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clean sheets to fine clean—thoughts,” he said, stumbling suddenly at the last word. He looked up quickly to see if Waterhouse had noticed, but seeing an impassive face went on offhandedly. “They didn’t do it consciously, but it was all setting a standard. That’s good for a boy, you know. I don’t think I believe much in roughing it.. If you give a boy the floor to sleep on, or a hammock at best, and chuck his food at him anyhow, he doesn’t think much of himself, and he doesn’t act worth much either. But as long as he knows what is good, that’s all right.”

“I see. That seems sound. Your taste in books is good, on the whole. I wonder you feel inclined to read after grubbing about with your hands all day. You come home looking the blackest, oiliest coal-heaver it has ever been my luck to see, and even cleaning yourself doesn’t exhaust all your energies. How can you do it?”

Tony grinned his white-toothed, stoker’s grin. “Because I’m greedy,” he said. “I want an awful lot before I die. And I’ll get it, by God! You’ll see—and without paying too high either.”

The friends went very well in harness, neither was communicative or exacting—two fruitful sources of dispute. They had, therefore, no quarrels worth mentioning during the twenty months in which they saw each other almost every night, in spite of Waterhouse’s occasional touchiness and Tony’s tiger temper always crouched to spring. He was only a year at Garstin’s; for the last eight months he drove a taxi-cab for six hours of the day, dividing the work with another man, and during this time he read with Waterhouse at night, doing more real work “in the book line,” as he amateurishly called it, than he ever had before. Then Waterhouse was offered more work in the evenings, and Tony insisted on his taking it. It would have been absurd to do