not famous, at the ends of dark and break-neck corridors; to tea at the suburban homes of barmaids and chorus girls, to dinner in the stables of a cavalry-barracks, to supper in cabmen’s shelters.  He was possessed in some mysterious way of the passwords to doors in hoardings behind which excavations were in progress; he knew by name the butchers of the Deptford yards, the men in the blood-caked clothes, so inured to blood that they may not with safety to their lives swear at one another; he took me into an opium-cellar within a stone’s-throw of Oxford Street, and into a roof-chamber to call upon certain friends of his ... well, they said they were fire extinguishers, so I’d better not say they were bombs.  Up, down; here, there; good report, but more frequently evil ... we had known this side of our London as well as two men may.  And our other adventures and peregrinations, not of the body, but of the spirit ... but these must be spoken of in their proper place.

I had arranged with Maschka that Schofield should bring me the whole of the work Andriaovsky had left behind him; and he arrived late one afternoon in a fourwheeler, with four great packages done up in brown paper.  I found him to be a big, shaggy-browed, red-haired, raw-boned Lancashire man of five-and-thirty, given to confidential demonstrations at the length of a button-shank, quite unconscious of the gulf between his words and his right to employ them, and bent on asserting an equality that I did not dispute by a rather aggressive use of my surname.  Andriaovsky had appointed him his executor, and he had ever the air of suspecting that the appointment was going to be challenged.

“A’m glad to be associated with ye in this melancholy duty, Harrison,” he said.  “Now we won’t waste words.  Miss Andriaovsky has told me precisely how matters stand.  I had, as ye know, the honour to be poor Michael’s close friend for a period of five years, and my knowledge of him is entirely at your disposal.”

I answered that I should be seriously handicapped without it.

“Just so.  It is Miss Andriaovsky’s desire that we should pull together.  Now, in the firrst place, what is your idea about the forrm the book should take?”

“In the first place, if you don’t mind,” I replied, “perhaps we’d better run over together the things you’ve brought.  The daylight will be gone soon.”

“Just as ye like, Harrison,” he said, “just as ye like.  It’s all the same to me....”

I cleared a space about my writing-table at the window, and we turned to the artistic remains of Michael Andriaovsky.

I was astonished, first, at the enormous quantity of the stuff, and next at its utter and complete revelation of the man.  In a flash I realised how superb that portion at least of the book was going to be.  And Schofield explained that the work he had brought represented but a fraction of the whole that was at our disposal.