hat mean gas jet, a smell of leather;
and there old Pascoe's hammer defiantly and rapidly attacked its
circumstances, driving home at times, and all unseen, more than those
rivets. If he rose to rake over his bench for material or a tool, he
went spryly, aided by a stick, but at every step his body heeled over
because one leg was shorter than the other. Having found what he
wanted he would wheel round, with a strange agility that was apparently
a consequence of his deformity, continuing his discourse, and driving
his points into the air with his hammer, and so hobble back, still
talking; still talking through his funny cap, as his neighbours used to
say of him. At times he convoluted aerial designs and free ideas with
his hammer, spending it aloft on matters superior to boots. The boots
were never noticed. Pascoe could revivify his dust. The glitter of
his spectacles when he looked up might have been the sparkling of an
ardent vitality suppressed in his little body.

The wall space of his room was stratified with shelves, where half-seen
bottles and nondescript lumps were to be guessed at, like fossils
embedded in shadow. They had never been moved, and they never would
be. Hanging from a nail on one shelf was a framed lithograph of the
ship _Euterpe_, off S. Catherine's Point, July 21, 1849. On the shelf
below the picture was a row of books. I never saw Pascoe look at them,
and they could have been like the bottles, retained by a careful man
because of the notion that some day they would come in handy. Once,
when waiting for Pascoe, who was out getting a little beer, I glanced
at the volumes, and supposed they bore some relation to the picture of
the ship; perhaps once they had been owned by that legendary brother of
Pascoe's, a sailor, of whom I had had a misty apprehension. It would
be difficult to say there had been a direct word about him. There were
manuals on navigation, seamanship, and ship-building, all of them
curiosities, in these later days, rather than expert guides. They were
full of marginal notes, and were not so dusty as I had expected to find
them. The rest of the books were of journeys in Central America and
Mexico: _Three Years in Guatemala_; _The Buried Cities of Yucatan_;
_Scenes on the Mosquito Coast_; _A Voyage to Honduras_. There was more
of it, and of that sort. They were by authors long forgotten; but
those books, too, looked as though they were often in use. Certainly
they co