When at last his exertions had thrown him out of breath, and his frame did not respond with quite the same unanimity to his passion, he stopped under a lamp in the middle of a street on the side of a steep hill, took out the precious document he carried, and began to peruse it for sheer human pleasure. He even pressed his lips to this prosaic thing, with no less of fervor, indeed with more abandonment than he had saluted the hand of the sorceress who had been the means of restoring it to his care.
“I must make her my saint, I must burn candles to her,” he muttered, recalling her image with a sense of rapture.
As he stood under the lamp, a very large and slow-footed policeman waddled up towards him, trying doors and casting the light of his lantern down the areas he passed. As he went by, keenly scrutinizing the figure of the young man, yet pretending not to notice it, Northcote hailed him.
“Where might I be, policeman? I am strange to these parts.”
“Well,” said the policeman slowly and with effort, “you might be in Balham, but you ain’t. Likewise, you might be at Charing Cross, but you are not there, nuther.”
“I observe, policeman, that you have graduated in the school of judicial humor,” said Northcote, delighted by the suavity of outline of X012. “If every man had his rights, which of course it is utopian to expect, you would be adding lustre to the bench. Your mental gifts fit you equally to be a judge, a recorder, or a stipendiary magistrate.”
Such an exaggerated view of his merits produced a deep-founded suspicion in the honest breast of X012.
“If every man had ’is rights,” said the custodian of the peace, speaking slowly and with effort, and eying Northcote with the solemnity of a horse, “you’d be took up on suspicion, young feller, and charged with loitering with intent.”
Northcote dispelled the suburban quietude with a guffaw.
“Being unwilling,” said he, “to impale myself upon that spiked railing which calls itself the law, I ought to be extremely careful to refrain in its presence from the vexed and overmuch discussed question of whether the badinage of its minions is wit, wisdom, humor, or a veritable cesspool of human inanity.”