hands; and the lecturer (along with the board schoolmaster, the Baptist
clergyman, and a working-man's candidate, who made up his bodyguard) was
ultimately driven from the scene. Morris had not been present on that
fatal day; if he had, he would have recognized a certain fighting
glitter in his uncle's eye, and a certain chewing movement of his lips,
as old acquaintances. But even to the inexpert these symptoms breathed
of something dangerous.

'Well, well,' said Morris. 'I have no wish to bother you further till we
get to London.'

Joseph did not so much as look at him in answer; with tremulous hands
he produced a copy of the British Mechanic, and ostentatiously buried
himself in its perusal.

'I wonder what can make him so cantankerous?' reflected the nephew. 'I
don't like the look of it at all.' And he dubiously scratched his nose.

The train travelled forth into the world, bearing along with it the
customary freight of obliterated voyagers, and along with these old
Joseph, affecting immersion in his paper, and John slumbering over
the columns of the Pink Un, and Morris revolving in his mind a dozen
grudges, and suspicions, and alarms. It passed Christchurch by the sea,
Herne with its pinewoods, Ringwood on its mazy river. A little behind
time, but not much for the South-Western, it drew up at the platform of
a station, in the midst of the New Forest, the real name of which (in
case the railway company 'might have the law of me') I shall veil under
the alias of Browndean.

Many passengers put their heads to the window, and among the rest an old
gentleman on whom I willingly dwell, for I am nearly done with him now,
and (in the whole course of the present narrative) I am not in the least
likely to meet another character so decent. His name is immaterial, not
so his habits. He had passed his life wandering in a tweed suit on the
continent of Europe; and years of Galignani's Messenger having at length
undermined his eyesight, he suddenly remembered the rivers of Assyria
and came to London to consult an oculist. From the oculist to the
dentist, and from both to the physician, the step appears inevitable;
presently he was in the hands of Sir Faraday, robed in ventilating cloth
and sent to Bournemouth; and to that domineering baronet (who was his
only friend upon his native soil) he was now returning to report. The
case of these tweedsuited wanderers is unique. We have all seen them
entering the table d'hote (at Spez