe, in her just indignation, lost any lingering vestiges of that dread of her son which only a few days ago had sufficed to curb her aggressive spirit in all but her most impetuous moments. The painter needed all his powers of inattention to cope with the moroseness of the old woman who, conspicuous by her flaunting shawl and bonnet, sat beside him on a wooden bench and interlarded the performance with more or less audible remarks. The balcony was occupied by men and boys in fustian and corduroys, a sprinkling of better class people, and a fair proportion of young women accompanying their sweethearts. The atmosphere reeked with smoke, and was heavy with alcoholic scents.

Downstairs, "gents" sat in luxurious stalls and sipped ale or spirits, or even champagne, and there was a general sense of gilding and looking-glass. There was a chairman whose hand was continually being shaken by new-comers, who had the air of asserting thereby a familiarity with the mysterious world behind the scenes. This functionary held a hammer with which he tapped on a table, not with the auctioneering signification of " Going," but with the opposite meaning of Coming." He also used it to lead the applause and to restore order. The entertainment was fairly innocent, and where it was unrefined it but reflected the general coarseness of the working man of the period before he had been humanised by the spread of People's Palaces and University-Extension Lectures. The great philanthropic movement-the civilisation of the English aborigines, as Maxville has called it was then in its infancy, and "beer and skittles" was the highest ideal of mortal beatitude (as is evident from a proverb now fallen into desuetude). A rouged and powdered "serio-comic" lady, in the voluptuouslycut evening dress then in vogue, flashed upon the stage, realising the vague visions of romantic costermongers, singing and dancing with saucy archness--a very dream of delight, recalling the halycon days of youth to blear-eyed coal-heavers. Then came some clever legerdemain, conjuring, and ventriloquism, with interludes of comic singing (the last neither comic nor singing, though it more than passed muster in both respects, being received with unbounded cachinnation). At last the sensation of the evening appeared in the person of "The Great Macdermott," still known to students of philology, anthropology, and comparative mythology, as the High Priest of a Neo-Pagan cult entitled Jingoism; and it was during his tenure of the stage that the ridiculous and lamentable incident took place which formed a fitting climax to a day so auspiciously begun. The series of misadventures which had befallen the painter, supplemented by the captious observations of the peevish old lady at his side, had driven him to such a state of desperation that nothing but a strong sense of duty would have retained him in his filial attendance upon her; his head was throbbing with a dull pain, his brain was distracted by feverish and remorseful thoughts, his soul was sick at the indelicacy and silliness of much of the buffoonery, and he was depressed by the coarseness of moral fibre displayed by the audience. The illustrious artiste was in the middle of a "topical song," a species of composition in which success depended on the discovery of a telling phrase; which found, rhythm, music, and sense were superfluous, though these redundancies were sometimes present. The chorus of this particular specimen, which chorus he rarely deigned to sing, but which the audience bawled out to the waving of his hand, triumphantly and arrogantly asserted that something would knock something else into the middle of next week or be knocked by it into the same time. After John Bull and various other persons and things had played an active part, and Prince Bismarck and various other persons and things passive parts in the process described, the lyrical

inspiration culminated in a vigorous panegyric on the Premier, who was placed in the former category, and was represented as capable of performing, or about to perform, the operation indicated upon sundry statesmen of his acquaintance who wished to ruin English women by giving them votes. At the mention of Floppington the audience (like all music-hall audiences, Conservative to the backbone) could no longer contain themselves; they rose at the singer they huzzahed themselves hoarse; they waved their hats and rattled their sticks and umbrellas; and then abandoning themselves to a frenzy of delight they sang the Floppington chorus three times over, while the artiste looked complacently on with the air of a man who is sure of his effects. But amid all the enthusiasm one solitary dissentient hiss made itself heard. It proceeded from that fiery Radical, Jack Dawe. His unutterable and contemptuous disgust had completely overturned his mental equilibrium. That these people, who had never studied the man as he had, whose gross tastes utterly shut them out from the comprehension of the Premier's motives, whose sympathies were utterly worthless as a test of worth, that these ignorant and coarse-grained creatures should presume to patronise Floppington, and that the singer should pitch so false a note of adulation, worked him into one of those irrational fits whose occasional recurrence at long intervals in this history will show what unknown and tenebrous depths lay beneath his placid exterior. The sound of disapprobation, the provocation of it magnified manifold by its singleness, raised the passions of the audience to fever-heat. Cries of "Turn him out," resounded from all quarters. This absurd failure of logic and justice completed the painter's irritation. He repeated his hiss, and the orders for his removal redoubled in intensity. He persisted in his hissing, and was accordingly ejected from the premises amid a scene of indescribable excitement to which Mrs. Dawe contributed not a little As soon as the disturber was removed, the audience (including Mrs. Dawe, who would have her money's worth, and who was captivated by the lilt) set to with tenfold enthusiasm, and declared over and over again, to the ever accelerated waving of the vocalist's hand, that Floppington was able to knock, and would knock, divers politicians into the middle of next week.

CHAPTER III.

ARCADIA.

A WEEK of idleness for Jack Dawe-a week of delicious saunterings through sunny lanes, whose simple and contented inhabitants greeted him pleasantly as he walked along, musing yet not unobservant; of pensive rambles through quaint courts, where the crumbling walls were eloquent with the picturesque pathos of antiquity; of afternoon wanderings in shady alleys, where loose-clad loungers filled the quiet air with fantastically wreathed cloudlets of