on the particular evening when this history opens, was leaning over a
gate in an Eastern county lane, staring vacantly at a field of ripe
corn.

He was a peculiar and rather battered looking individual, apparently
over forty years of age, and yet bearing upon him that unmistakable
stamp of dignity and self-respect which, if it does not exclusively
belong to, is still one of the distinguishing attributes of the
English gentleman. In face he was ugly, no other word can express it.
Here were not the long mustachios, the almond eyes, the aristocratic
air of the Colonel of fiction--for our dreamer was a Colonel. These
were--alas! that the truth should be so plain--represented by somewhat
scrubby sandy-coloured whiskers, small but kindly blue eyes, a low
broad forehead, with a deep line running across it from side to side,
something like that to be seen upon the busts of Julius Caesar, and a
long thin nose. One good feature, however, he did possess, a mouth of
such sweetness and beauty that set, as it was, above a very square and
manly-looking chin, it had the air of being ludicrously out of place.
"Umph," said his old aunt, Mrs. Massey (who had just died and left him
what she possessed), on the occasion of her first introduction to him
five-and-thirty years before, "Umph! Nature meant to make a pretty
girl of you, and changed her mind after she had finished the mouth.
Well, never mind, better be a plain man than a pretty woman. There, go
along, boy! I like your ugly face."

Nor was the old lady peculiar in this respect, for plain as the
countenance of Colonel Harold Quaritch undoubtedly was, people found
something very taking about it, when once they became accustomed to
its rugged air and stern regulated expression. What that something was
it would be hard to define, but perhaps the nearest approach to the
truth would be to describe it as a light of purity which,
notwithstanding the popular idea to the contrary, is quite as often to
be found upon the faces of men as upon those of women. Any person of
discernment looking on Colonel Quaritch must have felt that he was in
the presence of a good man--not a prig or a milksop, but a man who had
attained by virtue of thought and struggle that had left their marks
upon him, a man whom it would not be well to tamper with, one to be
respected by all, and feared of evildoers. Men felt this, and he was
popular among those who knew him in his service, though not in any
hail-fellow-w