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“But it wasn’t your fault,” I urged.

“No, perhaps not,” he agreed; “but it created a coldness which others were not slow to take advantage of.”

“I offered her the cat, too,” he added, but more to himself than to me.

We sat and smoked in silence. I felt that the consolations of a stranger would sound weak.

“Piebald horses are lucky, too,” he observed, knocking the ashes from his pipe against the window sash. “I had one of them once.”

“What did it do to you?” I enquired.

“Lost me the best crib I ever had in my life,” was the simple rejoinder. “The governor stood it a good deal longer than I had any right to expect; but you can’t keep a man who is always drunk. It gives a firm a bad name.”

“It would,” I agreed.

“You see,” he went on, “I never had the head for it. To some men it would not have so much mattered, but the very first glass was enough to upset me. I’d never been used to it.”

“But why did you take it?” I persisted. “The horse didn’t make you drink, did he?”

“Well, it was this way,” he explained, continuing to rub gently the lump which was now about the size of an egg. “The animal had belonged to a gentleman who travelled in the wine and spirit line, and who had been accustomed to visit in the way of business almost every public-house he came to. The result was you couldn’t get that little horse past a public- house–at least I couldn’t. He sighted them a quarter of a mile off, and made straight for the door. I struggled with him at first, but it was five to ten minutes’ work getting him away, and folks used to gather round and bet on us. I think, maybe, I’d have stuck to it, however, if it hadn’t been for a temperance chap who stopped one day and lectured the crowd about it from the opposite side of the street. He called me Pilgrim, and said the little horse was ‘Pollion,’ or some such name, and kept on shouting out that I was to fight him for a heavenly crown. After that they called us “Polly and the Pilgrim, fighting for the crown.” It riled me, that did, and at the very next house at which he pulled up I got down and said I’d come for two of Scotch. That was the beginning. It took me years to break myself of the habit.

“But there,” he continued, “it has always been the same. I hadn’t been a fortnight in my first situation before my employer gave me a goose weighing eighteen pounds as a Christmas present.”

“Well, that couldn’t have done you any harm,” I remarked. “That was lucky enough.”

“So the other clerks said at the time,” he replied. “The old gentleman had never been known to give anything away before in his life. ‘He’s taken a fancy to you,’ they said; ‘you are a lucky beggar!'”

He sighed heavily. I felt there was a story attached.

“What did you do with it?” I asked.

“That was the trouble,” he returned. “I didn’t know what to do with it. It was ten o’clock on Christmas Eve, just as I was leaving, that he gave it to me. ‘Tiddling Brothers have sent me a goose, Biggles,’ he said to me as I helped him on with his great-coat. ‘Very kind of ’em, but I don’t want it myself; you can have it!’

“Of course I thanked him, and was very grateful. He wished me a merry Christmas and went out. I tied the thing up in brown paper, and took it under my arm. It was a fine bird, but heavy.

“Under all the circumstances, and it being Christmas time, I thought I would treat myself to a glass of beer. I went into a quiet little house at the corner of the Lane and laid the goose on the counter.