London's Underworld

These friends of mine not only visit my office and invade my home, but they turn up at all sorts of inconvenient times and places.--There is my friend the dipsomaniac, the pocket Hercules, the man of brain and iron constitution.

Year after year he holds on to his own strange course, neither poverty nor prison, delirium tremens nor physical injuries serve to alter him. He occupies a front seat at a men's meeting on Sunday afternoon when the bills announce my name. But he comes half drunk and in a talkative mood, sometimes in a contradictory mood, but generally good tempered. He punctuates my speech with a loud and emphatic "Hear! hear!" and often informs the audience that "what Mr. Holmes says is quite true!" The attendants cannot keep him silent, he tells them that he is my friend; he makes some claim to being my patron.

Poor fellow! I speak to him kindl