"Waited at table and marked at billiards."
"Till you took to drink?" I said.
"Till I resigned from a strange circumstance."
I sent him out of the bar, and took him down the garden, saying I'd find him an hour or two's work. "Now, then," I said, as soon as I had got him alone, "what made you leave?"
He looked at me curiously. "I expect you know, sir," he said. "Sixty-six. Unfinished."
And then he told me of a game played in that old billiard-room on a wet summer afternoon thirty years before. He, the marker, was one of the players. The other man was a commercial traveller, who used the house pretty regularly. "A fat man, ugly-looking, with a nasty laugh. Josiah Ham his name was. He was at sixty-six when he got himself into a tight place. He moved his ball—did it when he thought I wasn't looking. But I saw it in the glass, and I told him of it. He got very angry. He said he wished he might be struck dead if he ever touched the ball."
The old tramp stopped. "I see," I said.
"They said it was apoplexy. It's known to be dangerous for fat men to get very angry. But I'd had enough of it before long. I cleared out, and so did the rest of the servants."
"Well," I said, "we're not so superstitious nowadays. And what brought you down in the world?"
"It would have driven any man to it," he said. "And once the habit is formed—well, it's there."