ined.

A decrepit hack or two, a couple of old-fashioned surreys, and a few
"cut-unders" drove by, bearing the newly arrived and their valises, the
hotel omnibus depositing several commercial travellers at the door. A
solitary figure came from the station on foot, and when it appeared
within fair range of the window, Uncle Joe Davey, who had but hovered
on the flanks of the combat, first removed his spectacles and wiped
them, as though distrusting the vision they offered him, then,
replacing them, scanned anew the approaching figure and uttered a
smothered cry.

"My Lord A'mighty!" he gasped. "What's this? Look there!"

They looked. A truce came involuntarily, and they sat in paralytic
silence as the figure made its stately and sensational progress along
Main Street.

Not only the aged men were smitten. Men shovelling snow from the
pavements stopped suddenly in their labors; two women, talking busily
on a doorstep, were stilled and remained in frozen attitudes as it
passed; a grocer's clerk, crossing the pavement, carrying a heavily
laden basket to his delivery wagon, halted half-way as the figure came
near, and then, making a pivot of his heels as it went by, behaved
towards it as does the magnetic needle to the pole.

It was that of a tall gentleman, cheerfully, though somewhat with
ennui, enduring his nineteenth winter. His long and slender face he
wore smiling, beneath an accurately cut plaster of dark hair cornicing
his forehead, a fashion followed by many youths of that year. This
perfect bang was shown under a round black hat whose rim was so small
as almost not to be there at all; and the head was supported by a
waxy-white sea-wall of collar, rising three inches above the blue
billows of a puffed cravat, upon which floated a large, hollow pearl.
His ulster, sporting a big cape at the shoulders, and a tasselled hood
over the cape, was of a rough Scotch cloth, patterned in faint,
gray-and-white squares the size of baggage-checks, and it was so long
that the skirts trailed in the snow. His legs were lost in the
accurately creased, voluminous garments that were the tailors' canny
reaction from the tight trousers with which the 'Eighties had begun:
they were, in color, a palish russet, broadly striped with gray, and,
in size, surpassed the milder spirit of fashion so far as they
permitted a liberal knee action to take place almost without
superficial effect. Upon his feet glistened long shoes, shaped,