to me to lunch every Sunday, remember. Meanwhile, let me give you one piece of advice. Be in as many sets and spheres of activity as you can; but don't be of any. And don't forget I'm always handy. Advice on tap, day and night. By the way, here's that five pounds I owe you," and having discharged this wholly mythical debt, Uncle Ben sprang on a bus step and was gone.

Later in the evening, when his things were unpacked, Rudd walked out for a meal, and returning down the Tottenham Court Road had his first London adventure.

In front of him was a poorly-dressed woman of about thirty, struggling with a large clothes-basket which was much too big and too heavy for her.

"Let me help you," Rudd said, catching her up and taking one of the handles as he spoke.

The woman looked at him in terror and snatched at his hand.

"Let go or I'll scream for the police," she cried. Rudd let go as if it were an adder and hurried on, mortified to the quick to have been so misunderstood.

He tingled under the thought of it long after. How was a boy of his age to know that in the Mother of Cities even Good Samaritans must walk warily?

CHAPTER XVII

LAVIS

R

UDD was soon settled at St. Stephen's and he did his best to work, but all the while as he sat at lectures or read in the library the murmur of London echoed in his head. How could so curious a youth hear this entrancing sound and be satisfied with cold print? That the students of villages like Oxford or Cambridge should neglect their duties is grotesque; but the marvel is that in London any bookwork is done at all with such siren voices as hers ever calling.

For a while he made no Hospital friends, and then one day a new-comer arrived—a tall, thin, hatchetfaced man of about twenty-seven, dressed loosely in tweeds.

"That's the man for me," Rudd thought; but not for a week or so did he meet him.

And then Lavis himself broke the ice.

It was in the little eating-house near the Hospital. Above it was the billiard-room where, at the most seductive of games of skill, many of the students lost whatever chances of medical distinction might have

been in store for them and gave up to ivory what was meant for mankind.

Rudd took a seat opposite the lean and rugged but kindly-looking person whom he had seen from time to time in the corridor of the reading-room, and considered the bill of fare.

"Whatever you do," said his companion, in a deep voice, looking up from his work, "don't have the stewed beef. It was prepared wholly in the interests of the toothpick industry."

The next day they had lunch together again, and gradually they became friendly. Rudd accepted an invitation to Lavis's rooms, and would have returned it but that his own bed-sitting-room was not suitable for hospitality, being at the top of a building inhabited by people who went to bed at ten, apparently for no other purpose than to make notes upon any sounds that might be heard in the house after that hour and report them to the landlady in the morning. Nothing less encouraging to young men's nocturnal conviviality could be imagined.

Lavis's rooms were maintained on a more liberal principle, and here, in an atmosphere of tobacco smoke, among books and engravings, Rudd listened to iconoclastic talk and assimilated new views and ideals.

Lavis was from Vancouver, and had but just decided, so late in life, to be a doctor. "There's no money in it," he said, "but it's one of the few decent businesses. One is doing something and not getting

the better of anybody all the time, as most of the others have to."

Lavis now had means, but had been roughing it as a surveyor for some years. Directly the funds arrived, through his father's death, he had put his favourite project into action.

Lavis did as he liked and never seemed to think of what others thought. He had a dress suit, and looked anything but a waiter or a trombonist in it, but he wore it as seldom as possible. Even in his dress suit he had a receptacle for a pipe. Cigars and cigarettes he despised, and more than one restaurant was barred to him because he not only refused to obey the order forbidding the smoking of pipes but insisted on delivering a caustic lecture on the subject to the manager.

Women had no interest for him whatever. Without saying so, it was clear that he regarded them as a general interference with male comfort. In their company he was low-voiced, attentive and deferential, but he was glad to be outside again in the fresh air.

Like so many colonials, he had read much, especially the new writers, and there seemed to be no bound to his interests. He would go to the Opera as much as to the Halls; haunt the National Gallery and Lord's; explore Whitechapel not less than Wiltshire.

It was Lavis who brought Rudd under the spell of the great and gracious stage figure of those times. Together they were assiduous supporters of the most

perfect production in the modern theatre, the Lyceum "Much Ado About Nothing," and not only witnessed that incomparable gentleman, Irving's Benedick, move hither and thither amid the Italian crowd in his gravely humorous perplexity, but heard the unforgettable tones and saw the unforgettable charm and gesture with which Beatrice (Queen of Women) said "There was a star danced, and under that was 1 born," and, a little later, came mischievously out from the banquet to her victim to bid him, against her will, to dinner.

Rudd and Lavis had their regular places at the Lyceum-almost as if they were subscribers to the Opera. They did not sit at all, but stood leaning over the barrier between the pit and the stalls. They thus made the best of both worlds, their upper parts being swells and their lower democrats, for though their legs were in the half-crown part, their heads were in the half-guinea.

It was Lavis who discovered three stanzas which turned Rudd's head and sent him singing through the day for weeks and weeks and never wholly left him. They came to him in a letter from Lavis, then in the country. "My dear Boy," he wrote, "here is something to get you out of London. If it were longer I wouldn't have the pluck to copy it; and if it were longer it wouldn't be perfect."

All day Rudd found himself murmuring—

"I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree."