'BOARD AND RESIDENCE'
One o'clock on Saturday. The unemployed's one o'clock on Saturday! Nothing more can be done this week, so you drag yourself wearily and despairingly 'home,' with the cheerful prospect of a penniless Saturday afternoon and evening and the long horrible Australian-city Sunday to drag through. One of the landlady's clutch―and she is an old hen―opens the door, exclaims 'Oh, Mr. Careless!' and grins. You wait an anxious minute, to postpone the disappointment which you feel by instinct is coming, and then ask hopelessly whether there are any letters for you.
'No, there's nothing for you, Mr. Careless.' Then in answer to the unspoken question, 'The postman's been, but there's nothing for you.'
You hang up your hat in the stuffy little passage, and start upstairs when: 'Oh, Mr. Careless, mother wants to know if you've had yer dinner.'
You haven't, but you say you have. You are empty enough inside, but the emptiness is filled up, as it were, with the wrong sort of hungry vacancy―gnawing anxiety. You haven't any stomach for the warm, tasteless mess which has been 'kep 'ot' for you in a cold stove. You feel just physically tired enough to
