eces of timber which lay near this part
of the Line, and on which I sometimes sat for half an hour at a time,
when I was tired by my wanderings about Mugby Junction.

It was square, cold, grey-looking, built of rough-hewn stone, and roofed
with thin slabs of the same material. Its windows were few in number,
and very small for the size of the building. In the great blank, grey
broad-side, there were only four windows. The entrance-door was in the
middle of the house; there was a window on either side of it, and there
were two more in the single story above. The blinds were all closely
drawn, and, when the door was shut, the dreary building gave no sign of
life or occupation.

But the door was not always shut. Sometimes it was opened from within,
with a great jingling of bolts and door-chains, and then a man would come
forward and stand upon the door-step, snuffing the air as one might do
who was ordinarily kept on rather a small allowance of that element. He
was stout, thick-set, and perhaps fifty or sixty years old--a man whose
hair was cut exceedingly close, who wore a large bushy beard, and whose
eye had a sociable twinkle in it which was prepossessing. He was
dressed, whenever I saw him, in a greenish-brown frock-coat made of some
material which was not cloth, wore a waistcoat and trousers of light
colour, and had a frill to his shirt--an ornament, by the way, which did
not seem to go at all well with the beard, which was continually in
contact with it. It was the custom of this worthy person, after standing
for a short time on the threshold inhaling the air, to come forward into
the road, and, after glancing at one of the upper windows in a half
mechanical way, to cross over to the logs, and, leaning over the fence
which guarded the railway, to look up and down the Line (it passed before
the house) with the air of a man accomplishing a self-imposed task of
which nothing was expected to come. This done, he would cross the road
again, and turning on the threshold to take a final sniff of air,
disappeared once more within the house, bolting and chaining the door
again as if there were no probability of its being reopened for at least
a week. Yet half an hour had not passed before he was out in the road
again, sniffing the air and looking up and down the Line as before.

It was not very long before I managed to scrape acquaintance with this
restless personage. I soon found out that my friend with the shirt-