He had one awful daub which he called "The Guardship Attacked," in which was depicted a vessel, broadside on to the spectator, wedged very tightly into the sea and sky of an impossible blue, with little pills of white smoke clinging to a porthole here and there. This work he told me was his "chef de hover," and he volunteered to furnish me with a copy of it on cardboard for half a crown, and to deliver it at my lodgings for his 'bus fare and a drink. I closed with that proposal and in a week's time he brought the work to me. My chum's painting tools and easels were scattered about the room in which I received him, and a dozen or so of sketches in various stages of progress were propped up on the buffet and the mantelpiece. He surveyed these with an ineffable sniff and said: "Oh! I perceive you are a brother of the brush." I took him outside to give him his promised drink and found that he was accompanied by an elderly, bearded, incredibly dirty man, who dealt in chick-weed, and who shared his room with him in Gees Court, Oxford Street. This fearsome person was absolutely alive with vermin and his unkempt grey beard was as the wrinkled sea. The pavement artist ordered a drink for him at my expense and when he had consumed it, he told me that I was a patron of the arts and wanted to embrace me. I held him off by the aid of an umbrella, and his companion told me that he had been a beneficed clergyman of the Church of England, and a companion for dukes and princes. However that might have been, the wretch had certainly the unmistakable _no_ accent of a gentleman and spoke with a certain beery eloquence which reminded one of poor Tom Robertson's Eccles.
My acquaintance with these gentlemen led me to a somewhat familiar knowledge of Gee's Court I have not been near the place now for more than thirty years and, for aught I know to the contrary, it may long since have been wiped out of existence. But when I knew it it was an awful place, the haunt of thieves and prostitutes, the vilest offsprings of the streets of London. What with the aid of the Scripture-readers, the various nursing and charitable sisterhoods, and the young medical accoucheurs in their fourth year, with whom I scraped acquaintance, I got to be quite well known in Gee's Court and could go about in safety. But one evening as I was entering the low-browed slimy archway by which it was approached from Oxford Street, a young policeman stopped me and asked me if I knew where I was going. I told him that I was quite intimate with the place and quite safe there. "Well, sir," he answered, "you know your own business best, but I wouldn't go along there for a fiver." My investigations had by this time brought me acquainted as I have said already with all manner of queer people. Amongst others I recall an omnibus driver who told me that he was the rightful heir to a big estate by Guilford. At my invitation he told his story, and he began it with this astounding proclamation: "It's like this, sir," he began, "my grandfather died childless," and when I failed to disguise my amusement he explained. "He was not really my grandfather but he was my father's uncle and we always called him grandfather." Then he went into a long and tangled statement of which I could neither make head nor tail, but the fact remained clear that in his own opinion he ought to have been a millionaire or thereabouts, and by rights able to pass his time in smoking cigars and drinking champagne wine, which he appeared to regard as the summit of human felicity.