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I expressed my satisfaction.

‘Quite right, sir, quite right; it’ll do for a makeshift, I’m bound to say. But wait till you see what we’ll get up for you on your own measure. Come, Tod, book and pen; get at it. Length of leg, 32’—and so on. Before I could get in a word he had measured me, and was giving orders for dress-suits, morning suits, shirts, and all sorts of things. When I got a chance I said:

‘But, my dear sir, I can’t give these orders, unless you can wait indefinitely, or change the bill.’

‘Indefinitely! It’s a weak word, sir, a weak word. Eternally—that’s the word, sir. Tod, rush these things through, and send them to the gentleman’s address without any waste of time. Let the minor customers wait. Set down the gentleman’s address and——’

‘I’m changing my quarters. I will drop in and leave the new address.’

‘Quite right, sir, quite right. One moment—let me show you out, sir. There—good day, sir, good day.’

Well, don’t you see what was bound to happen? I drifted naturally into buying whatever I wanted, and asking for change. Within a week I was sumptuously equipped with all needful comforts and luxuries, and was housed in an expensive private hotel in Hanover Square. I took my dinners there, but for breakfast I stuck by Harris’s humble feeding-house, where I had got my first meal on my million-pound bill. I was the making of Harris. The fact had gone all abroad that the foreign crank who carried million-pound bills in his vest-pocket was the patron saint of the place. That was enough. From being a poor, struggling, little hand-to-mouth enterprise, it had become celebrated, and overcrowded with customers. Harris was so grateful that he forced loans upon me, and would not be denied; and so, pauper as I was, I had money to spend, and was living like the rich and the great. I judged that there was going to be a crash by and by, but I was in, now, and must swim across or drown. You see there was just that element of impending disaster to give a serious side, a sober side, yes, a tragic side, to a state of things which would otherwise have been purely ridiculous. In the night, in the dark, the tragedy part was always to the front, and always warning, always threatening; and so I moaned and tossed, and sleep was hard to find. But in the cheerful daylight the tragedy element faded out and disappeared, and I walked on air, and was happy to giddiness, to intoxication, you may say.