of a club in Soho.  He very soon talked to me in the frankest way of all his doings; I think he was glad to be on friendly terms with me simply because I was better educated and could behave decently.  I don’t think he ever did anything illegal, and he had plenty of good feeling,—­but that didn’t prevent him from squeezing eighty per cent, or so out of many a poor devil who had borrowed to save himself or his family from starvation.  That was all business; he drew the sharpest distinctions between business and private relations, and was very ignorant.  I never knew a man so superstitious.  Every day he consulted signs and omens.  For instance, to decide whether the day was to be lucky for him—­in betting and so on—­he would stand at a street corner and count the number of white horses that passed in five minutes; if he had made up his mind on an even number, and an even number passed, then he felt safe in following his impulses for the day; if the number were odd, he would do little or no speculation.  When he was going to play cards for money, he would find a beggar and give him something, even if he had to walk a great distance to do it.  He often used to visit an Italian who kept fortune-telling canaries, and he always followed the advice he got.  It put him out desperately if he saw the new moon through glass, or over his left shoulder.  There was no end to his superstitions, and, whether by reason of them or in spite of them, he certainly prospered.  When he died, ten or twelve years ago, he left fifteen thousand pounds.

’I have to thank him for my own good luck.  “Look here,” he said to me, “it’s only duffers that go on quill-driving at a quid a week.  A fellow like you ought to be doing better.”  “Show me the way,” I said.  And I was ready to do whatever he told me.  I had a furious hunger for money; the adventure in Coventry Street had thoroughly unsettled me, and I would have turned burglar rather than go on much longer as a wretched slave, looked down upon by everybody, and exposed to insult at every corner.  I dreamed of money-making, and woke up feverish with determination.  At last Crowther gave me a few jobs to do for him in my off-time.  They weren’t very nice jobs, and I shouldn’t like to explain them to you; but they brought me in half a sovereign now and then.  I began to get an insight into the baser modes of filling one’s pocket.  Then something happened; my mother died, and I became the owner of a house at Notting Hill of fifty pounds rental.  I talked over my situation with Crowther, and he advised me, as it turned out, thoroughly well.  I was to raise money on this house,—­not to sell it,—­and take shares in a new music-hall which Crowther was connected with.  There’s no reason why I shouldn’t tell you; it was the Marlborough.  I did take shares, and at the end of the second twelve months I was drawing a dividend of sixty per cent.  I have never drawn less than thirty, and the year before last we touched seventy-five.  At present I am a shareholder in three other halls,—­and they don’t do badly.