Great God, how horrible he looked! If there was any certainty they would find one immediately, and bury one decently, there'd be no particular horror in that kind of death.

But to be found _like that_, and to lie in some riverside deadhouse down by Wapping, with a ghastly placard rotting on the rotting door, and nothing but ooze and slime and rottenness round about one--waiting to be identified! And who knows, after all, whether a dead man doesn't _feel_ that sort of thing ?" It was after such musings as these had begun to be very common with Horatio Paget that he caught the chill which resulted in a very dangerous illness of many weeks.

The late autumn was wet and cold and dreary; but Captain Paget, although remarkably clever after a certain fashion, had never been a lover of intellectual pursuits, and imprisonment in Mrs.Kepp's shabby parlour was odious to him.

When he had read every page of the borrowed newspaper, and pished and pshawed over the leaders, and groaned aloud at the announcement of some wealthy marriage made by one of his quondam friends, or chuckled at the record of another quondam friend's insolvency--when he had poked the fire savagely half a dozen times in an hour, cursing the pinched grate and the bad coals during every repetition of the operation--when he had smoked his last cigar, and varnished his favourite boots, and looked out of the window, and contemplated himself gloomily in the wretched little glass over the narrow chimney-piece,--Captain Paget's intellectual resources were exhausted, and an angry impatience took possession of him.

Then, in defiance of the pelting rain or the lowering sky, he flung his slippers into the farthest corner--and the farthest corner of Mrs.Kepp's parlour was not very remote from the Captain's arm-chair--he drew on the stoutest of his varnished boots--and there were none of them very stout now--buttoned his perfect overcoat, adjusted his hat before the looking-glass, and sallied forth, umbrella in hand, to make his way westward.