esses. At last, with the aid of his nose, he made
up his mind, and knocked.

"Come in," cried a voice of peculiar tone. It reminded Alec of
something he could not at all identify, which was not wonderful, seeing
it was of itself, heard once before, that it reminded him. It was the
same voice which, as he walked to the debate, the first night, had
warned him not to look at rainbows.

He opened the door and entered.

"What do you want?" said the voice, its source almost invisible in the
thick fumes of genuine pigtail, through which it sent cross odours of
as genuine Glenlivat.

"I want you to help me with a bit of Homer, if you please, Mr
Cupples--I'm not up to Homer yet."

"Do ye think I hae naething ither to do than to grin' the grandur o' an
auld haythen into spunemate for a young sinner like you?"

"Ye dinna ken what I'm like, Mr Cupples," returned Alec, remembering
his landlady's injunction not to be afraid of him.

"Come athort the reek, and lat's luik at ye."

Alec obeyed, and found the speaker seated by the side of a little fire,
in an old easy-chair covered with horsehair; and while undergoing his
scrutiny, took his revenge in kind. Mr Cupples was a man who might have
been of almost any age from five-and-twenty to fifty--at least, Alec's
experience was insufficient for the task of determining to what decade
of human years he belonged. He was a little man, in a long black
tail-coat much too large, and dirty gray trousers. He had no
shirt-collar visible, although a loose rusty stock revealed the whole
of his brown neck. His hair, long, thin, fair, and yet a good deal
mingled with grey, straggled about over an uncommonly high forehead,
which had somehow the neglected and ruinous look of an old bare tower
no ivy had beautified. His ears stood far out from his great head. His
nose refuses to be described. His lips were plentiful and loose; his
chin was not worth mentioning; his eyes were rather large, beautifully
formed, bright, and blue. His hand, small, delicately shaped, and
dirty, grasped, all the time he was examining Alec, a tumbler of
steaming toddy; while his feet, in list slippers of different colours,
balanced themselves upon the fender[.]

"You've been fighting, you young rascal!" said Mr Cupples, in a tone of
authority, the moment he had satisfied himself about Alec's
countenance. "That won't do. It's not respectable."

And he gave the queerest unintelligible grin.

Alec found himself strange