man. Everybody is, these days. Of course He dropped his h’ches. Everybody does, these days.
Born not far from Oxford Street, in a particularly odorous alley, once known as Hog Lane, which had given the late Mr. Hogarth a great deal of material for his scathing drawings, his early recollections had something to do with a pimply-faced, immensely stout woman who had called him “yer bleedin' little darlin' hynger” in moments of alcoholic tenderness; to give him clouts on the side of the head when the barmaid over at the “Rose and Elephant” had put too much gin in her good-morning half pint of “swipes.” His reputed father had been a sardonic navvy who had given him his Christian name of Preserved in a riotous mood because every one of his many other children had died a week or two after they had opened their lungs to the greasy soot of Hog Lane. Fate, kindly or otherwise, had preserved him, and the name had turned out to be singularly appropriate.
For, running away from home and board school at the ripe age of twelve and sailing before the mast to the Azores, afterwards to South Africa, he had arrived at the latter place at the high tide of the De-Beers diamond boom. Promptly he had deserted, had joined the South African Argonauts who pushed north to the veldt, and, to believe certain tales that were rampant in Lombard and Threadneedle and Bishops- gate Streets, had laid the foundations of his vast for tune by the nefarious process called I. D. B., “illicit diamond buying” from thieving Kaffirs and Cape boys who worked in the Kimberley fields.
Since then he had preserved and caused to grow and
