How well I remember the first morning, a bright Sunday morning in early
October, when I raided in upon Ewart! I found my old schoolfellow in
bed in a room over an oil-shop in a back street at the foot of Highgate
Hill. His landlady, a pleasant, dirty young woman with soft-brown eyes,
brought down his message for me to come up; and up I went. The room
presented itself as ample and interesting in detail and shabby with a
quite commendable shabbiness. I had an impression of brown walls—they
were papered with brown paper—of a long shelf along one side of the
room, with dusty plaster casts and a small cheap lay figure of a horse,
of a table and something of grey wax partially covered with a cloth,
and of scattered drawings. There was a gas stove in one corner, and
some enameled ware that had been used for overnight cooking. The
oilcloth on the floor was streaked with a peculiar white dust. Ewart
himself was not in the first instance visible, but only a fourfold
canvas screen at the end of the room from which shouts proceeded of
“Come on!” then his wiry black hair, very much rumpled, and a staring
red-brown eye and his stump of a nose came round the edge of this at a
height of about three feet from the ground “It’s old Ponderevo!” he
said, “the Early bird! And he’s caught the worm! By Jove, but it’s cold
this morning! Come round here and sit on the bed!”