not rheumatised his limbs. No one knows better than he that
what seems a bell-pull has often, owing to former violence and broken
wires, no connection with the bell. Here a chimney smokes, there the
flue is blocked with birds' nests. In certain country inns, the flimsy
gossamer of spiders makes an undesirable fretwork over the greenish
knobs of the ill-puttied panes. Mice, rats, and "such small deer"
scamper uncannily the live-long night along the worn waxcloths and
unspeakable carpets. As he undresses by the light of a three-inch
candle, he has his soul horrified by early Victorian prints, of Paul
tumbling from his horse on the way to Damascus, of the gory relief of
Lucknow, or of some towsy-headed clansman smiling out of perspective. He
is by no means a tourist on pleasure bent. He must face gust and surge,
for he cannot choose his time and weather. His duty is to cover as much
ground as he can in a given week, fill his order-book with
irreproachable orders, and get home to report, preparatory to another
sally in another direction. Competition stings him into feverish
activity. If he sells tea, he well knows that an army of rivals is
scouring the whole country with samples as good, or perhaps a great deal
better, than his own.

THE TWO-EST-FACED KNAVE.

Nevertheless, the jovial facetiousness of these commercial gentlemen
knows no limits, and hotel-waiters are, at all times, fair game for
their stings and arrows. In one of the northern hotels, there used to be
a portly and rubicund waiter who might have passed for the High Priest
of the Goddess of Health. His face shone, if I may say so, with the
radiance of perfect digestion. A pert commercial, one day, approached
him with an affected look of deep concern and said, "_Well, I hope
you're keeping better_," accompanying the remark with a dig in the
waiter's stomach. The waiter, who had never known a minute's ill-health
in his life, swore vividly for fifteen minutes without repeating
himself, and among many references to the commercial's ancestry, called
him the _two-est-faced_ knave that had ever set foot on the Shetland
Islands. Such a superlative was felt by all to be a masterpiece of
language, and turned the laugh against the bagman.[27]

[27] As to language, one hears, especially in the Hebrides,
phrases of amusing quaintness, due no doubt to the speaker
handling a foreign tongue. The school in one of the Mull villages
is very small, and I made a