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gates and open country outside, but something not unlike it. As it was, they rode through a vague and indeterminate region of incompleted new building interspersed with scrubby fields and then (seeing that Jack always took the most direct line possible) through a series of narrow, dirty, ill-lit back streets.
    ‘Here we are,’ said Jack, as his horse stopped in the narrowest, dirtiest and smelliest of them all, with no light whatever. ‘Jedediah! Jedediah!’ he shouted, banging on the door.
    After a long pause, while the rain dripped perpetually from the eaves and somewhere a broken gutter poured a solid cascade into the street, there came a slow shuffling noise from within and a gleam of light under the door.
    ‘Who’s there?’ asked a voice.
    ‘Hurry up, Jedediah, damn your eyes,’ called Jack, beating impatiently.
    ‘Oh, it’s Master Jack,’ said the voice to itself, and with a rumble of bolts and chains the door opened. He had been expected all day, but as usual Jedediah was amazed to see him, and holding the lantern high he exclaimed, ‘Why, bless my soul, it’s Master Jack. And Master Jack, you’re wet. You’re as wet as a drowned rat.’
    ‘It is because of the rain,’ said Jack. ‘Now take the horses in and rub them down, and tell Mrs Raffald I shall be back to sleep. We are going round to Mrs Fuller’s now. Come on, Toby, climb down.’
    ‘The other young gentleman is wet, too,’ said Jedediah, taking the horses.
    At the beginning of the journey Jack had assumed that Tobias would stay at his family’s house, but he had run up against his friend’s delicacy, and knowing Tobias’ immovable obstinacy in such matters, he had proposed a very simple alternative. Mrs Fuller, who had been in the family for a great many years, now let lodgings for single gentlemen in Little Windmill Street, just round the corner from Marlborough Street: she received Jack with a hearty kiss (having been his nurse at one time) and told him that he was wet, disgracefully wet.
    ‘Wet through and through,’ she said, tweaking his coat open and plucking at his shirt with that strong authority that belongs to her age and sex. ‘Come now, take it off this minute, or you will catch your death. You too, young gentleman: come into the kitchen at once. Nan, come and pull the gentlemen’s boots off. Good Lord preserve us all alive! he has come out in his slippers.’ Mrs Fuller gazed upon Tobias with unfeigned horror. ‘Where is his cloak-bag?’ she asked Jack, as if Tobias could not be trusted to give a sensible answer.
    ‘He forgot it,’ said Jack.
    ‘He left it behind, and came in his slippers? Was there ever such wickedness?’ cried Mrs Fuller, who considered it a Christian’s duty to wear wool next the skin in all seasons, and to keep dry. ‘However will he change?’
    Jedediah came into the kitchen with the valise and a white packet: he said, ‘I brought the young gentleman’s cloak-bag and this here: under the saddle-flap it was, and might have fallen out any minute of the day or night.’ He put the folded parchment down with some severity.
    ‘Oh yes,’ said Tobias; ‘I forgot it. It is my indenture, Jack, with my plan of the alimentary tract of moles on the back of it.’
    It was clear to Mrs Fuller that they were both demented. The rain had soaked into their wits, and the only way to drive it out again was with warmth, dry clothes, soup, a boiled fowl, a leg of Welsh mutton and the better part of a quart of mixed cordials.
    Thacker’s coffee-house was the meeting-place for naval officers, just as Will’s was for poets and literary men; and Jack, whenever he was free and in London, divided his time between the two. He had seen Admiral Vernon, the hero of Porto Bello, in the first and Mr Pope in the second, and it was difficult to say which had caused him the livelier delight.
    He was at Thacker’s at this moment, with Tobias by his side, waiting for Keppel: at present his face had no lively delight upon