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drawers, and a typewriter, and a horribly battered but very comfortable easy chair, and an almost equally battered trunk, and a strip of carpet, and Jeremy.
    Jeremy took off his evening clothes, folded them quickly and neatly, and put them away in a drawer. He then got out and put on a suit which had been a trusty companion on country tramps for many years, and which was now reaching the stage of being unable to face the light of day. The elbows were almost through, and there was something which was not exactly a hole in the right knee. As he put it on, he sang in a sort of growling whisper,
    â€œDay after day I’m on my way With my rags, bottles and bones”
    He wondered what it would be like to run an old clothes business. All right if the old clothes were your own. Beastly if they were anyone else’s. He wondered what it would feel like to be a tramp. Three months ago he wasn’t so far off finding out. Once your clothes go, and your boots, especially your boots, jobs no longer exist and you begin to slide on an hourly steepening slope to those ultimate depths in which men struggle just to get a crust of bread, or a pint of beer, or enough warmth to keep the life in them—
    â€œBring out your rags, bottles and bones”
    He put out the lights pulled up the blind, and opened the window. It was dark enough—thick, and a little rain in the air. The window looked into a small square yard, separated from the long strip behind Mannister’s house by a brick wall, and from the yards on either side by lower walls.
    Jeremy got out of the window and let himself down by the rainpipe. It was very dark indeed in the yard. The wall of the house and the other three walls gloomed over it and made it quite impossible to see anything at all. Jeremy had to negotiate a derelict wheelbarrow, half a dozen cracked flower-pots, a large tin bath with a hole in it, and a rickety pair of wooden steps. In theory, he knew the position of each of these things to a hair; in practice he barked his shins on the bath, narrowly escaped crashing over the flower-pots, and blundered into the steps, which when clutched shut up, catching his thumb in the hinge.
    It was rather a breathless moment.
    Then he fetched up against the wall and gave his mind to inducing the steps to stay put. He found consolation in murmuring,
    â€œPut on your black gloves and play the fiddle, And smile, dam you, smile!”
    There was bottle-glass on the top of the wall. He took off his coat and used it as a pad. The drop on the other side was no great matter.
    He had now to get into Mannister’s house, and this was no great matter either. The catch of the scullery window was not the first that he had slipped back. He was, in fact, something of an expert, having acquired the art at the age of fifteen when putting in an interminable period of quarantine with an old cousin of his father’s who insisted on treating him as if he were an invalid—“A light supper, and bed at half-past eight. Early to bed and early to rise, my dear Jeremy.” She practised what she preached. Her doors were locked at nine, and by ten o’clock the whole household was supposed to be asleep. It was then that Jeremy began to practise upon scullery windows. At first he merely opened the catch, slipped out, went for a tramp in the dark, and came back much exhilarated by having defied authority. Then one night there was the window latched against him. He was doubly exhilarated when he found that he could deal with the catch. He soon discovered that one of the maids was also in the habit of slipping out. It became a point of honour to take risks without being spotted. He acquired considerable proficiency, and went out of his way to attempt the more difficult windows. He had many hair breadth escapes, but was never caught. Old Cousin Emily never guessed.
    As he slipped the catch of Mr Mannister’s scullery window, it came to Jeremy cold and sharp that here