Having pulled the lettuce to pieces, he pushed himself back a little from the table, looked over his spectacles at me, then at the table-cloth, and began in a dreamy voice: 

“Old Gabriel is dead.  I heard the news at the office this morning, and went out and bought a black tie.  I am the oldest man in Tweedy’s now—­older by six years than Sam Collins, who comes next; so there is no mistake about it.  Sam is looking for the place; I saw it in his eye when he told me, and I expect he’ll get it.  But I’m the oldest clerk in Tweedy’s.  Only God Almighty can alter that, and it’s very satisfactory to me.  I don’t care about the money.  Sam Collins will be stuck up over it, like enough; but he’ll never write a hand like Gabriel’s, not if he lives to be a hundred; and he knows it, and knows I’ll be there to remind him of it.  Gabriel’s was a beautiful fist—­so small, too, if he chose.  Why, once, in his spare hours, he wrote out all the Psalms, with the headings, on one side of a folio sheet, and had it framed and hung up in his parlour, out at Shepherd’s Bush.  He died in the night—­oh yes, quite easily.  He was down at the office all yesterday, and spoke to me as brisk as a bird.  They found him dead in his bed this morning.

“I seem cut up about it?  Well, not exactly.  Ah, you noticed that I refused my chop to-day.  Bless your soul, that’s not on Gabriel’s account.  I am well on in years, and I suppose it would be natural of me to pity old men, and expect pity.  But I can’t; no, it’s only the young that I pity.  If you must know, I didn’t take the chop to-day because I haven’t the money in my pocket to pay for it.  You see, there was this black tie that I gave eighteenpence for; but something else happened this morning that I’ll tell you about.

“I came down in a ’bus, as usual.  You remember what muggy weather it was up to ten o’clock—­though you wouldn’t think it, to feel the heat now.  Well, the ’bus was packed, inside and out.  At least, there was just room for one more inside when we pulled up by Charing Cross, and there he got in—­a boy with a stick and a bundle in a blue handkerchief.

“He wasn’t more than thirteen; bound for the docks, you could tell at a glance; and by the way he looked about you could tell as easily that in stepping outside Charing Cross station he’d set foot on London stones for the first time.  God knows how it struck him—­the slush and drizzle, the ugly shop-fronts, the horses slipping in the brown mud, the crowd on the pavement pushing him this side and that.  The poor little chap was standing in the middle of it with dazed eyes, like a hare’s, when the ’bus pulled up.  His eyelids were pink and swollen; but he wasn’t crying, though he wanted to.  Instead, he gave a gulp as he came on board with stick and bundle, and tried to look brave as a lion.