ling and fighting on the ground; and the turning down of the bedstead had pressed the barber's wife into a corner, where, at a table partly occupied by unwashed cups and saucers, and the heads and bones of the bloaters on which the family had regaled at breakfasttime, she was busily engaged cutting up steak and rolling out dough for a meat pie. She seemed not in the least embarrassed by the presence of the ten men sitting along the edge of the bedstead, neither did they at having to sit there. They smoked and talked, or read the newspaper, and that in the midst of dirt and muddle that at home would have been altogether unbearable, with a degree of equanimity and good humour that was inexplicable.

Until you found out the reason why. This was the key to the mystery. The barber and his two assistants polished off their customers at the rate of three in ten minutes, and as soon as a man was shaved, and had paid his penny, the barber said to him, "Would you like to go through and see the scarlet-runners this morning?" To which singular question the man promptly, as though he had expected it, replied, “Well, I don't care if I do." Then the barber remarked to the lathering-boy, whose business it was to keep a couple of customers constantly napkined and soaped, ready for the razor, "Joe, show him through." Whereupon Joe accompanied the shaven one to the back-door of the house, and unlocked it; and so the customer vanished. In one instance, a man whom nobody seemed to know was shaved, and the barber took his penny, and said, "Thanky," and nothing else; on which the customer remarked, in an injured tone,

"Can't I see the beans?"

"What beans?" says the barber, innocently.

"Oh, it's all right," remarked another customer; "it's all right, Mr Popshort; I'll go bail for him."

"That will do, then," rejoined the barber, motioning Joe; "but how was I to know?"

I began to rejoice that I had not made up my mind to be shaved. The scarlet-runners were no mystery to me, as I had, a few days before, made the acquaintance of a person who had, Sunday after Sunday, watched their growth from the time when they first pushed their green heads through the earth; but, for all that, I was not a bona fide bean-fancier. I was a spy and a traitor; and, though a man may carry his countenance very well under the generality of trying circumstances, it is an awkward matter to do so in the hands of the enemy who wields a keen razor, and who has you fixed in a chair with your arms helplessly swathed in a cloth, and your head tilted back till the skin of your throat is tightly stretched. An assault with a pair of scissors is far from pleasant; but I had a good chance of avoiding even this penalty, inasmuch as during the process of taking the ends of my hair off, my head would be bowed, and the barber would not have much opportunity for reading guilt in my face. Besides, I had come provided with a weapon that would disarm suspicion. I was to ask if "Old Bailey" had been there that morning.

There was magic in the words. As the barber gave me my fourpence change out of sixpence, he looked as innocent of scarlet-runners growing in his garden as though it were depth of winter.

"Has Old Bailey been here this morning?" I asked. His manner altered at once.

"He'll be here presently, I dare say," said he, cheerily. "Will you have a look at the scarlet-runners?"

Joe let me out into the yard, where a few strings of

look at, and At the end of

the celebrated vegetable were trained to grow against the palings. But they were nothing to they were never meant to be looked at. the yard there was a door ajar; having the clue, I pushed it open, and found myself in a wood-chopper's shed. Passing through this I came to a low wall, with a chair close to it to make it easier to climb over; and, having performed this feat, there I was within a few yards of another back door, very near which was a young man cleaning pewter pots. "Straight through,' said the young man, and in a twinkling I found myself in the tap-room of the Hare and Weazel, where were already assembled at least five-and-twenty young men and old, who, judging from their clean-shaven visages, had one and all been invited by Mr. Popshort to view his scarlet-runners.

This was the explanation of all the mystery, all the manoeuvring. The Hare and Weasel was a publichouse at which, provided he had a mind to undergo the ordeal above described, a man might enjoy the privilege of setting the law at defiance, and indulging in malt or spirituous liquors "on the sly," during prohibited hours on a Sunday morning. To be sure, it was not a very splendid reward after so much trouble. The place was villainously dirty and uncomfortable. There was scarcely a form or a chair to sit on, and the landlord could not have shewn himself more tyrannical had we been dungeon captives, and he our jailor. Talking above a whisper met with instant rebuke, and any man who dared to laugh was threatened with peremptory expulsion. "I ain't-a-goin' to get into trouble because of you lot," angrily protested the landlord. "You know it's agin the law. I shouldn't be suprised if the perlice was at the keyhole this minnit.”

But no one turned pale at the intimation of this alarming possibility. On the contrary, it seemed to give a zest to the illicit proceeding, and the secret company took long pulls at their pewter pots, and winked their satisfaction as they passed the measure to their neighbour. It was an awfully good joke this, defying the police under their very noses-to engage in a deed of daring the penalty of which, should it be discovered, would be certain fine or imprisonment. It meant much more than appeared on the surface. It meant that as men and Britons we were determined, at the risk of forfeiting our liberty, to uphold our right to drink beer on a Sunday morning, never mind what it cost us.

And, to do him justice, the landlord exerted himself heroically to enable us to exercise to the utmost the virtue of pecuniary sacrifice in the good cause. He had no common porter on tap; no fourpenny ale; no sixpenny even. It was all eightpenny, and drawn from the wood, mind you-so as to avoid the dangerous noise that raising it from the cellar by means of the beerpulls would make. Perhaps it was this drawing it from the wood that gave the eightpenny such a foreign flavour. Not a strong flavour by any means, but the landlord made a merit of this. "Taint likely," said he; "that's because it's genuwine, and hain't had nothing added to it; you might drink a pailful, and not find a headache in it." Judging from its singularly mild flavour, the gin also might have been drawn from the wood, even from the rain-water butt that stood in the yard; but it was the purest old Tom, the landlord. assured us, and on that account he charged us sevenpence a quartern for it.

During the next hour so many of Mr Popshort's customers were curious to view his scarlet runners, that

the tap-room of the Hare and Weazel became choke full; and the landlord, who added a delicious contraband flavour to all he brought us, by adopting a freeand-easy undress, consisting of trousers, dirty shirt, and slippers only, found enough to do in supplying our demands. Whatever he handed in at the guarded door was accompanied by a "Hush!" and a laying of his forefinger on his lips, enjoining us to secrecy and silence; so the thirty or forty of us, huddling together in the stifling heat of that nasty-smelling little den, drank and replenished our pots and glasses with as much stealthy, malicious glee as though the cellars of the Chief Commissioner of Police himself were under process of pillaging, and we were draining them dry.

We conversed in whispers, and the most natural thing in the world was that our favourite theme should be the new Licensing Act. Said one man who seemed bent on practically testing the landlord's assertion, that there was not a headache in a whole pailful of the eightpenny,

"This is summat like the old times, this. Why, we ain't had such a muster here on a Sunday morning, ah, not for months." "And we shouldn't now," remarked another, "if it wasn't for them coming down so sudden with that there Act. Well, it's only fair that everybody should have a turn. Them there publicans out in the Green Lanes, and them places just far enough into the country for a Sunday morning walk, have had a tidy spell of it with their bony-fidy travellers. They bony-fidy's 'em now when they ketches 'em, don't they?"

"So they do, but it's a pity, I think. I like to be neighbourly, of course; but I certainly used to like that stroll out atween the hedges afore dinner on a Sunday