up West, why he should choose to live in such a place as Fetter Lane, over a greengrocer's shop, in rooms the rent of which could not possibly be more than thirty pounds a year.

To them, it remained a mystery; but surely to you who read this it is no mystery at all.

John Grey was a writer, a journalist, a driver of the pen, a business which brings with it more responsibilities than its remuneration can reasonably afford. There is no real living to be made by literature alone, if you have any ambitions and any respect for them. Most people certainly have ambitions, but their respect for them is so inconsiderable when compared with their desire of reward, that they only keep them alive by talking of them. These are the people who know thoroughly the meaning of that word Art, and can discuss it letter for letter, beginning with the capital first.

But to have ambitions and to live up to them is only possible to the extreme idealist--a man who, seeing God in everything, the world has not yet learnt or perhaps forgotten to cater for.

So far everything is utilitarian--supplying the needs of the body which can only see God in consecrated wine, and so it is that wise men build churches for fools to pray in--the wise man in this world being he who grows rich.

This, then, is the solution to the mystery of John Grey. He was an idealist--the very type of person to live in a City of Beautiful Nonsense, where the rarest things in the world cost nothing and the most sordid necessities are dear. For example, the rent of number thirty-nine was a gross exactment upon his purse. He could ill afford that thirty pounds a year. He could ill afford the meals which sometimes hunger compelled him to pay for. But when he bought a piece of brass--the little brass man, for example, an old seal, that was of no use to anybody in the world, and only stood passively inert upon his mantel-piece--the price of it was as nothing when compared with the cheap and vulgar necessities of existence.

But it must not be supposed that Fetter Lane and its environs constitute the spires, the roofs and domes of that City of Beautiful Nonsense. It is not so. Far away East, on the breast of the Adriatic, that wonderful City lies. And we shall come to it--we shall come to it all too soon.

CHAPTER V

THE BALLAD-MONGER--FETTER LANE