262 STRAY-AWAYS 



sombre house; the last of the season's lodgers had 

 left a few days before, and his wife and daughters, 

 gorgeously attired, had stepped into the last tram for 

 Dalkey, witli no intention of returning till 11 p.m. 



The acti\'ity of the street seemed to make his loneli- 

 ness more complete. Not a foot of all those that passed 

 by paused at his door, every face was set on its own 

 concerns, and whether in sadness or laughter, was a 

 mere preoccupied profile to the isolated figure scarcely 

 three yards away across the area rails. The paving- 

 stones of the roadway were belaboured by big hoofs 

 as the trams dragged load after load of human beings 

 to the suburbs, bicyclists glided with their peculiar 

 air of self-sufficiency, soldiers from Beggars' Bush 

 Barracks swaggered, in trim pairs and trios, children 

 played clamorously about the dingy outlets of the 

 lanes that debouch in Lower IMount Street. As an 

 alternative to this outlook Mr. McKenzie could, when 

 so disposed, study the contours of his back garden, a 

 grey and airless pit, where a gravel walk afforded a 

 promenade for cats round a bilious, variegated laurel 

 and a sooty shrub of uncertain family. The vista 

 was closed by a gloomy wall in which was a cobwebbed 

 door, gi\'ing access to a stable, and behind all rose the 

 vague, brawling voices of the lane that ran its evil 

 course parallel with the street. 



A stable and a coach-house were as superfluous to 

 Mr. McKenzie as to the majority of his neighbours, 

 and he had followed the universal fashion of letting 

 them to a cabman and his family, by which device a 

 comfortable sum is brought in yearly, and a rotation 

 of epidemics is kept up in convenient proximity to 

 the householder. ^Ir. McKenzie's eye, as it glanced 

 occasionally through the back window, was expressive 

 of the satisfaction that he felt at having, only the 

 week before, made an arrangement of this kind, with 



