level.  Water dripped from the peak of his cap, and his clothes were heavy and dark with it.  He spoke.  “Mister, could ye give me a hand up?  I’ve made a mess of it.”  His cheerful and rather insolent assurance faltered for a moment.  He then mumbled:  “I’ve been on the booze y’understand.”  But there was still something in his tone which suggested that any good man might have done the same thing.

It is not easy to be even sententious with the sinful when an open confession robs us of our moral prerogative, so I only told him that it seemed likely booze had something to do with it.  His age could have been forty; but it was not easy to judge, for the bridge of his nose was a livid depression.  Some accident had pushed in his face under the eyes, giving him the battered aspect of ancient sin.  His sinister appearance would have frightened any timid lady if he had stopped her in such a street, on such a day, with nobody about but a lost dog, and the houses, it could be supposed, deserted, or their inmates secluded in an abandonment to misery.  And, taking another glance at him, I thought it probable, from the frank regard of the blue and frivolous eye which met mine, that he would have recognized timidity in a lady at a distance, and would have passed her without seeing her.  Uncertain whether his guess in stopping me was lucky, he began pulling nervously at a bleached moustache.  His paw was the colour of leather.  Its nails were broken and stained with tar.

“Can’t you get work?” I suggested.  “Why don’t you go to sea?”

This deliberately unfair question shook his upright confidence in himself, and perhaps convinced him that he had, after all, stopped a fool.  He took his cap off, and flung a shower from it—­it had been draining into his moustache—­and asked whether I did not think he looked poor enough for a sailor.

Then I heard how he came to be there.  Two days before he had signed the articles of the steamship Bilbao.  His box had gone aboard, and that contained all his estate.  The skipper, to be sure of his man, had taken care of his discharge book, and so was in possession of the only proof of his identity.  Then he left the shipping office, and met some friends.

Those friends!  “That was a fine girl,” he said, speaking more to the rain than to me.  “I never seen a finer.”  I began to show signs of moving away.  “Don’t go, mister.  She was all right.  I lay you never seen a finer.  Look here.  I reckon you know her.”  He plunged an eager hand into an inner pocket.  “Ever heard of Angel Light?  She’s on the stage.  It’s a fact.  She showed me her name herself on a programme last night.  There y’are.”  He triumphed with a photograph, and his gnarled forefinger pointed at an exposed set of teeth under an extraordinary hat.  “Eh, ain’t that all right?  On the stage, too.  Met her at the corner of Pennyfields.”

It was still raining.  He flung another shower from his cap.  I was impatient, but he took my lapel confidentially.  “Guv’nor,” he said, “if I could find the swab as took my money, I lay I’d make him look so as his own mother ’ud turn her back on him.  I would.  Ten quid.”