58 STRAY -AW AYS 



four schoolboys. They had not seemed to have 

 much luggage, but their dormitory had the appear- 

 ance of being inhabited by four large famihes. The 

 remainder of the containing capacity of the offices 

 was in the hands of rats, and of a colony of bees that 

 lived under the floor and crawled forth at night to 

 see what the candle-light meant. The offices were 

 connected with the house by a sequence of passages 

 on the ground floor; they possessed a door into the 

 yard, and a door to the front of the house, and they 

 also possessed a draught, by day and night, that 

 recalled the compressed gales of the Tube Railway 

 Stations. The Passages were looked on as second 

 choice by the women who came to sell chickens, and 

 other conversationalists, first choice being, of course, 

 the kitchen. No one could foretell the moment 

 when their candle would be blown out in the Passages, 

 and I was wont to traverse them at night with a 

 bicycle -lamp. 



It was on one of the wettest nights of a wet Christ- 

 mas week, when the wind had the big Conneniara 

 roar in it, that I made my usual progress to dinner 

 with the bicycle-lamp, swiftly, because I was late, 

 and cautiously, because the worn flags were slippery 

 with the damp that they sweated forth in such 

 weather. In the darkest section of the Passages 

 something rushed past me, a low, fleeing thing, on 

 which there was no time to turn the lamp. The 

 impression remained of a grey-and-black dog. I 

 heard its claws scrabble on the flags as it went, like 

 the lash of a whip, round an open door, and was 

 swallowed up in the tremendous night. My way lay 

 near the kitchen, and from thence there rose a female 

 howl that would have been blood-curdling had it not 

 turned suddenly and healthfully into a lament for 

 " me whipped cream." Grasping the position, I 



