CHAPTER I.MY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES.
The odds and ends of humanity, so plentiful in London's great city, have for many years largely constituted my circle of friends and acquaintances.
They are strange people, for each of them is, or was, possessed of some dominating vice, passion, whim or weakness which made him incapable of fulfilling the ordinary duties of respectable citizenship.
They had all descended from the Upper World, to live out strange lives, or die early deaths in the mysterious but all pervading world below the line.
Some of them I saw, as it were, for a moment only; suddenly out of the darkness they burst upon me; suddenly the darkness again received them out of my sight.
But our acquaintance was of sufficient duration to allow me to acquire some knowledge, and to gain some experience of lives more than strange, and of characters far removed from the ordinary.
But with others I spent many hours, months, or years as circumstances warranted, or as opportunities permitted.

Some of them became my intimates; and though seven long years have passed since I gave up police-court duties, our friendship bears the test of time, for they remain my friends and acquaintances still.
But some have passed away, and others are passing; one by one my list of friends grows less, and were it not that I, even now, pick up a new friend or two, I should run the risk of being a lonely old man.

Let me confess, however, that my friends have brought me many worries, have caused me much disappointment, have often made me very angry.

Sometimes, I must own, they have caused me real sorrow and occasionally feelings of utter despair.

But I have had my compensations, we have had our happy times, we have even known our merry moments.
Though pathos has permeated all our intercourse, humour and comedy have never been far away; though sometimes tragedy has been in waiting.
But over one and all of my friends hung a great mystery, a mystery that always puzzled and sometimes paralysed me, a mystery that always set me to thinking.
Now many of my friends were decent and good-hearted fellows; yet they were outcasts.