s
which remained on some moss-grown bushes. To him Mr. Touchwood called
loudly, enquiring after his master; but the clown, conscious of being
taken in flagrant delict, as the law says, fled from him like a guilty
thing, instead of obeying his summons, and was soon heard _hupping_ and
_geeing_ to the cart, which he had left on the other side of the broken
wall.

Disappointed in his application to the man-servant, Mr. Touchwood
knocked with his cane, at first gently, then harder, holloaed, bellowed,
and shouted, in the hope of calling the attention of some one within
doors, but received not a word in reply. At length, thinking that no
trespass could be committed upon so forlorn and deserted an
establishment, he removed the obstacles to entrance with such a noise as
he thought must necessarily have alarmed some one, if there was any live
person about the house at all. All was still silent; and, entering a
passage where the damp walls and broken flags corresponded to the
appearance of things out of doors, he opened a door to the left, which,
wonderful to say, still had a latch remaining, and found himself in the
parlour, and in the presence of the person whom he came to visit.

Amid a heap of books and other literary lumber, which had accumulated
around him, sat, in his well-worn leathern elbow chair, the learned
minister of St. Ronan's; a thin, spare man, beyond the middle age, of a
dark complexion, but with eyes which, though now obscured and vacant,
had been once bright, soft, and expressive, and whose features seemed
interesting, the rather that, notwithstanding the carelessness of his
dress, he was in the habit of performing his ablutions with Eastern
precision; for he had forgot neatness, but not cleanliness. His hair
might have appeared much more disorderly, had it not been thinned by
time, and disposed chiefly around the sides of his countenance and the
back part of his head; black stockings, ungartered, marked his
professional dress, and his feet were thrust into the old slipshod
shoes, which served him instead of slippers. The rest of his garments,
as far as visible, consisted in a plaid nightgown wrapt in long folds
round his stooping and emaciated length of body, and reaching down to
the slippers aforesaid. He was so intently engaged in studying the book
before him, a folio of no ordinary bulk, that he totally disregarded the
noise which Mr. Touchwood made in entering the room, as well as the
coughs and hems w