the walls. Sketches of boxers, of ballet-girls, and of
racehorses alternated with a sensuous Fragonard, a martial Girardet,
and a dreamy Turner. But amid these varied ornaments there were
scattered the trophies which brought back strongly to my recollection
the fact that Lord John Roxton was one of the great all-round sportsmen
and athletes of his day. A dark-blue oar crossed with a cherry-pink
one above his mantel-piece spoke of the old Oxonian and Leander man,
while the foils and boxing-gloves above and below them were the tools
of a man who had won supremacy with each. Like a dado round the room
was the jutting line of splendid heavy game-heads, the best of their
sort from every quarter of the world, with the rare white rhinoceros of
the Lado Enclave drooping its supercilious lip above them all.

In the center of the rich red carpet was a black and gold Louis Quinze
table, a lovely antique, now sacrilegiously desecrated with marks of
glasses and the scars of cigar-stumps. On it stood a silver tray of
smokables and a burnished spirit-stand, from which and an adjacent
siphon my silent host proceeded to charge two high glasses. Having
indicated an arm-chair to me and placed my refreshment near it, he
handed me a long, smooth Havana. Then, seating himself opposite to me,
he looked at me long and fixedly with his strange, twinkling, reckless
eyes--eyes of a cold light blue, the color of a glacier lake.

Through the thin haze of my cigar-smoke I noted the details of a face
which was already familiar to me from many photographs--the
strongly-curved nose, the hollow, worn cheeks, the dark, ruddy hair,
thin at the top, the crisp, virile moustaches, the small, aggressive
tuft upon his projecting chin. Something there was of Napoleon III.,
something of Don Quixote, and yet again something which was the essence
of the English country gentleman, the keen, alert, open-air lover of
dogs and of horses. His skin was of a rich flower-pot red from sun and
wind. His eyebrows were tufted and overhanging, which gave those
naturally cold eyes an almost ferocious aspect, an impression which was
increased by his strong and furrowed brow. In figure he was spare, but
very strongly built--indeed, he had often proved that there were few
men in England capable of such sustained exertions. His height was a
little over six feet, but he seemed shorter on account of a peculiar
rounding of the shoulders. Such was the famous Lord John Rox