be
able to recognise him."

"I'm trying to, Mr. Anne. But _clean-shaved_? I don't seem to rightly
get hold of that p'int. Sometimes it might appear to me like as if he
was; and sometimes like as if he wasn't. No, it wouldn't surprise me now
if you was to tell me he 'ad a bit o' whisker."

"Was the man red-faced?" I roared, dwelling on each syllable.

"I don't think you need go for to get cross about it, Mr. Anne!" said
he. "I'm tellin' you every blessed thing I see! Red-faced? Well, no, not
as you would remark upon."

A dreadful calm fell upon me.

"Was he anywise pale?" I asked.

"Well, it don't seem to me as though he were. But I tell you truly, I
didn't take much heed to that."

"Did he look like a drinking man?"

"Well, no. If you please, sir, he looked more like an eating one."

"O, he was stout, was he?"

"No, sir. I couldn't go so far as that. No, he wasn't not to say
_stout_. If anything, lean rather."

I need not go on with the infuriating interview. It ended as it began,
except that Rowley was in tears, and that I had acquired one fact. The
man was drawn for me as being of any height you like to mention, and of
any degree of corpulence or leanness; clean-shaved or not, as the case
might be; the colour of his hair Rowley "could not take it upon himself
to put a name on"; that of his eyes he thought to have been blue--nay,
it was the one point on which he attained to a kind of tearful
certainty. "I'll take my davy on it," he asseverated. They proved to
have been as black as sloes, very little and very near together. So much
for the evidence of the artless! And the fact, or rather the facts,
acquired? Well, they had to do not with the person but with his
clothing. The man wore knee breeches and white stockings; his coat was
"some kind of a lightish colour--or betwixt that and dark"; and he wore
a "moleskin weskit." As if this were not enough, he presently hailed me
from my breakfast in a prodigious flutter, and showed me an honest and
rather venerable citizen passing in the Square.

"That's _him_, sir," he cried, "the very moral of him! Well, this one is
better dressed, and p'raps a trifler taller; and in the face he don't
favour him noways at all, sir. No, not when I come to look again, 'e
don't seem to favour him noways."

"Jackass!" said I, and I think the greatest stickler for manners will
admit the epithet to have been justified.

Meanwhile the appearance of my landlady added a great load