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As soon as Coleman had planted his belongings in a hotel he was bowled in a hansom briskly along the smoky Strand, through a dark city whose walls dripped like the walls of a cave and whose passages were only illuminated by flaring yellow and red signs. Walkley the London correspondent of the Eclipse, whirled from his chair with a shout of joy and relief -at sight of Coleman. " Cables," he cried.
"Asbury Fuller?" and he deftly fastened beneath his nose an elegant false moustache with waxed ends. With his hands before his eyes as if to forefend his view from some dreadful apparition, the man in the corner sank upon his knees, gibbering, "William Leadbury, come back from the dead!" "William Leadbury, alive and well, here to claim his own from you, Anderson Walkley, outlaw and felon.
Careless of himself, he yet realized to the full the meaning of this grim duel, for when the fight was over and the Northern men cheering, he was silent Captain Walkley asked why he did not cheer with the others. "Too many hearts made sad to-day," was the significant reply that showed he counted the cost to its bitter end, though he went forward none the less bravely.
Keys, called too late to the death bed, duly bore witness before the coroner's jury that ``Mary Anne Walkley had died from long hours of work in an over- crowded workroom, and a too small and badly ventilated bedroom. In order to give the doctor a lesson in good manners, the coroner's jury thereupon brought in a verdict that ``the deceased had died of apoplexy, but there was reason to fear that her death had been accelerated by over-work in an over-crowded workroom, &c. ``Our white slaves, cried the ``Morning Star, the organ of the free-traders, Cobden and Bright, ``our white slaves, who are toiled into the grave, for the most part silently pine and die.
"I had left to call her, when that poltroon of an Anderson Walkley, who had stolen back into the house after running from it, crept behind me and struck me back of the ear with a shaving mug. I dropped unconscious. In the resulting confusion, your very existence was as forgotten as your whereabouts was unknown.
I had become Anderson Walkley and was dead. You had seized my property and my identity. I had been in Chicago but two days and no one had become familiar enough with my appearance to make any question when you with your clean-shaven face came down on the morning after my kidnaping and told the people at the hotel that you were William Leadbury and had shaved your moustache off over night.
A. B. Walkley, the English dramatic critic, after declaring that he would rather have lived during the Balzac epoch in Paris, continues in this entertaining vein: And then one might have had a chance of seeing George Sand in the thick of her amorisms. For my part I would certainly rather have met her than Pontius Pilate.
Unhappily, there are few souls so humble, so conventual as that. George Eliot, as Mr. Walkley recalled, was terrified lest ill-judged blame or ill-judged praise should discourage her production; but then she made it a strict rule never to read any criticism, so that, of course, it had no restraining effect upon her.
Judge Bording, by the recent concatenation of events, I am become the host. Let us leave Walkley here to pack his effects, and return to the drawing-room."
Yes, exposed, Anderson Walkley, by the sudden confronting of you with the implements of your craft, the weapons you had used in your trade, and the belief thus aroused in your guilty mind that your secret was known, that your identity had been detected." "Asbury Fuller, what business is it of yours?" and Leadbury snatched up a large pair of hair clippers and waved them with a menacing gesture.
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