fe, with that hard and severe cast of features that rather repels than
invites intimacy. In figure he was compactly and stoutly built, his
step as he walked, and his air as he stood, showed one whose military
training had given the whole tone to his character. Certain strong lines
about the mouth, and a peculiar puckering of the angles of the eyes,
boded a turn for sarcasm, which all his instincts, and they were Scotch
ones, could not completely repress. His voice was loud, sharp, and
ringing, the voice of a man who, when he said a thing, would not brook
being asked to repeat it. That Colonel Haggerstone knew how to be
sapling as well as oak, was a tradition among those who had served with
him; still it is right to add, that his more congenial mood was the
imperative, and that which he usually practised. The accidental lameness
of one of his horses had detained him some weeks at Baden, a
durance which assuredly appeared to push his temper to its very last
intrenchments.

The third representative of forlorn humanity was a very tall, muscular
man, whose jockey-cut green coat and wide-brimmed hat contrasted oddly
with a pair of huge white moustaches, that would have done credit to
a captain of the Old Guard. On features, originally handsome, time,
poverty, and dissipation had left many a mark; but still the half-droll,
half-truculent twinkle of his clear gray eyes showed him one whom no
turn of fortune could thoroughly subdue, and who, even in the very
hardest of his trials, could find heart to indulge his humor for Peter
Dalton was an Irishman; and although many years an absentee, held the
dear island and its prejudices as green in his memory as though he had
left it but a week before.

Such were the three, who, without one sympathy in common, without a
point of contact in character, were now drawn into a chance acquaintance
by the mere accident of bad weather. Their conversation if such it could
be called showed how little progress could be made in intimacy by those
whose roads in life lie apart. The bygone season, the company, the
play-table and its adventures, were all discussed so often, that nothing
remained but the weather. That topic, so inexhaustible to Englishmen,
however, offered little variety now, for it had been uniformly bad for
some weeks past.

"Where do you propose to pass the winter, sir?" said Haggerstone to
Jekyl, after a somewhat lengthy lamentation over the probable condition
of all the Alpine pas