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came as the result of my refusal to go with my mates on a sorrowful expedition to a Bombay brothel, from which three did, in fact, return poxy. Strange, don’t you think, that my mother means to keep me away from her home for young women and girls because she believes me to be like some ravening wolf who will prey upon her poor lambs?”
    “Now there I believe you wrong her, ” said I.
    “What then do you say?”
    “They are not lambs, and well she knows it. Perhaps she fears they will prey upon you. You are, after all, her son. She wishes to keep you from harm —at all cost.”
    “Well, with that last I agree,” said Tom, “at all cost, certainly.”
    After much back-and-forth through the Garden, we had come to rest at the pillar, which then stood at the exact center of the piazza but now stands there no more. We leaned against its base as we conversed, and though impassioned by our frustration, we spoke in quiet tones. Indeed we spoke so quiet, our heads so close together, that there in the daylight, with the marketing crowd all about, we must have had the look of conspirators. For when Jimmie Bunkins spied us and approached, he hailed us thus:
    “Here’s a rum sight for me peepers! Tom, the village hustler of yore, decked out natty in a sailor suit, selling me pal Jeremy into a life on the scamp!”
    At that, Tom Durham let forth a guffaw, jumped down from the pillar base, and threw his arms open to Bunkins.
    “Jimmie B.! The hornies ain’t got you yet? I figured you for a scholar on Duncan Campbell’s floating academy. Or worse. Your heaters kept you out of the clink, have they?”
    I was doubly surprised: first, that the two were obviously well acquainted; second, that Tom should know Co vent Garden’s flash-talk so well, much less remember it, as he did, after an absence of near three years.
    They embraced, as proper friends might. Tom, much the taller of the two, pulled poor Bunkins off his feet. There followed a bit of back pum-meling and hand shaking with shouts of “How beya?” “You’ve grown to man size, ” and so on.
    Then Bunkins, the reformed thief, turned to me and again expressed his surprise at seeing Tom and me together. I explained, as best I could, our relation. Then Tom gave to me his history with the one he called Jimmie B.
    “We were scamps together, ” said he.” My year in the Garden he was a proper chum. He taught me nap prigging, tick squeezing, and all the dark arts practiced in the precinct. Ain’t that so, Jimmie B.?”
    ‘Pon my life,” swore Bunkins, “and I never had no better student. Just listen how he learned the flash!” Bunkins stepped close and, with an eye toward Tom, spoke quietly to me: “In fact, had he stuck to napping, as I advised, he would not have gone bad with the Beak-runners.”
    Then to Tom: “It was the Beak hisself saved you, was it?” (He referred, reader, to Sir John.)
    “It was,” said Tom Durham.
    “A rum cove,” said Bunkins.
    “A rum cove,” Tom agreed.
    “Where’s your mate Jonah? You two was shipped off together.”
    “Well, keep a dubber mum, cause all who get a chance at the sea should jump at it, but pal Jonah crapped on the Malabar Coast.”
    “Mum’s the word. But … did he get caught napping?”
    “Oh no, we left all that ashore, the two of us. Jonah Falkirk died a fair seaman’s death in a battle with Indian pirates.”
    “Injun pirates, is it? Crikey, Tom, you got some stories to tell, ain’t it?”
    “A fair few.”
    “My cove HUhf a seaman,” said Bunkins proudly. Then whispered: “They say he was a pirate, but he don’t talk none about such.”
    “Your cove, is it? And who might he be?”
    “John Bilbo, so he is.”
    “Black Jack Bilbo? Him who has the gaming house in Mayfair?”
    “The same, on’y he don’t let just everybody call him that. He asks me to call him Mr. Bilbo, and I obliges, for he treats me fair and looks out for me.”
    “I’d noticed you’d come up in the world, ” said Tom,