"Shut up, mother," he cried at last, quite gruffly, "what I does I
does to please myself. I likes to see people comfortable about me.
If they wasn't, it's me as would be more upset than them."
I did not see him again for nearly two years. Then one October
evening, strolling about the East End, I met him coming out of a
little Chapel in the Burdett Road. He was so changed that I should
not have known him had not I overheard a woman as she passed him
say, "Good-evening, Mr. Burridge."
A pair of bushy side-whiskers had given to his red face an
aggressively respectable appearance. He was dressed in an ill-
fitting suit of black, and carried an umbrella in one hand and a
book in the other.
In some mysterious way he managed to look both thinner and shorter
than my recollection of him. Altogether, he suggested to me the
idea that he himself--the real man--had by some means or other been
extracted, leaving only his shrunken husk behind. The genial
juices of humanity had been squeezed out of him.
"Not Jack Burridge!" I exclaimed, confronting him in astonishment.
His little eyes wandered shiftily up and down the street.
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