o go even so far as this.

The barmaid sighed again, and raised one of her hands from the counter on
which they rested to scratch the smallest surface of her face with the
smallest of her fingers. She looked towards the door, and presently
remarked, 'I think I hear the 'bus coming in from station.'

The eyes of the dairymen and farmers turned to the glass door dividing
the hall from the porch, and in a minute or two the omnibus drew up
outside. Then there was a lumbering down of luggage, and then a man came
into the hall, followed by a porter with a portmanteau on his poll, which
he deposited on a bench.

The stranger was an elderly person, with curly ashen white hair, a deeply-
creviced outer corner to each eyelid, and a countenance baked by
innumerable suns to the colour of terra-cotta, its hue and that of his
hair contrasting like heat and cold respectively. He walked meditatively
and gently, like one who was fearful of disturbing his own mental
equilibrium. But whatever lay at the bottom of his breast had evidently
made him so accustomed to its situation there that it caused him little
practical inconvenience.

He paused in silence while, with his dubious eyes fixed on the barmaids,
he seemed to consider himself. In a moment or two he addressed them, and
asked to be accommodated for the night. As he waited he looked curiously
round the hall, but said nothing. As soon as invited he disappeared up
the staircase, preceded by a chambermaid and candle, and followed by a
lad with his trunk. Not a soul had recognized him.

A quarter of an hour later, when the farmers and dairymen had driven off
to their homesteads in the country, he came downstairs, took a biscuit
and one glass of wine, and walked out into the town, where the radiance
from the shop-windows had grown so in volume of late years as to flood
with cheerfulness every standing cart, barrow, stall, and idler that
occupied the wayside, whether shabby or genteel. His chief interest at
present seemed to lie in the names painted over the shop-fronts and on
door-ways, as far as they were visible; these now differed to an ominous
extent from what they had been one-and-twenty years before.

The traveller passed on till he came to the bookseller's, where he looked
in through the glass door. A fresh-faced young man was standing behind
the counter, otherwise the shop was empty. The gray-haired observer
entered, asked for some periodical by way of paying for